Word: nasa
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Pilot Willie McCool answered email questions in space over NASA's website. He explained how the G-forces on takeoff feel kind of like a bear sitting on your chest. He had trouble sleeping that first night, when you are essentially floating in your bed. The hardest part of his job was having to take blood from his fellow astronauts. "He was afraid he would hurt somebody while he was drawing blood," one friend and fellow pilot says. They had been serving together on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Enterprise when McCool got word he had been accepted by NASA...
...eastern Texas heard a crushing rumble outside, the dogs whined, and horses started, and a poisonous rain of broken shuttle pieces fell onto backyards and roadsides and parking lots, through the roof of a dentist's office, bits of machinery in Nacogdoches, a hand and leg in San Augustine. NASA told everyone to stay away from the debris, that it could kill you, but the agency mainly wants a chance to gather the evidence and deter grave robbers. NASA buried all the remains of the Challenger in an old missile silo and sealed it with tons of concrete...
...tells you something about America's new reflexes that when Columbia vanished, NASA chief Sean O'Keefe called the White House and a Cabinet office that didn't even exist when the Challenger crashed: Homeland Security. "There are no survivors," the President said, but by then we had been watching the endless video of what looked like the shooting stars of August, knowing that those bright white puffs of star were made of metal and rubber and men and women. Like other fiery images, this one keeps replaying in the dark long after you turn it off, and while...
...last song the lost crew of the space shuttle Columbia ever heard was Scotland the Brave by the 51st Highland Brigade. That was the wake-up song beamed up by NASA on the morning the ship was supposed to return to earth. The day before it had been Shalom Lach Eretz Nehederet, for Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon. Thursday morning it had been John Lennon's Imagine. Scotland the Brave was for mission specialist Laurel Clark, Scottish by extraction...
...space-shuttle contingency has been declared," the voice of Mission Control intoned in the arid argot of the space agency. It was an echo of the understated announcement 17 years ago, when the shuttle Challenger consumed itself in an awful fireball, and the stunned NASA narrator was left to declare, "Obviously a major malfunction...