Word: orbits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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NASA, of course, does not permit alcohol aboard its spacecraft or on its facilities, but last week, after Columbia's harrowing, computer-plagued final day in orbit, the space agency had good reason to splash everyone with champagne. Sweeping out of the skies in the fading glow of a setting sun, the space shuttle settled gently onto Edwards Air Force Base's Runway 17 in the California desert with the "right on the numbers" precision only a master pilot like John Young, 53, America's premier astronaut, can muster. For seven hours and 50 minutes before that...
...electronic glitches that led to those fears began on Columbia 's ninth day in orbit as it circled 155 miles above the earth. The flight had already been lengthened by 24 hours to give ground scientists more experiment time. This was made possible by the shuttle's unexpectedly low use of its "consumables" (oxygen, fuel, electric power). But when Columbia, in preparation for its descent, fired the small maneuvering rockets, or thrusters, hi its nose, the jolt rocked the ship. The usually laconic Young said that it sounded like a "howitzer blast going off in your backyard...
...situation was never life-threatening, since a computer was always available to take charge of the ship. Still, the controllers decided to wave off a landing for several orbits while hundreds of engineers in Houston pored over data in an effort to discover the cause of the failures. The controllers were afraid that the difficulty, whatever it was, would spread through the system and bring down all the ship's computers. Without a computer, even a John Young probably would not have been able to take Columbia safely out of orbit because of the complex sequence of rocket firings...
...units, which sense any changes in the spacecraft's speed or direction, mysteriously broke down. In addition, the laws of celestial mechanics added a political problem. Each extra swing around the earth changed Columbia's path. As a result, when the ship swooped out of its last orbit, instead of coming in south of Australia and over the western Pacific, it passed only 80 miles above eastern Siberia in the militarily sensitive area of the Sakhalin Peninsula where Soviet aircraft shot down a South Korean jet last September. Never before had a manned American spacecraft flown...
...Spacelab and the new breed of payload specialists-scientists from outside the regular astronaut corps, including one West German researcher-who managed its heavy load of 72 experiments. The space agency noted that more than 90% of the studies had been completed. If the scientific data transmitted from orbit in just a single burst were lined up as small, text-size electronic symbols, one official calculated, they would extend from the earth to the moon. After preliminary analysis, Space-lab's international team of scientists, from Europe, the U.S., Canada and Japan, were able to point to a number...