Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rend the sky in two, and a cheer swelled from the crowd below. Within minutes the ship had rolled to a halt along the right side of the runway at Edwards Air Force Base, kicking up massive clouds of dust. Not since the landing of the first shuttle had NASA officials been so openly emotional. Said Mission Commander Hank Hartsfield: "We've got a good bird there...
...crew had every right to be proud. With that uneventful touchdown, NASA could claim a strikingly successful debut for Discovery, the newest member of its three-shuttle fleet. For six exhausting days on Flight 41D, six astronauts tackled the busiest shuttle agenda ever, twice staying up past their assigned bedtimes to troubleshoot glitches. Every task, however, from knocking a pesky hunk of ice off the ship's hull to operating manually a drugmaking machine that was supposed to be controlled by computers, was completed on time...
...NASA needed the triumph. To the dismay of space officials, the maiden launch of Discovery had been postponed three times. The original takeoff date of June 25 was put off when a back-up computer refused to answer a command. The next day a fuel valve faltered 4 sec. before blastoff, again delaying the mission. Then, on Aug. 28, the day before the third scheduled launch, a NASA engineer discovered that the computer charged with the last-minute double-checking of equipment might miss some critical signals. Blast-off was deferred for 24 hrs., as computer programmers scrambled to write...
...airliner was sent over Soviet territory instead of a U.S. electronic-surveillance aircraft because U.S. officials believed that the Soviets would never shoot down a civilian aircraft. The U.S. plan, he suggests, was for the satellite and the shuttle to monitor Soviet responses to the airliner's intrusion. NASA officials insist that the shuttle was never close enough to receive aircraft radio transmissions from the 007 intrusion area and thus could not have had such a monitoring assignment...
...predecessors from 1949 to 1976; of cancer; in Troy, N.Y. It was Low who suggested, in a 1960 memo to President John Kennedy, that a man could be put on the moon by decade's end. After the disastrous January 1967 fire that killed three astronauts, NASA Deputy Director Low took charge of redesigning and rebuilding the Apollo craft; with 90-hour, detail-obsessed work weeks, he met his deadline when Apollo 11 reached the moon in July 1969. In 1976, Low became president of his alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Seven weeks ago, his son David was named...