Word: ship
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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From the Kennedy Space Center and the Soviet Union's Baikonur Cosmodrome, powerful shuttles and unmanned rockets lift off week after week, bearing construction modules and fuel supplies to a giant space station in earth orbit. There, skilled workers have been assembling the ship that will take the first humans to Mars. After more than a year of construction, the million- pound, ungainly looking spacecraft is ready. With a crew of eight, it separates from the space station and heads for Mars, following the Hohmann ellipse, a space trajectory that may one day be as familiar as a great-circle...
...orange and blue column of fire that illuminated the night sky. Turning lazily eastward, the rocket sent the craft off on an ambitious mission: to scout Mars and probe Phobos, one of its two tiny moons. Far below at the sprawling complex, technicians swarmed over a sister ship that is scheduled to be launched this week on a similar mission. Exulted Roald Sagdeyev, director of the Soviet Space Research Institute: "Now we can go and drink champagne...
...reluctant Congress. "The station would be needed to serve as an assembly point," says NASA's Brian Pritchard, who has studied the feasibility of such a plan. "We don't have the power to lift from 1 million to 3 million lbs. ((the weight of the Mars ship)) into orbit from the earth...
...speed, the astronauts would have a much smaller "window" for re-entering the atmosphere. "Come in too low, and you burn up," says Oberg. "Come in too high, and you overshoot. You miss the earth, and you'll never see it again." Other plans call for an unmanned cargo ship to precede the manned craft to Mars and for even higher velocities that would cut mission times down to a year...
Bush did not dwell on details of the event in his 30-minute address, but defended the U.S. presence in the gulf and the decision of the ship's captain. He urged Iran and Iraq to accept a year-old, U.N. cease-fire resolution immediately...