Word: spacecraft
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Once the commercial guys like Branson or UP Aerospace perfect a reliable, low-cost spacecraft, the space frontier becomes officially open for business to pursue what until recently seemed impossible: Snag an asteroid into low-earth orbit to mine its minerals. Launch solar satellites to beam down all the cheap power we can use. Build space hotels for family tourism. "Whether it means flying a rocket to an inflatable hotel in low-earth orbit, these are far-fetched, fantasy things that are out there but suddenly become a little more real when you have private entrepreneurs trying to figure...
...long, long time in coming, but NASA?s manned space program finally got one right. Thursday's announcement that the contract for the next-generation crew exploration vehicle - now dubbed Orion - had been awarded to Lockheed Martin was the right spacecraft to the right company at the right time...
...first place, we had completed the six flights of the Mercury program and were on about the business of Gemini. And Kennedy delivered his speech before we had any real idea of how to make the trip. So it was high time NASA pulled the trigger on the new spacecraft, and the fact that it did so yesterday was a welcome sign of a true commitment...
...Orion spacecraft, by contrast, is based on proven Apollo technology. It?s configured like a large Apollo: a conical crew compartment atop a cylindrical engine module. It will sit atop heavy-lift boosters that are modeled in part after the shuttle?s own liquid-fuel engines - far and away the best part of the old shuttle technology and the part most worth saving. Unlike Apollo, it will be stuffed with 21st century electronics and computers, and it will be cleverly reconfigurable, able to carry six astronauts into Earth orbit and four to the moon or Mars...
...former crocodile hunter who goes by the name of Wolf, is reminiscing about the great Normanton rocket launch of 1957. He was among the party of inebriated amateur scientists gathered by the river that night. They'd heard on the radio that the Soviets had just put the Sputnik spacecraft into orbit. "We thought, We can build a rocket,'' Arneth says. Commandeering a welder, they made a long cylinder from three 44-gallon drums, then rigged up a nose cone from an old hopper. "They got an old car seat and put that in the drum, and then they went...