Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...deadline for completing the project was tight. From the moment the green light was given, engineers and others on the project began to put in 90-hour work weeks-figuring, designing, double-checking and, as it turned out, sometimes starting over. At the same time, NASA was preparing for another rescue, the repair in space of the Solar Maximum Mission scientific satellite damaged in 1980. The space agency set out to fix the sophisticated $75 million instrument on the eleventh shuttle flight last April. But Astronaut George Nelson was unable to grasp the Solar Max with a device mounted...
...launch date approached, the sense of exhilaration quickened. "It was put together in a hell of a hurry," said Pilot Walker with apparent delight. On the appointed day, turbulent winds of up to 80 m.p.h. at high altitude postponed the liftoff from Cape Canaveral. But nearly everything that NASA could control, it did. When the weather calmed down the next morning, the black-and-white bird threaded skyward only 70 milliseconds late. The one-day delay meant that the launch came on Gardner's birthday, and he promised "not to blow out the candle until 8½ minutes into...
...With NASA's encouragement, 3M is one of several companies looking to orbital factories as a place to conduct experiments. This high frontier, as some visionaries call it, could be the arena of the next industrial revolution. The Center for Space Policy in Cambridge, Mass., predicts that by the year 2000 space industries could annually produce $27 billion in Pharmaceuticals to combat cancer and emphysema, $3.1 billion in gallium arsenide semiconductors for electronics, and $11.5 billion worth of incredibly pure glass for optical purposes...
...company is looking to space as a sort of annex to plants it already has in the U.S. In October 3M announced an ambitious ten-year plan to conduct experiments on 72 shuttle flights through the mid-1990s, right on up to NASA's proposed $8 billion space station. On the ground at its campus-like headquarters in St. Paul, 3M has set up a space research and applications laboratory staffed with 15 chemists, physicists and engineers. The firm will probably spend about $8 million on the project next year, although the operation is so new that the company...
...supply company, ran electrophoresis experiments, which allowed precise separation under weightless conditions of biological materials. Although one batch was contaminated, the others permitted the removal of impurities too small to be extracted on earth. One possible outgrowth: production of insulin-producing cells to control diabetes. Says Isaac Gillam, the NASA official in charge of commercial programs: "We will see products manufactured in space from the McDonnell Douglas and Johnson & Johnson effort as soon as early...