Word: saturns
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Trailing a Promethean plume of fire and smoke, the entire 18-story-high, 4.5 million-lb. package thundered off the pad, shaking the earth for miles around, a seismic jolt greater even than the tremors from the mighty Saturn rockets that carried the Apollo astronauts to the moon. From the hundreds of thousands of spectators at the Kennedy Space Center came encouraging shouts: "Go, man, go!" "Smooth sailing, baby!" "Fly like an eagle!" "Oh my god, what a show...
...spacecraft accelerated, eventually to reach speeds of 17,000 m.p.h., the astronauts were pressed hard against their couches, experiencing a tug three times that of normal gravity, only half of a Saturn launch's g forces. Eight and a half minutes after the spacecraft had left the launch pad, its engines had swallowed up more than half a million gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Columbia fired explosive charges to spin off its main tank, which disintegrated in a shower of fragments over the Indian Ocean, only ten miles off course, although at a higher altitude than expected. Then...
Until now, manned spaceflight has been a most extravagant-some say most wasteful-enterprise. The towering Saturn rockets made only one-way passages Even the tiny "command ships" that splashed back to earth after their journeys to the moon never flew again. The shuttle orbiter has been painstakingly designed for use again and again, perhaps as many as 100 times. Not only will that make spaceflight less costly, it should encourage a whole range of activities, from launching and retrieving new types of satellites, including power plants that can snatch energy from the sun, to setting up permanent orbital observatories...
...darkness fell last night and reporters filtered through the press room--typing, reading, rigging cables, gazing down the "Saturn Causeway" towards paths 39A--a twinge of campfire cameraderie took hold...
...intensity). All the information from the new space telescope will be converted to electronic signals and beamed to earth with the help of relay satellites. On the ground, computers will reconstruct the images and display them on high-resolution TV screens just as they did during the recent Saturn flyby...