Word: makeshifts
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NASA's engineers and technicians, who had already displayed extraordinary Yankee ingenuity in fashioning Skylab's makeshift sunshade, refused to give up. Experimenting with duplicates of tools aboard Skylab, they devised techniques for cutting, sawing and even prying off the metal. Practicing with these tools in simulated conditions of weightlessness in NASA'S big water test tank at Huntsville, Ala., Backup Astronauts Rusty Schweickart and Ed Gibson demonstrated that the implements might well work in space...
...failure, it had seemed that the astronauts had triumphed over almost insurmountable difficulties. Finally docking with Skylab after five attempts, they had struggled for three hours in 125° temperatures to erect an umbrella-like sunshade over the area where Skylab had lost its micrometeoroid and thermal shielding. The makeshift solution worked. Within a few days, temperatures in the workshop dropped to the low 80s and the astronauts, who had been spending most of their time aboard the Apollo command module, could take up residence in Skylab...
...their second option, the astronauts also carried into space a canopy rigged to a makeshift A-frame. But its deployment would require a more difficult space walk from the exit in Skylab's airlock module. As a third option, the Apollo command module carried the "Spinnaker Shade," which had been the original first choice of space officials. They had second thoughts about the sail-like canopy, because they feared that the light jet plumes from the command module's thrusters might fog the still functioning solar wings on the telescope mount. As he hung out of the open...
...soothe gyrating exchange markets, the world's moneymen last March stumbled grudgingly into a different kind of international monetary system. In it, most major currencies are "floating"-that is, selling not at rates fixed in U.S. dollars but at prices set by supply and demand.* Last week that makeshift system was put to its first serious test, and it performed adequately. What could have become a first-class crisis was defused without anybody having to do anything in particular...
After the bombers pass over, the dead are extricated from collapsed buildings and crushed shelters. A woman cannot hear. A little girl has injured her leg; it will be amputated in a makeshift emergency hospital. The bombing will continue tomorrow...