Word: orbiteer
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...situation was never life-threatening, since a computer was always available to take charge of the ship. Still, the controllers decided to wave off a landing for several orbits while hundreds of engineers in Houston pored over data in an effort to discover the cause of the failures. The controllers were afraid that the difficulty, whatever it was, would spread through the system and bring down all the ship's computers. Without a computer, even a John Young probably would not have been able to take Columbia safely out of orbit because of the complex sequence of rocket firings...
...units, which sense any changes in the spacecraft's speed or direction, mysteriously broke down. In addition, the laws of celestial mechanics added a political problem. Each extra swing around the earth changed Columbia's path. As a result, when the ship swooped out of its last orbit, instead of coming in south of Australia and over the western Pacific, it passed only 80 miles above eastern Siberia in the militarily sensitive area of the Sakhalin Peninsula where Soviet aircraft shot down a South Korean jet last September. Never before had a manned American spacecraft flown...
...Spacelab and the new breed of payload specialists-scientists from outside the regular astronaut corps, including one West German researcher-who managed its heavy load of 72 experiments. The space agency noted that more than 90% of the studies had been completed. If the scientific data transmitted from orbit in just a single burst were lined up as small, text-size electronic symbols, one official calculated, they would extend from the earth to the moon. After preliminary analysis, Space-lab's international team of scientists, from Europe, the U.S., Canada and Japan, were able to point to a number...
...scientists had high praise for the ingenuity shown by the men in orbit, like Mission Specialist Robert Parker, whose deft use of a sleeping bag provided a cover of darkness while he reloaded a jammed spool of film. Said one Houston observer, University of Naples Physicist Luigi Napolitano: "You know, without those guys, the mission would have been a failure on the first day." The astronauts also found time to clown for the TV cameras and take telephone calls from President Reagan and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. But some problems simply had to be endured, like the accumulation...
...families, but the flight was not over for the other four crewmen. They were driven off to NASA's Dryden Flight Research Facility at Edwards for a continuation of the rigorous biomedical tests, including highspeed whirls in a centrifuge, which had begun on the ground and continued in orbit. These are designed not only to discover ways of coping with space sickness but also to learn whether any significant physiological changes occurred after ten days of weightlessness. Until these examinations are finished this Thursday, the guinea pig quartet must remain in isolation. They can take comfort in the thought...