Word: rockets
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...problems worsened. On April 18, a startled Air Force watched its once trusty Titan rocket explode at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base. Lost in the fiery metallic shower was a Big Bird spy satellite, intended to keep a keen polar-orbit eye on the Soviets. The explosion was the second successive Titan 34D failure within a year, after nine perfect flights. NASA bravely tried another launch, and on May 3 was dismayed when its long-reliable Delta rocket, carrying a hurricane-spotting satellite, had to be detonated over Cape Canaveral after its main engine shut down prematurely...
Beyond that, the French discovered again last Saturday that space mishaps are not confined by national boundaries. An Ariane II rocket had to be destroyed by controllers when its third stage failed to ignite 4 1/2 min. into its flight. Lost with the rocket was a $90 million telecommunications satellite. It was the fourth failure in 18 Ariane launches and the third malfunction of its third-stage engine, suggesting a possible system problem. So Ariane, too, was grounded while the accident's cause is sought. Most American companies seem willing to wait out the shuttle's return. Hughes Communications...
...Bird spy satellites. The Air Force has sent seven KH craft into polar orbits over the past nine years, but only one is still operational. The satellites are normally used in pairs, and a replacement for the last one to go dead was lost in last August's Titan rocket explosion. The single eye is expected to function for at least another year. Until its new Titans start to become available in 1988, the Air Force has some crisis protection: a known stock of 13 older Titan IIs that are already being refurbished as launch vehicles, and some 40 Titan...
...space board points out that relying on the shuttle for scientific launches has seriously delayed projects such as the Galileo and Ulysses probes of Jupiter and the Hubble space telescope. The last major scientific space mission by the U.S. was the 1977 Voyager 2, launched on a Titan-Centaur rocket; Voyager's bypass of the planet Uranus in January provided the U.S. with its only space success this year...
...years. It assumes that NASA's proposed orbiting space station will be in place by 1994. Simultaneously, research would proceed on both an aerospace plane (President Reagan's so-called Orient Express), capable of taking off from runways and soaring into orbit, and a new generation of reusable rocket-powered craft that would reach orbit with a single-stage engine. These two new vehicles would compete to see which would become the shuttle's successor, carrying passengers and cargo between earth and the space station. Yet another craft, a kind of space truck, would also be created to move crews...