Word: orbits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...culprit, as Californians gleefully observed, was scuddy Florida weather. When it became apparent in the early hours of the morning on Challenger's sixth and last day in orbit that the sun would not burn away the morning fog and the winds would not chase away the low-hanging clouds over Cape Canaveral, Mission Control in Houston sent up the gloomy message: rather than attempt a first-ever shuttle landing at Kennedy, Challenger would put down on its next orbit (its 98th) on the dried-out lake bed in the Mojave Desert where shuttles have come home from space...
...able to try out its new concrete shuttle landing strip at Kennedy until early next year. Reason: Challenger's next flight involves both a nighttime lift-off and landing, while on the mission after that, a refurbished Columbia, NASA'S other operational shuttle, will return to orbit carrying the heaviest single cargo to date, the 34,500-lb. European-built space lab. NASA does not want to risk a landing on the relatively narrow, marsh-lined Kennedy runway during either mission...
...member crew, the largest yet to fly on a shuttle. Barely a day after their flaming on-time liftoff, Crippen and company set out two commercial communications satellites, one Canadian, the other Indonesian. By week's end the satellites had completed their long six-day climbs to "geostationary" orbit 22,300 miles above the equator. "That's four for four," Ride announced proudly, tallying up the number of commercial satellites successfully launched by the shuttle...
...count did not include NASA's own $135 million Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS), which failed to reach geostationary orbit after its launch on Challenger's last flight. Technicians expect to nudge TDRS into proper orbit this week...
...fifth day up. She and John Fabian, 44, an Air Force colonel, will use Challenger's 50-ft.-long "cherry picker," a remote-controlled mechanical arm, to pluck a German-built experimental package called the Shuttle Pallet Satellite (SPAS) out of the cargo bay and let it orbit freely in space. The SPAS is a self-contained laboratory housing eight separate experiments. These involve such potentially important commercial processes as growing crystals for electronic components and forming superfine alloys in the favorable zero-g environment...