Word: orbited
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Jubilant giants, at that. "The shuttle will become the DC-3 of space," exulted veteran Astronaut Deke Slayton, boss of orbital flight-test crews, referring to the sturdy Douglas aircraft that opened new routes for commercial aviation in the mid-1930s. Columbia's maiden space voyage brought to mind the first flight of Orville and Wilbur Wright at Kitty Hawk, Lindbergh's lone-eagle crossing of the Atlantic, even the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, which would turn a land of remote frontiers into a nation. Princeton's prophet of space colonization, Physicist Gerard...
From the instant of Columbia's touchdown, a moment watched by tens of millions of television viewers in the U.S. and perhaps hundreds of millions more round the world, Americans seemed to go into orbit themselves. "Terrific!" shouted Dennis O'Connell, a truck driver from Queens, N.Y., as he paused in a Manhattan pub to watch the landing. "It shows everybody we're still No. 1." Mrs. Alicia Hoerter, a Louisville grandmother, could barely contain her excitement or her puns. "Columbia, the gem of a notion!" she exulted. "First, it's a rocket, then...
There were also a few mi nor glitches. During the first "night" in space-actually they saw the sun rise and set once during every 90-min. orbit-Young and Crippen complained about a chill in the cabin. The temperature had drooped to 37° F. "I was ready to break out the long undies," joked one of the frozen astronauts. The problem was quickly fixed with a signal from earth that pumped warm water into the cabin's temperature control system. Young and Crippen had less luck fixing a faulty flight data recorder that had stopped mysteriously. They...
...delta-shaped spacecraft-part rocket ship, part airplane-raced around the earth at an altitude of 150 miles, its nearly perfect performance seemed a glorious vindication of more than a decade of effort and expense. Columbia's flight plan called for a 54½-hr., 36-orbit mission, ending with a nerve-racking, gliding descent into California's Mojave Desert. There was every expectation that it would achieve that goal. Three and a half hours into the flight, as the spacecraft began its third orbit, Mission Control sent word that Columbia was "go" for the full flight...
Even before they got their green light, the astronauts were settling in for a long haul. With almost anticlimactic ease, Crippen operated the spacecraft's big cargo bay, opening and closing and then reopening its doors. That was an essential maneuver at the start of the second orbit, allowing the ship to rid itself of internal heat from all its operations, and it was executed flawlessly. Televised pictures from space quickly showed just how well the machinery worked. Even the big engine housings in Columbia's tail were dramatically visible against the blackness of space...