Word: payloads
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...after Global Surveyor is launched, a sister ship, the Mars Pathfinder, will follow it into space. Like NASA's unmanned Viking ships of the 1970s, Pathfinder will land on Mars' pockmarked surface. Unlike the Vikings, Pathfinder will have someplace to go once it gets there. After the pyramid-shaped payload touches down, its sides will open like the petals of a 3-ft.-tall flower to reveal a six-wheeled rover. Powered by solar cells and D-cell batteries, the 2-ft.-long robot vehicle is supposed to hum away from the landing pod, crawling at 2 ft. a minute...
...half-size, 67-ft. prototype of the VentureStar called the X-33 is scheduled to fly in 1999, the finished craft in 2006. NASA and Lockheed claim that the innovations will shrink the shuttle's price-per-payload-pound from $10,000 to $1,000, slash repair and inspection costs and reduce turnaround time from weeks to days. Goldin envisions fleets of VentureStars launching satellites, hauling material back and forth to space stations and ferrying tourists into orbit. "Many people have aspirations of going into space," he says. "They should be able to live those...
...record for a single spacecraft. "We've never done anything quite like this," says TIME aerospace correspondent Jerry Hannifin. "Flying over Russia and in range of a Russian control station, the Atlantis crew maneuvered the 100-ton shuttlecraft, with this big docking tunnel sticking 15 feet out of its payload bin, very slowly -- at the rate of an inch per second -- through a forest of antenna and solar arrays. It looks like a big mechanical porcupine with five to ten inches of clearance. The Atlantis crew rams it into the docking port on the Mir. A huge metallic kiss." When...
...rendezvous between the shuttle Atlantis and the Russian space station. "We've never done anything quite like this. Flying over Russia and in range of a Russian control station, the Atlantis crew will maneuver the 100-ton shuttlecraft, with this big docking tunnel sticking 15 feet out of its payload bin, very slowly -- at the rate of an inch per second -- through a forest of antenna and solar arrays. It looks like a big mechanical porcupine with five to ten inches of clearance. The Atlantis crew will ram it into the docking port on the Mir. A huge metallic kiss...
...Atlantis hurtled toward Mir today, a Canadian astronaut performed some high altitude construction to prepare for the docking. "Chris Hadfield pulled the five-ton docking module out of the payload bay of the shuttle and, with a fifty-foot crane, maneuvered it onto the top of the shuttle craft," says Hannifin. "All this at 17,500 miles per hour and 250 miles above the earth. It's unprecedented in terms of pulling off a giant construction project in space...