Word: spacecrafts
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...into the gleaming steel cone 218 ft. above Pad 34 and hooked themselves up to life-support systems. Technicians sealed the airtight double hatch plates and pumped pure oxygen into the little chamber. The test countdown had proceeded for several hours when suddenly, over their radio link to the spacecraft, controllers heard the cry "Fire aboard the spacecraft!" followed by movements, more shouts and a sharp scream of pain. "It was horrible," recalled a former NASA official. "We could hear it happening and we were powerless to do anything...
...manned flights for 21 months after the Apollo fire, a period of agonizing self-appraisal. Admitting that no one had realized the extent of the fire hazard in a capsule full of pure oxygen, NASA switched to cabin atmospheres that consisted of 60% oxygen and 40% nitrogen while the spacecraft was on the pad. The agency also developed a new type of hatch that could be opened in five seconds. As NASA workers last week searched for answers to the Challenger tragedy and pondered the future of manned space flight, they could find some solace in the fact that...
...number of different technologies; to be able to use them somehow, to do something that required a concerted team effort and, finally, a great individual effort." She also took up racquetball and weight training. On her first shuttle flight, aboard Discovery in 1984, Mission Specialist Resnik operated the spacecraft's remote-control arm and performed solar-power experiments with a 102-ft.-high solar sail. She also provided one of the most memorable images in space- program history when television cameras aboard Discovery captured her--in polo shirt and shorts--concentrating on her tasks while her long, curly dark brown...
There was, at the apex of detente during Gerald Ford's Administration, a brief hope that space could become a bridge rather than a barrier between the superpowers. In 1975 astronauts and cosmonauts aboard an Apollo and a Soyuz spacecraft linked in a display of heavenly symbolism. But such episodes proved to be merely minor exceptions to the rule that space was inevitably where the superpowers would extend their rivalry...
While no one at NASA will even speculate on when shuttle flights might resume, other knowledgeable officials cite the sole precedent: after a fire destroyed an Apollo spacecraft on the launching pad and killed three astronauts in January 1967, it took 21 months before manned space flights resumed. "We've got to reckon in about those terms," says New Jersey Republican Jim Courter, a member of the House Armed Services Committee who follows the space program closely. The moratorium could be shortened if the flaw turns out to be something that can be fixed fairly quickly. But it could stretch...