Word: skylab
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...after Apollo, something went wrong with the nation's space program. Despite successes -- such as the Skylab space station and the series of unmanned missions that will reach its climax next month when Voyager 2 arrives at Neptune -- the program seemed to founder. The space shuttle, for example, was oversold as the one answer to U.S. space-transportation needs. But it is too big to put astronauts in space efficiently, too small to launch the largest payloads and too unreliable to live up to the 60-flight-per-year schedule once promised. The result, even before the Challenger accident...
...space development, NASA is about to perform new research that will fill the gap, Caterina said. A telescope that the space shuttle will carry into space this summer, for example, will allow scientists to expand the distance they can observe. Work has been started on Skylab Freedom, which Caterina said would make the U.S.S.R.'s current skylab obsolete...
Despite the experience gained from Apollo moon shots and the longer Skylab missions, U.S. doctors have some doubts about the ability of humans to withstand the effects not only of prolonged weightlessness but also of the transitions from gravity on earth (one G) to zero G in space to 0.38 G on Mars. "We're nowhere near ready to send a human to Mars," says Dr. Michael Bungo, director of NASA's Space Biomedical Research Institute at the Johnson Space Center. "We've got years more of basic research...
...WHEN SKYLAB'S orbit began to degenerate, everyone knew there could be only one outcome. As the satellite plunged closer and closer to Earth, it had to plow through denser and denser layers of the atmosphere; increasing drag reduced its velocity and increased the rate of its fall. Finally, too much of its momentum had been destroyed. The situation, literally, disintegrated...
...harder, of course, to predict the fate of a nation than it is to predict the trajectory of a satellite. But Cory Aquino and her People Power movement, like Skylab, are losing the momentum needed to keep aloft. Isolated from the left and under increasing threat from the nation's military, Cory Aquino may well find herself living next door to Ferdinand Marcos before Christmas...