Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This flying pair of scissors looked like the joke of some eccentric inventor. In fact, the 38-ft.-long aircraft is a test design that comes from the same no-nonsense people who created the space shuttle. Pursuing what NASA officials refer to as the "small A" (for the less publicized, low-budget aeronautics in their agency's name), they built the single-seat model to overcome two major obstacles in supersonic flight: high fuel consumption and thundering noise...
...cosmos, the Johnny Carson Tonight show and the New York Times bestseller list, the flamboyant scientist-cum -showman figured that the only Big Bang left to make was in the world of business. Thus, twelve months ago, Sagan and B. Gentry Lee, a space program manager from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif, began scraping together a $700,000 line of credit from California's Security Pacific National Bank and went into business promoting products for the cosmically conscious...
...their engineering colleagues, doing a stint in the flight simulator to check whether it accurately reflects what happens in space, and reporting to the space center's director, Christopher Kraft Jr. The preliminary verdict: in spite of problems before and during the flight, Columbia was, in that venerable NASA expression...
...researchers who assembled Columbia's scientific experiments were just as pleased. Even though the abbreviated flight gave them less data than a longer one might have provided, NASA Geologist James Taranik described the experimenters as "literally jumping up and down with excitement over what they have seen." All five of the automatic experiments perched in the shuttle's open cargo bay worked, at least to some degree, performing various types of remote-sensing of the earth. The most successful machine was the big shuttle imaging radar, called SIR-A, which succeeded in making the longest single radar sweep...
...smooth touchdown was joyfully anticlimactic. Columbia slid to earth more gently than many a commercial jet. Cheers rose up from the 250,000 people gathered on the desert floor for the homecoming, and controllers in Houston lit up their traditional victory cigars. It seemed that Columbia might yet become NASA's solid-gold Cadillac of space...