Word: orbited
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Ironically, despite NASA'S concentration on solar research with Skylab, the agency's failure to anticipate the extent of sunspot activity during the vehicle's years in orbit contributed substantially to the craft's death. Russian scientists as well as America's own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had predicted considerable solar disturbances, including great magnetic storms and solar flares. When they erupted in 1977 and 1978, they warmed the gases in the earth's outer atmosphere, increasing the drag on Skylab. Never fully powered because of its lost solar wing and failing batteries, the craft began to slip ever...
...joint Soviet-American mission, using the Soviet Soyuz system, but it had to be abandoned because the Russian craft's docking hardware was incompatible with Skylab's. Soyuz also lacked sufficient propellant to maneuver with the ailing U.S. vehicle and then give it a powerful boost into higher orbit. Declared NASA'S Frosch: "The obstacles involved were insurmountable, in the time remaining." Russian scientists, in effect, agree, although they note that if plans for a cooperative effort had been started two years ago, a rescue might have been possible. Roald Sagdoyev, director of the Institute of Space Research...
...manned exploration is also about to take a new turn. At Florida's John F. Kennedy Space Center, next to the giant assembly building used for Apollo 11, workers are struggling to prepare Columbia, the nation's first operational space shuttle, for launch into earth orbit some time next year. Though plagued by financial crises and technical problems, the ship should be worth waiting for. The Apollo/Saturn system, towering some 360 ft. on the pad, was discarded or destroyed in each mission. By contrast, the shuttle is designed to make repeated journeys between earth and space...
NASA has no intention of letting Apollo 11's birthday pass unnoticed. In Washington, Armstrong, Aldrin and their stay-in-orbit partner Michael Collins will be reunited for a round of ceremonies, capped by a replay of the original moon walk late at night at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. In Texas another old Apollo hand, Christopher Kraft, the director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, will preside at space-day ceremonies; he will open a temporary post office to cancel space-commemorative stamps for philatelists. At the Kennedy Space Center, a giant...
...technical ones ever since its conception in the 1960s. Denounced as a "senseless extravaganza in space" by Vice President Walter Mondale while he was still in the Senate, the shuttle created such a furor that NASA was repeatedly forced to compromise its design. In the present version, the orbiter looks much like a bloated DC-9. It will rise vertically off the pad on the back of a large cylindrical tank containing liquid propellants used to power two booster rockets attached to its sides. At an altitude of about 28 miles, the spent rockets will be dropped by parachute into...