Word: nasa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Morgan was on site at Cape Canaveral the following year when McAuliffe and her six crewmates perished in the explosion of the shuttle Challenger. The fact that she's now in space is a tribute to her tenacity - to say nothing of her courage - as well as to NASA's often artful ability to include a compelling storyline in what would otherwise be a routine space flight. What it says less about - as is so often the case with the NASA of the last generation - is the value of the shuttles themselves and the current state of the manned space...
...Teacher in Space program was a creature of NASA's arguably naive, 1980s belief that, with a fleet of sturdy shuttles, space flight could become a wonderfully routine thing. Former Utah Senator Jake Garn snagged himself a seat on one flight - never mind that he spent much of the mission so violently space sick that NASA wags informally added a whole new category, labeled "Garn," to the sliding scale used for diagnosing nausea in orbit. Then Congressman (now Senator) Bill Nelson of Florida spent six days in space aboard the shuttle Columbia in January of 1986, the same month Challenger...
Morgan nonetheless stayed with the agency, serving as a roving ambassador for space flight and remaining, in name at least, a Teacher in Space designee. Under NASA's newer, stricter flight eligibility rules, however, the only way she could ever get her chance to fly would be to quit the teaching profession and become a professional astronaut, relegating kids' education from space to a much more incidental part of her responsibilities. She applied for a slot and in 1998 was selected; she is now flying as a mission specialist, responsible for operating the robotic arm of both the shuttle...
...arguably reasonable price, those risks would be worth taking. But it's doing almost no science at all at an exorbitant price - an estimated $100 billion a year - and will have no shuttles left to service it in 2010 when the shuttle fleet is scheduled to retire. NASA has been promising big payoffs from the ISS - advances in biomedical research, for example, and in materials manufacturing - since President Ronald Reagan first proposed it in 1984, and has never been able to deliver. Meanwhile, the shuttle Columbia claimed the lives of another seven astronauts in 2003, a disaster Morgan was once...
...That's not the 'right stuff' as far as I'm concerned.' BART GORDON, U.S. Representative and chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, on a recent report revealing that NASA astronauts were cleared to fly while drunk...