Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When the big Boeing and its high-priced hitchhiker landed on the Kennedy Space Center's new three-mile-long shuttle runway, there was none of the hoopla that marked the launch. Only 3,000 people, mostly NASA employees and their families, were on hand to greet the space voyager. No one seemed to miss the attention. As a spokesman explained, "This is routine. It's going to be coming back here many, many times...
Whether the flights of Columbia and its sister ships now under construction become as commonplace as more earthbound commuter runs depends on how the spacecraft checks out during the coming weeks. Shortly after the Boeing landed, the shuttle was lifted off its back by a giant hoist that NASA, in characteristic jargon, calls a mate/demate device. Columbia was then towed to its processing hangar, where it will undergo stem-to-stern examination and overhaul...
...that Columbia has finally flown, NASA-like the returning shuttle-seems to be "right on the money." But the military role of the program is surely going to increase because the Pentagon hopes eventually to send up almost all of its payloads by shuttle. Air Force planners are thinking of buying one or two shuttles for their exclusive use. They are also developing a new portable booster to be carried aboard, thus overcoming one of the shuttle's notable limitations. It can operate only in low earth orbit (at altitudes from 115 to 690 miles). But the new booster...
Ever eager to win support in high places, NASA dispatched one of its 23-inch desktop models of space shuttle Columbia to Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese. But like the original, it had a few problems. As the model sat in Meese's darkened office over the weekend, its cargo bay inexplicably swung open. Small metal pieces fell out. So sensitive is the White House alarm system these days that a flock of "white mice"-the nickname for agents responsible for office security-came scurrying. To their bafflement, they found the room locked, unoccupied and undisturbed. As with the real...
...discovered the caper and Congress might never have investigated and the White House tape system might never have been revealed and Richard Nixon might never have resigned.) Luck was the invisible hand that prompted Skylab to scatter its debris over Western Australia, not rush-hour Manhattan. Even transcendently foresighted NASA might admit that the space shuttle's flawless flight last week involved some luck. The luck of the universe (by one new theory) once banged an immense asteroid into the earth, raising a dust cloud so dense that it blocked off the sunlight, ruined the planet's food...