Word: payloads
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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NASA and the Defense Department have already begun work on two new launchers to make space-station construction feasible. One is a heavy-lift unmanned rocket for massive payloads. The other is the National Aerospace Plane, or "Orient Express." Smaller than the shuttle, it would take off like an airplane from a runway, soar into space to deliver its human cargo, then return and land. And NASA has plans to convert the present shuttle into a cargo-only model, with a larger payload than the manned version. Together, these launchers would give NASA much needed flexibility...
...space rocket that stalled helplessly on a White Sands, N. Mex., test stand last week seemed to symbolize the fears critics have long expressed about the Strategic Defense Initiative. What fizzled was not the payload -- a satellite designed to generate Buck Rogers-style neutral-particle beams in space -- but a thoroughly conventional solid-fuel Aries booster. Coming after an aborted mission in March using a Delta launcher, the unsuccessful mission crystallized suspicion that SDI is so riddled with potential failures that it will never get off the ground...
...Minister claims that India can produce a nuclear bomb "overnight," though Gandhi said in 1986 that it would take "maybe longer than . . . a few weeks" for India to deploy A-weapons. In February 1988 India successfully tested the Prithvi, a 150-mile-range ballistic missile that can carry a payload of 2,000 lbs., more than enough for a nuclear warhead...
NASA's new manner was in marked contrast to its bold, often arrogant and occasionally careless approach in pre-Challenger days. NASA initially promoted the shuttle as a routine "space truck," an efficient, economical transport vehicle capable of lofting any payload -- commercial, scientific or military -- into orbit. Washington succumbed to that pitch, allowing NASA to decree ! that expendable rockets such as the Delta, Atlas and Titan be phased out in favor of the shuttle...
...result of its difficulties, NASA has lost potential commercial clients to the European Space Agency, which will put payloads into orbit aboard unmanned Ariane rockets at bargain prices (cost: about $40 million per payload). Even more galling was last month's decision by the Reagan Administration to allow China to launch two U.S. communications satellites, a move that stunned the fledgling U.S. commercial rocket industry. "That hurt, and hurt hard," says an executive of one U.S. firm. "We wanted those birds...