Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fairy tale as good as old. The film opens on a night sky, Disney I blue and full of twinkling stars. In the clearing of a forest that Bambi and Thumper might have been pleased to call home, a spaceship sits - not a high-tech marvel of the NASA future but a bell-shaped spinster of a ship, with old-fashioned street lamps appending and the unmistakable aura of Captain Nemo's Nautilus from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. A misty crescent moon gives glimpses of child-size figures moving about in capes and cowls on a field...
...were about to take off again. Mission controllers had a brief, horrifying vision of the nose gear thudding back down on the hard desert floor and collapsing under the jolt. But Lousma gently leveled the ship off and let it roll out to a halt. Initially, NASA officials speculated that Columbia's lurching might have been caused by an unexpected gust of wind. But later they insisted that Lousma had eased the stick back, probably to slow the ship down...
...extra day in space probably added significantly to the mission's cost -NASA would not say by how much - but it provided 20 hours more to collect scientific data. During that extra time, Columbia's instruments monitored a surprise eruption of a huge solar flare, a fiery burst of hot gases from the sun's surface. Such plumes often reach thousands of miles into space and give off a flood of charged particles that can play devilish tricks on spacecraft. In 1979, Skylab, NASA'S abandoned space workshop, came crashing prematurely to earth after its orbit...
Columbia should be ready for its fourth and last test flight in late June. NASA Chief James Beggs is so pleased with the shuttle's progress that he is shopping around for a private contractor to run the ships. So far he has had no takers. Many companies have booked space aboard future shuttle flights in order to launch satellites, but few believe that private enterprise could now operate the shuttle profitably without heavy Government subsidies. Industry has also displayed considerable caution about using the shuttle for testing such schemes as making drugs or mixing alloys in zero...
Beggs, however, is eager to get NASA "out of the space trucking business" and back into its primary role as a research and development agency that opens up new avenues to the high frontier of space. Beggs already has one idea he wants NASA to pursue: "platform," a building the permanent first habitat true space where scientist astronauts could live and work in orbit. With a little trucking help from the shuttle, of course. - - By By Frederic Golden...