Word: rocketeers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Queens, N.Y., as he paused in a Manhattan pub to watch the landing. "It shows everybody we're still No. 1." Mrs. Alicia Hoerter, a Louisville grandmother, could barely contain her excitement or her puns. "Columbia, the gem of a notion!" she exulted. "First, it's a rocket, then it's a spaceship, then it's a plane." In a packed Georgia Tech ballroom, great whoops of joy went up when John Young, class of '52, put Columbia down on the desert floor, and a band struck up "I'm a ramblin' wreck...
...program: the Spacelab, a self-contained scientific compartment for up to four experimenters scheduled to be car ried aloft in 1983. Said one official: "Success for America means a breakthrough for us too and signals the entry of Western Europe into aerospace." The French, who are building a conventional rocket launcher called Ariane, which could draw away some of the shuttle's business, were no less effusive. Said Le Figaro: "After their political and military failures of recent years, our friends [the Americans] needed a big technological success. And they've got one." The French public wanted...
...hardly outdo Young, who has now made 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...
...payload, but who is going to buy space in it? Communications companies, for one, are already lined up to use the shuttle for satellite launches. One advantage is price: $35 million for a shuttle launch vs. $48 million for a boost into space from a conventional Atlas-Centaur rocket. Another is that the shuttle can carry several satellites at a time. What is more, says A T & T 's Robert Latter, "you can test the satellite all the way up. Maybe you could even fix it in flight." After the astronauts perfect their skills at retrieving satellites with...
...shuttles for their exclusive use. They are also developing a new portable booster to be carried aboard, thus overcoming one of the shuttle's notable limitations. It can operate only in low earth orbit (at altitudes from 115 to 690 miles). But the new booster rocket, attached to satellites to be carried into space, will be able to hurl them into geosynchronous or stationary orbits at an altitude of 22,300 miles. In such orbits, a surveillance satellite's speed almost exactly matches the earth's rate of rotation; in effect, the satellite remains motionless over...