Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...moment, however, NASA'S attention was more pressingly diverted. Just eight hours into the flight, Mission Specialist Ronald McNair, 33, a physicist making his first flight, successfully sent Western Union's $75 million Westar VI spinning out of Challenger's big cargo bay. But soon all contact with Westar, built by Hughes Aircraft, was lost. Its transmitters were silent. Ground-based trackers could not tell whether its booster, which was to have propelled it into a geostationary "parking place" 22,300 miles above the equator, had misfired or some onboard electronics had failed. Desperately trying to bring...
...failure immediately confronted NASA with the question of whether it should go ahead with the launch of Westar's twin, Indonesia's Palapa B2, scheduled for the next day. Palapa is to be used as a telecommunications link between the 13,677 islands of the sprawling Indonesian archipelago. At week's end, NASA decided to postpone the launch at least for a day while ground controllers probed the Westar accident. If Indonesia requested a deferral until a later mission, the shuttle would have to bring the satellite back to earth. The added weight would speed the shuttle...
...commander, Vance Brand, 52, a former Marine pilot on his third spaceflight, and his four crewmen, including Copilot Robert ("Hoot") Gibson, 37, a space novice, faced other weighty matters. In many ways Flight 41-B, as the mission is called under a new numbering system fathomable only to NASA bureaucrats, is the most ambitious sortie into space to date. It features a full agenda of experiments, including one intriguing test devised by a high school student to see if zero-g can relieve the agony of arthritic rats in a mid-deck cage. The astronauts will operate the shuttle...
...mission's unquestioned highlights are the untethered space walks on Tuesday and Thursday. Spacemen have been venturing outside their spacecraft ever since Cosmonaut Alexis Leonov undertook the first EVA (for extravehicular activity, in NASA jargon) in 1965. But they have always been securely hooked to a lifeline. This time they will rely entirely on a Buck Rogers-type contraption called, with a touch of sexism, a manned maneuvering unit...
...NASA also has its eyes on another first. If winds and weather are fair in Florida at the end of Challenger's seventh day in orbit - and the problem of Palapa has been resolved - the winged spacecraft will land on the Kennedy Space Center's three-mile-long shuttle runway rather than on the hard-packed sands of California's Edwards Air Force Base. Such a feat would not only go a long way toward proving the shuttle's versatility but also save NASA at least $1 million a mission, the cost of piggybacking the orbiter...