Word: orbiter
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...also created a kind of time warp. For a few days, America was back in the 1960s, an era when space was a grand frontier to be tamed, and when NASA's technical brilliance and right-stuff bravado made the agency seem virtually unstoppable as it sent men into orbit and on to the moon...
...rocket booster. Ever since the Challenger blew up less than two minutes after liftoff in January 1986, killing all seven astronauts aboard, the agency has seemed lost in space. Shuttle launches have been delayed by mechanical glitches more often than not. Satellites have mysteriously stopped transmitting while in orbit. Space probes have broken down en route to Jupiter and Mars. Along with the setbacks came a crisis in the spirit of space adventure -- a loss of vision and will to probe the unknown reaches of the solar system and the universe. "How do you follow putting people on the moon...
Thus after last week's triumphant repair mission, relieved NASA officials are now saying, "Thanks, Endeavour, we really needed that." The mission proves that astronauts can handle construction and repair work in orbit -- the skills essential to NASA's pan to build and operate a space station by the end of the decade. Yet space extravaganzas are no longer enough to keep the public and Congress behind the space program. The questions that haunted NASA before the Hubble mission won't go away. Why does the U.S. need a space program anyway? Should the nation be risking lives and spending...
...past the execution would have been a nightmare. "For Mars Observer," says Ghassem Asrar, the program scientist for Mission to Planet Earth, " NASA was involved in every step from start to orbit." Obedient to its bureaucratic, cover-your-backside tradition, the agency demanded that the companies building the Observer, led by General Electric and Martin Marietta, submit endless reams of paperwork documenting every last nut and bolt...
...note that the Hubble could never have been repaired without human hands; opponents argue that without NASA's insistence that the telescope be launched by shuttle, the instrument could have gone up in the late 1970s, at a fraction of its eventual cost and into a higher, more useful orbit to boot...