Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...days before blastoff, preparations for the second launching of the space shuttle Columbia were "just going bang, bang, bang," according to Deke Slayton, manager of NASA's shuttle test program. Things were running so far ahead of schedule, in fact, that most workers at the Kennedy Space Center were given a morning off. Even the astronauts, Air Force Colonel Joe H. Engle, 49, and Navy Captain Richard...
Columbia's flight marks the first time a spacecraft has been used more than once. NASA plans two more test flights before the shuttle begins operational flights next fall...
Although the shuttle is now operating on a "minimum flight plan," National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) officials are "very optimistic" that a full mission can be accomplished, as long as the two remaining fuel cells continue to function at acceptable levels, Mack Herring, a NASA spokesman, said last night...
When the shuttle made its first flight last April, NASA sought to prove to itself and the world that the craft could really roar up into space like a rocket, then glide safely back to earth like a plane. This week the U.S. space agency is engaging in quite another sort of test. Flying "upside down" high above the earth, Columbia will try out a $100 million, Canadian-built "arm in space." Unless the Remote Manipulator System, as the huge skyhook is called in NASA jargon, really works, the shuttle will be unable to perform one of its key roles...
...NASA's unsurprising name for the second test of its Space Transportation System is S.T.S.-2. Columbia will be piloted by a new crew, Air Force Colonel Joe H. Engle, 49, the lean, affable mission commander who likes to hunt bear with bow and arrow, and Navy Captain Richard H. Truly, 43. Both are veteran pilots who began training as astronauts in the 1960s but who only now will be making orbital flights. The shuttle will be packed with more fuel and equipment than it was last April, including seven experiments, and it is slated to stay aloft...