Word: spacecrafts
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...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...
...long voyage toward Jupiter, the spacecraft is scheduled to pass within 620 miles of the asteroids Gaspra and Ida, the first such close encounter in the annals of interplanetary travel. Then, five months before reaching Jupiter near the end of 1995, Galileo is to release a 730-lb. probe that will become the first man-made object to penetrate the gaseous atmosphere of the planet. Its instruments are expected to transmit data on the Jovian atmosphere for about 75 minutes before being silenced by the planet's intense atmospheric pressure. Galileo is next scheduled to settle into a two-year...