Word: shipful
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Climbing painfully down into the XS-1 as it lay in the airborne belly of the huge mother ship, a B-29, Yeager snapped the cover shut using a sawed-off broom. At 20,000 ft., he dropped out of the bomb bay with a jolt. With all four rockets firing, the plane started shaking violently. The Mach needle edged up past 0.965, and then it went off the scale. Yeager was thunderstruck. He was flying supersonic, and "it was as smooth as a baby's bottom: Grandma could be sitting up there sipping lemonade," he said later. He half...
...videotape, which runs from 8:35 to 8:48 a.m. E.T.--ending about 11 min. before the ship was destroyed--shows the astronauts just where they ought to have been that late in the mission, with commander Rick Husband, pilot William McCool and crew members Laurel Clark and Kalpana Chawla strapped into their seats on the main flight deck. Crewmates Ilan Ramon, David Brown and Michael Anderson were out of view, similarly belted into place on the middeck below. When the tape begins, Chawla and Clark are finishing their suiting up, while Husband and McCool are busy flying the ship...
...crew members spend the next few minutes enjoying the light show while tending to their suits and instruments and feeling for the return of the first ghost of gravity. When the ship is pulling only one-hundredth of a G, McCool is heard commenting that when he drops a card, it falls, a sure sign that Columbia is crossing the line from extraterrestrial to terrestrial...
...routine until 3 min. later--8 min. before the accident--when NASA got its first indication of what it dryly calls off-nominal aero increments. Translation: the shuttle was growing unstable because of the loss of insulating tiles, and the computer-controlled flaps were attempting to compensate. Inside the ship this would not have caused concern...
...First problem is the port city of Umm Qasr in the south. This was said by the Pentagon to have been taken last Friday, but as late as today - Monday - house to house fighting continued there, holding up coalition plans to ship in humanitarian...