Word: spacecrafts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...defect stems, at least in part, from NASA'S own supercaution. To improve performance, Challenger's engines were built to operate at 9% greater thrust than those of the first orbiter, Columbia, when the throttle is fully opened. Realizing that this extra power would vibrate the spacecraft more violently, NASA engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center made a design change. They ordered reinforcement of the metal piping that carries hot, gaseous hydrogen fuel into the small chamber where the engines are first fired up and begin revving to their full 480,000 lbs. of thrust...
Because this launch site is farther north than Cape Canaveral, spacecraft get less of a boost from the earth's rotation (whose velocity is highest at the equator) and thus need more power on liftoff...
...decade in the planning, the telescope was built and launched in the U.S., while the rest of the spacecraft comes from The Netherlands. Twice a day IRAS' recorded observations, stored on tape by its computers, are "dumped" in a burst of radio signals as it passes above a ground station at Chilton, England. The signals are retransmitted via a communications satellite to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California for detailed computer analysis...
...object of the international concern was a spacecraft innocuously dubbed Cosmos 1402. Launched last August, it is a five-ton bundle of electronics, including a powerful radar used by the Soviets to track U.S. naval vessels. In 1978 a similar satellite, Cosmos 954, scattered radioactive fragments over Canada's Northwest Territories. Though no one was killed or injured, the embarrassed Soviets paid Canada $3 million to help defray the cost of the difficult cleanup...
...pressed the issue. For one thing, the Defense Department is itself considering using reactors to power laser and particle-beam weapons that may eventually be deployed in space. Also, NASA has already sent nuclear power packs to the moon and uses them regularly on robot spacecraft to the outer planets, like the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn and beyond. (Reason: sunlight is too weak to be tapped as an energy source...