Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...crew is caught in an Atlantic storm, carried aloft and sent, sail billowing, on a journey to the moon. Later storytellers launched ships with sails on even more fanciful space trips. But none of these fictional voyages was as remarkable as the mission now being planned for NASA by scientists at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. If all goes well, they will launch an unmanned spacecraft guided with a giant sail to rendezvous with Halley's comet when it next approaches...
Free and Inexhaustible. The fantastic voyage was proposed by a group commissioned by J.P.L. Director Bruce Murray to consider imaginative concepts for interplanetary exploration. A mission to Halley's comet, which returns every 74 to 79 years, has long been one of NASA's goals. But using conventional space-flight techniques to rendezvous and keep up with the glowing visitor-which reaches speeds of 198,000 kilometers (124,000 miles) an hour as it approaches the sun-would require enormous amounts of fuel and an impractically large and expensive rocket...
Amidst all this science, the conservators still become enthusiastic over the artistic results of their chemical technology and NASA-like machinery. One might become calloused into viewing the paintings as mere flat surfaces in need of care before they are carried off to line walls or hang from rack after rack in a storage room with only inches to spare between them. But a woman restoring a Bouchet portrait of a court lady instead remarks: "These pieces were added to the rectangular original to turn it into an oval...rather lovely...
...around the earth and back. Last week the first of these craft stepped off on this journey into history. In a daylong trek, the ship was moved 58 kilometers (36 miles) across California's Mojave Desert from the Rockwell International plant in Palmdale where it was built to NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base. There it will begin tests that will culminate in flights that could do for space colonization what the prairie schooner and the railroads did for the settling of America...
...move, like everything else connected with the $6.9 billion shuttle pro gram, required precise planning. For months, engineers from NASA and Rockwell International had been surveying the route to Edwards, relocating telephone poles and overseeing the resurfacing of 16 kilometers (10 miles) of gravel road so that it could withstand the shuttle's 68,000-kilogram (150,000-lb.) weight. They also constructed a special trailer to carry the craft, a 90-wheel affair designed to be steered both from the front and the rear like a hook-and-ladder truck...