Word: spacecrafts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...unmanned rockets lift off week after week, bearing construction modules and fuel supplies to a giant space station in earth orbit. There, skilled workers have been assembling the ship that will take the first humans to Mars. After more than a year of construction, the million- pound, ungainly looking spacecraft is ready. With a crew of eight, it separates from the space station and heads for Mars, following the Hohmann ellipse, a space trajectory that may one day be as familiar as a great-circle route over the North Atlantic...
...launches. With their heavy-lift launcher Energia, which can boost payloads at least three times as great as those on the U.S. shuttle, the Soviets would provide an extra capability to ensure sufficient backup fuel supplies. They believe they can deploy a space shield or parachute to slow their spacecraft enough to enable it to enter orbit around Mars without the use of retrorockets that draw on precious fuel supplies. Soviet scientists concede that this "aerobreaking" technique is still experimental...
...protection we can provide without paying a significant penalty in time and weight." Retooling the orbiter to include a < more versatile system, such as ejection seats, could shut down the shuttle fleet for four more years. "We'd run the risk of never flying again," says Chandler. "The next spacecraft anyone designs will have an escape system designed into it," declares Discovery Crew Member Pinky Nelson. "But for now, if we want to fly, we've got to live with what...
Although American astronauts will have a hard time catching up with their Soviet counterparts, U.S. civilian imaging satellites may soon compete with rival Soviet spacecraft. Last week the White House announced the lifting of a ban on commercial imaging satellites capable of taking high-resolution photographs of the earth's surface. Reason: competition from higher-resolution Soviet and French space-based cameras...
...Christmas Eve 1968, three American astronauts -- Frank Borman, William Anders and James Lovell -- were making revolutions around the moon in the Apollo 8 spacecraft. Lovell, now a corporate executive in Chicago, describes the event in a charming mix of metaphors: "It was the final bright star in the last gasp of 1968." The messy earth looked different from a distance, "that bright loveliness in the eternal cold," as Archibald MacLeish wrote...