Word: houres
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...excited, particularly since that business of coming home should have been relatively routine--at least by the high-wire standards of space travel. After shimmying out of their sleep restraints, the crew would stow gear and belt themselves into their seats--a process that would take a good six hours. With Columbia turned rump forward, the commander would then fire the main maneuvering engines, slowing the spacecraft and easing it toward the upper wisps of the atmosphere. Once he turned the ship around, he would surf the currents of the steadily thickening air, fishtailing this way and that until, just...
However long the investigation takes, it will start with an examination of the last 45 min. of Columbia's life. Commander Rick Husband fired his deorbit engines at 8:15 a.m. E.T. when the ship was high over the Indian Ocean. Half an hour--and half a world--later, it hit the edges of the atmosphere just north of Hawaii at an altitude of about 400,000 ft. (122,000 m). Shortly after, a faint pink glow began to surround the ship, as atmospheric friction caused temperatures to rise to between 750[degrees]F and 3,000[degrees]F across...
...About 900 Tannese live in Ianapus, a hamlet where the laden branches of wild mandarin trees hang over small, dark-roomed dwellings thatched with leaves, and dogs and pigs lie in the dust. The tourists who fly half an hour south to Tanna from Port Vila, the capital, come mainly to see the molten belching of Mt. Yasur, the island's live volcano, and rarely visit places like this, self-sufficient communities connected to the world beyond their borders by little more than a web of narrow walking tracks. Money isn't seen here much, either. While few Tannese villagers...
...Perhaps Tanna's most fascinating dialogue between the old and the imported can be found an hour's bumpy drive south of Lenakel, past beaches covered in glittering black sand, to Green Point. About 3,000 villagers here are ardent members of the John Frum Movement, which follows the teaching of a European-looking spirit-man who they say appeared to senior men in the area just before World War II, urging them to reject missionary rule and return to kastom living. Green Point men, sitting under the fern-clad branches of an enormous banyan tree, say Frum's original...
...Kokura was the target, but the bombardier couldn't locate it because the area was clouded. So the navigator took us to Nagasaki. We had gotten a report that the area was clear, but we noticed undercast clouds. By this time, we'd used almost an hour's gas at the rendezvous point, and the engineer was really sweating it. It was going to be nip and tuck. I went up to Sweeney and said, "We're going to be able to make one run on this target-if we're lucky." I told him to be prepared...