Word: orbiters
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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...
...space agency has also been forced to delay until 1988 a project to orbit Venus with a satellite that will scan its cloud-veiled surface with radar beams. In 1986, Halley's comet, perhaps a chunk of debris left over from the early solar system, will return to the earth's vicinity for the first time since 1910. So far the space agency has been unable to scratch up the money for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to intercept this visitor from deep space with cameras and other scientific instruments. Says George Rathjens, former chief scientist...
Though the shuttle's cost overruns have caused penny pinching on other scientific projects, the future in space should now brighten for scientists, even if their experiments must ride on military flights. In 1985, the shuttle is scheduled to hoist a large, remote-controlled telescope into orbit high above the earth's obscuring atmosphere. From there, astronomers should be able to see out 14 billion light-years (seven times farther than they can see using the biggest earthbound reflectors), expanding the volume of the known universe about 350-fold and bringing them very close to what is presumed...