Word: missioners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...large section of its meteoroid and heat shield ripped away, taking one of its prematurely extended solar-energy wings with it. A second wing jammed in a retracted position. The craft both overheated in orbit and was dangerously underpowered. But in the space age's first salvage mission, on May 25, 1973, Astronauts Charles ("Pete") Conrad Jr. and Joseph Kerwin entered the overheated space lab and rigged a makeshift umbrella to shade the vehicle's bald spot, then spent a harrowing four hours outside the stricken craft freeing the stuck wing. During a second manned mission, on July...
...methods of rescuing Skylab were considered by NASA and then discarded as impractical. There was talk of a joint Soviet-American mission, using the Soviet Soyuz system, but it had to be abandoned because the Russian craft's docking hardware was incompatible with Skylab's. Soyuz also lacked sufficient propellant to maneuver with the ailing U.S. vehicle and then give it a powerful boost into higher orbit. Declared NASA'S Frosch: "The obstacles involved were insurmountable, in the time remaining." Russian scientists, in effect, agree, although they note that if plans for a cooperative effort had been started two years...
...Columbia, the nation's first operational space shuttle, for launch into earth orbit some time next year. Though plagued by financial crises and technical problems, the ship should be worth waiting for. The Apollo/Saturn system, towering some 360 ft. on the pad, was discarded or destroyed in each mission. By contrast, the shuttle is designed to make repeated journeys between earth and space...
...giant multistage rocket, discarded piecemeal after a single mission, was the only way of doing the job. That the job should be done was a political decision, made by a handful of men. As William Sims Bainbridge pointed out in his 1976 book The Spaceflight Revolution; a Sociological Study, space travel is a technological mutation that should not really have arrived until the 21st century. But thanks to the ambition and genius of Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev, and their influence upon individuals as disparate as Kennedy and Khrushchev, the moon-like the South Pole-was reached half...
...Bond is quickly summoned to the headquarters of the ever-British spy chief, M, after 007 neatly wraps up his former mission (narrowly averting a nasty fall out of an airplane in an opening scene no less impressive than Connery's skiing in On Her Majesty's Secret Service). M dispatches him forthwith after the missing shuttle...