Word: orbiter
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...greater risk than on their previous flight, reached for a more audacious and dangerous goal--and almost always succeeded. But after the four extraordinary years between 1968 and 1972, when the U.S. was sending crews to the moon, the agency retreated to the familiar backwaters of near Earth orbit. Aside from a few high notes like the Hubble-telescope repair mission and the horror of the Challenger explosion, human space travel became downright dull. And with the first components of the NASA-led International Space Station set to launch within months, things seemed likely to stay that...
...hear NASA's detractors tell it, Glenn is manifestly unfit for space travel of any kind. Flying into orbit more than a third of a century after he last made the trip, more than a dozen years after most people his age have begun retiring, and only months after the death of fellow Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard illustrated the frailties of even the most resilient flesh, is, they argue, at best showboating and at worst reckless...
...says NASA. Long ago, the agency noticed a parallel between the changes that happen to a body in space and those wrought by aging on Earth. What better way to study this phenomenon than to send an aged astronaut into orbit? And what better aged astronaut than the one who made the country's first trip...
...first lawmaker to fly in space. Senator Jake Garn of Utah and Representative Bill Nelson of Florida both took shuttle rides in the giddy, all-aboard days before the Challenger disaster. In the eyes of many, however, Garn and Nelson were mere junketeers, politicians who wangled a trip into orbit largely for the sake of going up--or, in the case of the famously space-sick Garn, throwing up. Glenn is no mere joyrider. "John has worked hard to prepare for this," says Senator Wendell Ford of Kentucky. "He's not doing it for the publicity. He is doing...
Russia's ahead in the space race again. The world's first space-bound bureaucrat -- Yuri Baturin, a former security adviser to Boris Yeltsin -- blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan Thursday, heading for a two-week stay aboard Mir. NASA, of course, has sent lawmakers into orbit; Senator Jake Garn took a junket on the Space Shuttle back before the Challenger disaster, and John Glenn heads off in the fall. But never has America put a presidential aide in space. Can this one fly? "We can teach anyone to become a cosmonaut as long...