Word: padded
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...five space flights, including a moon landing, and his rookie pilot, Bob Crippen, 43. Though their lift-off was delayed two days because of that computer failure, once they settled into the cockpit for the second try, everything went, well, like a rocket. Barely 45 min. off the launch pad, Columbia was circling the earth at an altitude of 150 miles. Before the end of the day it reached 170 miles. Meanwhile, two vessels steamed out to recover the 80-ton shells of two spent solid-fuel rockets that had parachuted into the Atlantic. When a nosey Soviet "trawler" edged...
...more distant future, such stations, like the great wheel in 2001: A Space Odyssey, could serve as a launch pad for journeys far beyond the earth, maybe to Mars. Interplanetary spacecraft assembled in earth orbit could be made of much lighter and less costly materials since they would not have to survive the stresses and friction of travel through the earth's atmosphere...
...Pentagon hopes to be lofting at least some of its own shuttle flights from a military spaceport now under construction at Vandenberg Air Force Base, near Santa Barbara, Calif. The $200 million installation will include a launch pad and a new three-mile-long shuttle landing strip, as well as fuel tanks, shops and other support facilities. It will operate under the control of a new military space center at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, hard by the North American Air Defense Command's underground headquarters deep in Cheyenne Mountain...
Trailing a Promethean plume of fire and smoke, the entire 18-story-high, 4.5 million-lb. package thundered off the pad, shaking the earth for miles around, a seismic jolt greater even than the tremors from the mighty Saturn rockets that carried the Apollo astronauts to the moon. From the hundreds of thousands of spectators at the Kennedy Space Center came encouraging shouts: "Go, man, go!" "Smooth sailing, baby!" "Fly like an eagle!" "Oh my god, what a show...
...spacecraft accelerated, eventually to reach speeds of 17,000 m.p.h., the astronauts were pressed hard against their couches, experiencing a tug three times that of normal gravity, only half of a Saturn launch's g forces. Eight and a half minutes after the spacecraft had left the launch pad, its engines had swallowed up more than half a million gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Columbia fired explosive charges to spin off its main tank, which disintegrated in a shower of fragments over the Indian Ocean, only ten miles off course, although at a higher altitude than expected. Then...