Word: spacecrafts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...months, Moscow had been hinting at new space spectaculars to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. When a brand-new spacecraft called Soyuz 1 was launched into orbit last week carrying veteran Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, 40, it seemed certain that the first manned Soviet flight since March 1965 was aimed at overtaking and even surpassing the faltering U.S. Apollo program. Barely 24 hours later, Komarov was dead, killed in a crash landing that may ground the Russian man-in-space program for months...
There was good reason to believe that Komarov's ill-fated flight had been planned as Phase 1 of a highly ambitious mission. Unofficial reports from Moscow had indicated that Soyuz would be joined in orbit by another spacecraft carrying several men and that the two ships would attempt to rendezvous, dock, exchange crews and set up an orbiting space station. There was speculation that the second ship had a restartable engine that would push the joined ships as far out as 50,000 miles-a first step toward a flight later this year in which a manned Russian...
...cosmonaut's fifth revolution around the earth, they believe, increasing difficulties with both the attitude-control and communications systems warned ground controllers that the flight of Soyuz might have to be prematurely ended. Plans for a rendezvous were abandoned, and the launch of the second spacecraft was scrubbed...
Struggling with his controls, Komarov apparently tried to abort his mission on both the 16th and 17th revolutions, which took him close to his planned landing site in central Russia. But Soyuz was probably still tumbling, and Komarov could not use his retrorockets. Unless an orbiting spacecraft is stabilized and properly oriented when the retrorockets are fired, it can shoot farther into space or re-enter the atmosphere improperly and burn...
Unlike most scientists, Chemist Urey believes that water-not lava-formed the smooth lunar plains and filled-in depressions revealed in photographs taken by Ranger and Orbiter spacecraft. The dark plains, he says, "look precisely like the bottoms of dried-up, primitive oceans or lakes." And material in filled-in craters and crevices may once have been flowing...