Word: pads
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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...
...shuttle could hardly have got off the pad without military support. In the early 1970s, when the space agency first sought funding for a reusable space vehicle to succeed the costly and expendable Saturn rockets that carried the Apollo astronauts to the moon, many congressional leaders strongly opposed the ambitious new space adventure. Only when the Air Force threw its full political weight behind the shuttle did Congress vote funds...
...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...
...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...