Word: launchpad
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...Nelson. "He's the ideal commander." Hauck has flown on two previous shuttle missions. One, which he commanded, was the 1984 Discovery mission to retrieve two wayward satellites. He has not lost a sense of wonder about the shuttle: "It's kind of mystical being out there on the launchpad listening to the sounds. It seems like a breathing, alive machine." A graduate of Tufts University and a Navy combat pilot in Southeast Asia, Hauck planned to take Beatles and Billy Joel tapes on Discovery. He and his wife Dolly have two adult children, Whitney and Stephen. Hauck, a water...
...Hilmers, 38, mission specialist. Jan. 28, 1986, was Hilmers' 36th birthday. But it was no time for celebrating: that was the day Challenger disappeared in a cloud of smoke. Ever since, Hilmers has had a dream that "one day a shuttle would once again make its way to the launchpad to launch Americans into space." A religious man, he says his anxiety about the mission was "soothed by my faith in God." Hilmers, who doubles as Covey's backup pilot, is a math whiz. He graduated summa cum laude from Cornell College, in Iowa, and earned an electrical-engineering degree...
...there were reports of an enormous but still unacknowledged disaster: a giant Soviet booster was said to have exploded on the launchpad, killing hundreds of technicians, along with high-ranking Soviet military officers...
Wilson, co-author of the book Bicycling Science, is admittedly something of a bike nut. He pedals to class rain or shine. Even before Project Apollo was on the launchpad, he tried vainly to persuade NASA to include a pedal-powered vehicle. But the space agency opted instead for its $38 million, battery-driven lunar rover, a two-man vehicle that took up valuable payload capacity...