Word: spacecraft
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...ROSWELL: As every UFO enthusiast knows, an alien spacecraft putatively crashed in the desert near this New Mexico town in 1947?and the U.S. military tried to cover it up. At the Roswell International UFO Museum, visitors can examine hundreds of autopsy drawings, sworn affidavits and newspaper reports from the time of the crash. And pick up a tasty Alien Cookie Kit in the gift shop...
...fresh talk about a manned mission to Mars comes during what has been a heady few weeks for the long-struggling NASA. Earlier in the month, the Stardust spacecraft, launched in 1999, made an improbable flyby of Comet Wild-2, drawing in a breath of primordial dust to bring back to Earth for study. In the middle of last week, the Spirit rover--which bounced down on Mars at the beginning of the month--at last rolled off its landing ramp and onto the dry flats of Gusev Crater. As J.P.L. engineers radioed up instructions, the rover prepared to stick...
...first and most obvious challenge is to design and build a Mars-worthy spacecraft. Winged ships like the shuttle are clearly out--useless in the wispy Martian atmosphere and unreliable even close to home, as two shuttle disasters have shown. That means a return to something closer to the capsule model that served the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs so well. Boeing Aerospace has already been designing a podlike crew transfer vehicle to get astronauts to and from the space station and to take a little of the load off the shuttle. The design won a lot of backing...
...thornier than the design of the spacecraft is the problem posed by all the fuel, food and water such a mission would require. The Apollo flights to the moon were gas-up-and-go trips that lasted no more than 12 days. You could fill the tank and the larder once before you left and carry along everything you would need. Not so when you're looking at 14 months of round-trip flight time between Earth and Mars and perhaps a 1 1/2-year stay on the planet to catch the next Earth-Mars alignment back home. Even...
...water is merely hydrogen and oxygen and since it's hydrogen that provides the propulsive fire in some liquid-fuel engines and oxygen that keeps those flames burning, breaking the two elements apart in a Mars-based fuel distillery could provide everything necessary to refill the tanks of a spacecraft once it arrives on the Red Planet. Oxygen produced on Mars could also be used as breathable atmosphere...