Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Usually NASA's biggest headache is to get spacecraft safely off the ground. But after the White Sands wave-off last week, Houston was confronted with a new sort of crisis: deciding when and where to bring one of its ships down. There was little time to spare. Columbia, already in or bit for a week, had no more than three days of fuel left for generating electricity to run the spacecraft's life-support systems or get it out of orbit...
Word went out to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to prepare for a possible touchdown there. But NASA was uneasy about landing on the single, three-mile-long K.S.C. runway. Though Kennedy will eventually be used regularly by the shuttle, NASA has not yet tested the bird's landing characteristics in the crosswinds that might be encountered there. An even less desirable option: putting Columbia down on a concrete strip at California's Edwards Air Force Base, near the muddy, rain-soaked desert lake bed where Columbia touched down on its two earlier missions. Laconically acknowledging...
...like to own it." In fact, Columbia's glitches, with the exception of the radio breakdown, were all relatively minor, and it was unfortunate that they obscured the mission's true importance. By making a record-breaking third voyage into space, Columbia was providing stunning proof of NASA's basic vision: that the U.S. could build and operate a spacecraft capable of moving in and out of orbit with the reliability of a commercial jet flying between terrestrial cities...
...mission was another NASA television spectacular, and Lousma and Fullerton shone as showmen. As Fullerton pointed his TV camera at such scenes as Arizona's Painted Desert and the snowcapped Rockies during one pass over the U.S., Lousma exulted, "This good old America, from sea to shining sea in just twelve minutes. It really is America the beautiful...
...Within one year NASA's [the National Aeronautics and Space Administration] research and development program will be 80 percent militarized." Webb said, adding that the civilian space program is facing "virtual extinction...