Word: spacecraft
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...Experiment (GRACE)--a twin-satellite pas de deux designed to measure Earth's gravitational field and its effect on ocean currents. A critical step was eliminating any wobble between the ships. J.P.L. staff members had been working with engineers at Stanford University on a thruster that could nudge a spacecraft with boiled-off helium. It was perfect for GRACE's needs. "At J.P.L.," says Rob Manning, Mars program manager and former chief engineer for the Pathfinder mission, "anybody can go to any meeting and criticize or comment...
...wait two years until the planets line up properly again. The danger is that this kind of pressure can cloud the judgment of even the best project managers, leading them to rush as time grows short. For that reason, before a single bit of metal is cut on any spacecraft, J.P.L. bosses draw up what they call an Incompressible Test List--milestones that must be achieved before the spacecraft is certified to fly. "We do that early in the game when things are still calm," says J.P.L. director Charles Elachi. "We put it in a drawer, and I tell...
...cost too much and achieved too little. The space station continues to hemmorhage money and return not a whit of good science. So space watchers had good reason to be dubious yesterday when NASA at last pulled back the curtain on its plans for the next generation of spacecraft intended to return human beings back to the moon. As it turned out, the plan is an awfully good one-sort...
...shuttle was an attempt to change all that, with a spacecraft that is almost entirely reusable. But a ship that must repeatedly fly back and forth between Earth and space takes an awful beating, requiring it to spend far more time in the shop being maintained than it ever did in orbit. What's more, the configuration of such a machine-with the rockets strapped directly to the sides of the crew vehicle-puts fuel, debris and humans in awfully close proximity. Fourteen people have died as a result of that lethal propinquity...
...moonships fix all that. NASA administrator Michael Griffin has called the new generation of spacecraft "Apollo on steroids" and that's a good description. The command and service modules-which will carry the crew-do look like pumped-up Apollos. And the spindly lunar lander is a decidedly more muscular version of the earlier...