Word: rocketings
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...PACKS After the test pilot of a rocket-propelled backpack told Popular Science magazine in 1969 that the machine made him "feel safer than I do driving the family car in traffic," it seemed Buck Rogers-style travel for everyone was imminent. But a mass-market model never managed...
Even before the spacecraft were launched, it was clear their designers had done an extraordinary job. The rovers will reach the Martian surface much the way Pathfinder did, descending with the aid of rocket engines and parachutes and bouncing to a landing swaddled in air bags. After shaking off its inflatable cocoon, each 384-lb. vehicle will unfold itself into its full standing physique, measuring 5.2 ft. long, 7.5 ft. wide and 4.9 ft. tall...
...society and change how cities were built. Was it a jet pack? A teleporter? No, it was the Segway scooter, a goofily innocuous machine that seems to have been designed solely so George W. Bush could tumble off one, as he did this summer in Maine. From dreams of rocket men flying across space-age cityscapes to visions of meter readers riding glorified hand trucks--this is what we get when we are so unfortunate as to live long enough to see the next big thing arrive...
...winged spacecraft. With just three orbiters remaining - Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour - one more catastrophic accident would mean the program could not support enough flights to keep the space station operating. And an orbital space plane would share many of the same limitations as the shuttle. What if a rocket were about to explode and the commander tried to abort at supersonic speed? The force would simply rip the wings off a space plane. And leaving one docked to the station for months at a time, the way Soyuz lifeboats are today, would expose its thermal tiles and wingpanels, essentially...
...back to Earth is unique. But the space shuttle, while magnificently brawny and brilliantly engineered, emerged from a series of compromises and budget cuts dating back to the Nixon Administration. The most critical mistake: designing a spaceship to fly horizontally like an airplane but launching it vertically like a rocket. That one decision saved $5 billion in the 1970s but led directly to the loss of both the Challenger and Columbia. "The problem is that once the shuttle is a meter or two off the ground, there is nothing you can do to save it if something goes wrong," says...