Word: orbiters
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Still, Dream No. 1 is simply to get the shuttle up, into orbit and then safely back to earth on a 2.8-mile-long landing strip at the Kennedy Space Center or another at Edwards Air Force Base in California?or even, in an emergency, one at the White Sands Missile Test Range in New Mexico. Fulfilling this feat cannot be breezily taken for granted. One sobering fact is that the Columbia, unlike every other U.S. spacecraft, will be launched without having undergone unmanned test flights in space; to bring it back alive, the astronauts must go along...
...system it introduces could contribute substantially to the domestic economy, extend U.S. capacities to find mineral resources on earth, survey the oceans, keep track of weather patterns and help bring solar energy down to earth. The most compelling of the early projects for the shuttle will be placing in orbit in 1985, if all goes well, a 22,500-lb. telescope that, free of the haze of the earth, will be able to see seven times farther than the world's most powerful instruments and perhaps solve some riddles of the universe...
...Crippen began full-time training in January 1978. Each has received 25 hours of formal instruction a week in such subjects as navigation and astronomy, but each also spends many more hours poring over what Astronaut Crew Trainer Thomas Kaiser calls the "cookbook"-a 21-volume compendium of launch, orbit and descent procedures for piloting Columbia that will be on board during the flight. The manual is changed constantly; in the office shared by Young and Crippen is a stack of mimeographed revisions 2½ ft. high. The two men have also spent more than 1,200 hours working...
...away to the phone. He returned with a startled look on his face and whispered to Physicist Lloyd Berkner, who then rapped for silence on the hors d'oeuvre table. "I wish to make an announcement," he told the group. "I am informed that a satellite is in orbit at an elevation of 900 km. I wish to congratulate our Soviet colleagues on their achievement...
Nothing seemed to kindle Kennedy's enthusiasm like another journey into space. He was jubilant when the U.S. finally got Alan Shepard into the stratosphere and down again. Kennedy flew to Cape Canaveral, Fla., to greet John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth. The week he was killed, J.F.K. stood beneath the first stage of the giant Saturn 1 rocket. While Wernher von Braun talked quietly into his ear of the day the monster would head toward the moon, Kennedy thrust his hands in his coat pockets, rocked back on his heels, and for a fleeting second...