Word: orbiter
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...controls of the space shuttle Discovery when it deployed the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990 now appears poised to steer NASA into its post-shuttle orbit. Former astronaut and retired Marine general Charles Bolden Jr. is President Obama's likely nominee to head the space agency; the two are expected to meet at the White House May 19 for a formal interview. Years before his famous Discovery flight, Bolden traveled to space with a payload specialist named Bill Nelson - now a powerful Florida Senator and one of Bolden's strongest backers. While Bolden, 62, is widely respected within the space...
...station in real time via video link. Most of the museum, however, is made up of the usual look-but-don't-touch exhibits. A full-size model of the iconic Sputnik satellite is suspended from the ceiling, while the tiny capsule that Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin used to orbit the Earth rests on a pedestal. In two glass cases at the entrance, the stuffed bodies of Belka and Strelka, the first dogs to return to Earth alive after a space flight, sit with their heads cocked inquisitively. Some of the halls are lined with kitschy "space art" (one piece...
...shuttle Atlantis is once again in orbit - this time for a final servicing visit to the venerable Hubble Space Telescope - and once again the world is sweating out reports of damage to the spacecraft's thermal tiles caused by debris shed from the external fuel tank during liftoff on Monday. It was just that kind of mishap that doomed the shuttle Columbia and its seven-member crew back in 2003, allowing superheated gases to penetrate the ship during re-entry and causing it to disintegrate. That was the second shuttle to be lost in flight, after the explosion of Challenger...
...does turn out that the damage is more serious than that, it will be occurring on a particularly bad mission. Most of the shuttles' trips to orbit these days are for visits with the ISS. The station is a roomy place - by spacecraft standards at least - and if a shuttle's underside is found to be too badly damaged to allow a safe re-entry, the astronauts could simply bunk down in the ISS until another shuttle or Russian Soyuz ships could bring them home...
...Canadian lumberjack with an indigenous girlfriend (the beguiling Lynn Collins, who has played Ophelia and Juliet and knows how to telegraph troubled love). He should know he cannot escape his roiled physical and psychological destiny; there ain't no sanity claws. Soon he's drawn back into the orbit of Stryker, whose plan is to pour adamantium into Logan's system, giving our boy the power to fight and destroy his murderous bro. "We're going to make you indestructible," Stryker says in one of his many generic Dr. Frankenstein lines. "But first we have to destroy you." And then...