Word: liftoff
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...next liftoff should come in April, when the shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to send a craft called Magellan on its way to Venus. The space probe will begin orbiting the planet next year, using radar to map its cloud-hidden surface. The best maps now in existence, compiled by Soviet spacecraft, show features as small as a quarter-mile across, but Magellan is expected to do about ten times as well...
...Monday, several hours after Discovery's liftoff, the crew completed its primary task--deployment of a $100 million Tracking Data and Relay Satellite to complete a communications network that will allow shuttle astronauts to have nearly constant contact with Mission Control...
...hours after liftoff, Springer and Bagian were to deploy the 24-ton Tracking and Data Relay Satellite. It will then be carried by its own rocket to a 22,300-mile-high orbit to join two older satellites and complete an orbiting network essential for communicating with future space shuttles and with science and military satellites...
Navy Commander Robert L. Gibson, the Atlantis crew commander, sat through seven postponements of the shuttle Columbia's liftoff in 1986. Other crew members include Lt. Col. Guy S. Gardner, Col. Richard M. Mullane, and Lt. Col. Jerry L. Ross of the Air Force, and Navy Commander William M. Shepherd. Gardner and Shepherd are on their first shuttle mission. The others have flown before...
...very clean ascent for Atlantis; there were no problems encountered on the way to orbit," said Brian Welch, commentator at Mission Control in Houston said. The two solid fuel booster rockets successfully burned out two minutes and eight seconds into liftoff. Failure of a booster rocket joint caused the Challenger's destruction...