Word: orbital
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hail Columbia, officially designated a Space Transportation System (S.T.S.), and known as the space shuttle or the shuttle orbiter for short. The shuttle, to make it even shorter, is the most powerful and complicated craft ever put together by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Apollo capsules that went to the moon are Model T artifacts in comparison. Columbia, with booster rockets and fuel tank, weighs 2.7 million Ibs.; it is controlled by computers loaded with more than 600,000 lines of exquisitely precise program codes; it has pumps the size of trash cans that can discharge superheated gases...
...shuttle that is to orbit at speeds up to 17,500 m.p.h. was trundled to its lift off site on a massive crawler-tractor that took 7� hours to creep the 3� miles from the Kennedy Space Center's immense Vehicle Assembly Building. NASA's delight could be detected as far away as Houston. There, a technician watching the proceedings on television at the Johnson Space Center exclaimed what many felt: "Hey! This is for real! We're back to launching birds again." It has been a long time between shots...
Still, Dream No. 1 is simply to get the shuttle up, into orbit and then safely back to earth on a 2.8-mile-long landing strip at the Kennedy Space Center or another at Edwards Air Force Base in California?or even, in an emergency, one at the White Sands Missile Test Range in New Mexico. Fulfilling this feat cannot be breezily taken for granted. One sobering fact is that the Columbia, unlike every other U.S. spacecraft, will be launched without having undergone unmanned test flights in space; to bring it back alive, the astronauts must go along...
...system it introduces could contribute substantially to the domestic economy, extend U.S. capacities to find mineral resources on earth, survey the oceans, keep track of weather patterns and help bring solar energy down to earth. The most compelling of the early projects for the shuttle will be placing in orbit in 1985, if all goes well, a 22,500-lb. telescope that, free of the haze of the earth, will be able to see seven times farther than the world's most powerful instruments and perhaps solve some riddles of the universe...
...Crippen began full-time training in January 1978. Each has received 25 hours of formal instruction a week in such subjects as navigation and astronomy, but each also spends many more hours poring over what Astronaut Crew Trainer Thomas Kaiser calls the "cookbook"-a 21-volume compendium of launch, orbit and descent procedures for piloting Columbia that will be on board during the flight. The manual is changed constantly; in the office shared by Young and Crippen is a stack of mimeographed revisions 2½ ft. high. The two men have also spent more than 1,200 hours working...