Word: payloads
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...months later, Columbia will bear a $55 million payload named Astro-1 that includes three ultraviolet telescopes and two wide-angle cameras. For much of the mission, the instruments will be studying such exotica as quasars, black holes and globular clusters, but for a while during the days that the five international probes encounter the comet, all of Columbia's eyes will be on Halley's. One of the Astro-1 telescopes will peer at very short wavelength light to see if it can detect such elements as helium, neon and argon, which would reveal something about what temperatures were...
...Soviets also implicitly offered concessions involving the power of rockets used to launch warheads. In the argot of nuclear weapons, this power is known as throw weight, the ability to hurl a payload. The Soviets now have about 5.7 million kilograms of ballistic-missile throw weight, while the U.S. has a mere 2 million kilograms. The Soviet proposal offered last week would reduce the Kremlin's throw weight to no more than 3 million kilograms, according to an analysis for TIME by Ted Warner, an arms-control expert at the Rand Corp...
Then the flight grew livelier. Things went wrong by the alphabet. The RCS (reaction control system) locked in the firing position. The GPC (general purpose computer) went down. Fire broke out in the APB (aft payload bay). Mission Commander Larry Cerier of Chicago and Pilot Bill Parker of Friendswood, Texas, worked out the problems coolly. The right stuff. They even got a little cocky. They began to try out banter over the radio in the style of deadpan macho that astronauts affect. When the fire started, Parker took emergency steps (activating switches to spray the area with a chemical fire...
...intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), for example, are the most accurate and powerful strategic weapons in the nation's arsenal, but the fixed underground silos in which they are stored also make them the most vulnerable. Airborne bombers, which can be recalled from attack up to the moment their nuclear payload is fired, provide a President with the most flexible strategic weapon currently available, but also the slowest. Submarine-based missiles are virtually undetectable by the Soviets, but at least until recently, they were considered less accurate than land-based or airborne missiles...
...astronauts were immediately faced with another dilemma. With its screen open, AUSSAT, which was scheduled to be deployed the next day, would probably be disabled by solar radiation while it sat unprotected in Discovery's open payload bay. The solution: AUSSAT was launched only 6 1/2 hours later, shortly before ASC1, a commercial satellite, was successfully deployed as planned, both on the first day in orbit. LEASAT 4, another orbiting link in the Navy's communications system, followed on schedule two days later...