Word: spacecrafts
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...Soviet preserve. Not a single U.S. astronaut flew in space during that period, while Soviet cosmonauts set one orbital endurance mark after another, finally reaching 185 days, more than twice the duration of America's longest Skylab mission. Most of this time was spent aboard a single Soviet spacecraft, a remarkable 20-ton mobile home in the sky called Salyut...
...Soviet folk hero, the late Yuri Gagarin, first man in space. Though weighing only about a quarter as much as Skylab, which came tumbling ignominiously back to earth in 1979, Salyut was durable and highly innovative in design. Among its technological features were two docking ports (to receive visiting spacecraft, including a new class of fully automated, unmanned supply ship) and large, winglike solar panels (to convert sunlight into electricity). Salyut carried myriad scientific and observational gear, notably a multi-spectral camera, telescopes for scanning the heavens, kilns for processing materials in zero-g atmosphere, even a small garden...
...understandable then that Cosmonaut Vladimir Kovalyonok, 39, got a little sentimental last month when he and his rookie sidekick, Viktor Savinykh, 41, headed back to earth in an advanced Soyuz T spacecraft after 75 days in space. Theirs was the final visit of cosmonauts to Salyut, although it could be used for unmanned missions. The Soviets have indicated that they may dock an unmanned Cosmos satellite on Salyut soon, perhaps this week. After looking back at the ship for the last time, Kovalyonok rhapsodized: "It was so beautiful it gave my heart a pang...
...Senate went Republican; the era of the reusable manned spacecraft began; Atlanta feared for the safety of its children. Cambridge saw the departure of its top executive, celebrated its 350th anniversary, and braced itself for drastic budget cuts due to a statewide slash in property taxes. Some of the big stories at Harvard--a proposal to restructure College governance, the establishment of a new concentration in Literature, and even the Harvard-Yale game debacle--seem trivial when compared with the national events of the past year. But rightly or not, the University has a tendency to get wrapped...
Engineers are satisfied with the performance of the heat-shielding tiles that protected the spacecraft against the searing, 2700° F temperatures of its re-entry into the atmosphere. But they are still perplexed by many dents and chips in the brittle material, especially on the starboard side. Best guess so far: the damage was incurred during lift-off by ice and insulation that broke free of the shuttle's giant external fuel tank, which contained supercold liquid oxygen and hydrogen. Another puzzle is why the bulky, swept-winged "bird" showed greater lift than expected on descent, which carried...