Word: payloads
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.: You can understand what John Glenn means when he says -- repeatedly -- that there are more important things to pay attention to on the upcoming shuttle mission than a lowly payload specialist such as himself. For example, Glenn is going to have some skittish houseguests to take care of after Thursday's blastoff: three casefuls of large, brown, southern-style cockroaches. The nose-wrinkling experiment belongs to a Maryland high school, who are paying the bugs' round-trip ticket to discover whether zero gravity throws off cockroach reproductive skills...
...presence of the roach-o-nauts. It's less than two years since the embattled space station Mir was plagued by the presence of a single floating cockroach -- which, not surprisingly, came aboard by accident. NASA moved to calm fears Monday: "They won't be infesting space," laughed payload coordinator Rud Moe. It is, after all, worth $5,000 to the agency if the bugs check in and check out. All the same, perhaps the 77-year-old senator should remember to pack an emergency can of Raid...
...after a Ukrainian-built Zenit-2 rocket carrying 12 Globalstar satellites thundered skyward from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Sept. 10, its engine failed. The 460-ton rocket fell back to Earth, showering debris across southern Siberia and driving Globalstar's stock down 40% overnight. The $190 million payload was covered by insurance, but the disaster delayed the system's debut even further. It was a big blow. Like the first cold-beer vendor on a hot beach, Iridium is more likely than ever to win those first and most eager customers--and the ones probably willing...
...joys of being hoary of head is that you can speak frankly without grounding your career. So when Vanity Fair hunted down some ex-astronauts to ask what they thought of John Glenn's jaunt into the great blue yonder, they were none too starry-eyed. "John Glenn a payload specialist? That's bulls____," said FRANK BORMAN, second from left. "NASA could get better data monitoring him for 10 days in bed." WALLY SCHIRRA, far left, was similarly wry. "I can think of several more Senators we should boost into space." Even JIM LOVELL, second from right, next...
...including such delicacies as smoked turkey, Kona coffee and dried apricots. All the meals are sealed in plastic packets, each of which is coded with a colored dot to indicate which crew member it is intended for. The color code for Brown, the commander, is red; for Glenn, a payload specialist, it's purple. "The shrimp cocktail they fix is very, very good," says Glenn, "as good as what you'd get at Delmonico's. Curt likes shrimp, and I always tell him that when he's on the flight deck and I'm hungry, I'm going...