Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...prevent that, NASA engineers had devised a daring rescue. The new space shuttle, slated to make its first flight in September, would intercept Skylab, attach a small booster engine to one end, then fire it. Thus space planners could either raise Skylab.to a higher orbit or send it plunging harmlessly into an ocean. Last week, after weighing the chances of such an orbital operation, NASA conceded defeat. That means Skylab will expire in a meteorite-like death that could scatter parts of the space station on populated regions...
Space officials cannot tell precisely when the "random reentry" (as NASA jargon has it) will occur. Best estimate: some time between mid-1979 and mid-1980. They do know that most of the space station will burn up in the atmosphere. But about one-third of the station will rain down in a shower of some 500 fragments along a track up to 6,440 km (4,000 miles) long and 160 km (100 miles) wide. Its location: somewhere in a broad, globe-girdling belt as far north as Newfoundland and as far south as the tip of South America...
Perhaps so. But such assurances did not ease NASA'S embarrassment over the whole Skylab affair, which arose because of a scientific error about the extent of sunspot activity in the late 1970s and its effect on Skylab. By spewing out clouds of charged particles, these great solar magnetic storms help heat up and expand the earth's upper atmosphere. That creates more drag for objects in orbit, hastening their reentry. Confronted by a falling Skylab, NASA last spring began developing the $26 million booster engine. But it was clear, especially after troubles with the shuttle...
...flawless launch, NASA lofted into earth orbit an $87 million remote-controlled astronomical observatory that should help answer some of the most fundamental questions about the universe. Two days later, some 29 million kilometers (18 million miles) further out in space and closing in on Venus, a U.S. spacecraft ejected the first of four probes that will thoroughly analyze the atmosphere of the cloud-shrouded planet before hitting its scalding surface...
...NASA officials admitted that it will probably be years before the U.S. can equal the new mark. What made the triumph more galling is the fact that it was achieved with equipment far less advanced than the U.S. space shuttle, which is not scheduled to make its first orbital flight until late next year...