Word: spacecraft
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...benevolent influence of microgravity, they were able to form a mix of aluminum and zinc, two metals that cannot easily be combined on earth. Extremely strong yet lightweight, the alloy, if it could be produced in mass quantities in space, might be useful for superstructures of airplanes or spacecraft...
What makes the views from IRAS so unusual is that they provide the first look at a hitherto invisible world. Before IRAS, telescopes placed aboard spacecraft gathered either conventional "visible" light, in the range of the human eye, or higher-frequency ultraviolet radiation, X rays and gamma rays. IRAS, by contrast, operates at the other end of the electromagnetic spectrum: it "sees" in the dark by detecting the long waves of infrared radiation, or heat. Since water vapor in the earth's atmosphere soaks up most infrared radiation from space, such observations until now could only be made...
...extraterrestrial ambitions have been declared more often by the U.S.S.R. than that of establishing permanent bases in space. In pursuit of this cosmic goal, the Soviets have launched a series of Salyut spacecraft that have been occupied by cosmonauts for periods of half a year or more. Now this program, often advertised by the Kremlin as a steppingstone to the stars, has suffered a serious setback. Last week Soviet officials acknowledged that the latest orbital station, Salyut 7, had experienced problems, though they vigorously denied British reports that the two cosmonauts were in danger of being marooned in space...
...rocket nozzle recovered from the previous shuttle flight in August turned out, on postflight inspection, to be just a hairline away from burning through. Some space officials said that if the rocket had fired only a few seconds longer, it would have lost all directional ability and the spacecraft would have tumbled wildly out of control...
...they didn't, not in 1962, when John Glenn became the first American "star voyager," the first "free man" to circle the globe in a spacecraft and match the accomplishment of the Soviets, who had done the trick first. It was 17 years before someone succeeded in naming the mysterious qualities that made Glenn and his six fellow Mercury astronauts such compelling figures...