Word: spacecrafts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...great main fuel tank seeped puffs of steamy vapors, supercold droplets of liquid oxygen. Suddenly, just after dawn on Sunday, the ship's three main engines roared to life. Throttling quickly to 90% of their full 1.1 million lbs. of thrust, the engines caused the spacecraft and fuel tanks to tilt ever so slightly. Seconds later, they snapped back to vertical, and two solid-fuel rockets-fiery space-age Roman candles never before used on a manned flight-ignited, adding their full fury, 5.3 million lbs. more of thrust...
Into a clear blue hole in a partly overcast Florida sky the spacecraft rose, seemingly carried aloft by an ever lengthening orange-and-white column of fire and smoke. As it arched higher and higher, Astronaut Bob Crippen, 43, making his first flight into space, shouted exuberantly: "Man, what a feeling! What a view!" "Glad you're enjoying it," replied Mission Control in Houston...
...spacecraft accelerated, eventually to reach speeds of 17,000 m.p.h., the astronauts were pressed hard against their couches, experiencing a tug three times that of normal gravity, only half of a Saturn launch's g forces. Eight and a half minutes after the spacecraft had left the launch pad, its engines had swallowed up more than half a million gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Columbia fired explosive charges to spin off its main tank, which disintegrated in a shower of fragments over the Indian Ocean, only ten miles off course, although at a higher altitude than expected. Then...
...delta-shaped spacecraft-part rocket ship, part airplane-raced around the earth at an altitude of 150 miles, its nearly perfect performance seemed a glorious vindication of more than a decade of effort and expense. Columbia's flight plan called for a 54½-hr., 36-orbit mission, ending with a nerve-racking, gliding descent into California's Mojave Desert. There was every expectation that it would achieve that goal. Three and a half hours into the flight, as the spacecraft began its third orbit, Mission Control sent word that Columbia was "go" for the full flight...
Even before they got their green light, the astronauts were settling in for a long haul. With almost anticlimactic ease, Crippen operated the spacecraft's big cargo bay, opening and closing and then reopening its doors. That was an essential maneuver at the start of the second orbit, allowing the ship to rid itself of internal heat from all its operations, and it was executed flawlessly. Televised pictures from space quickly showed just how well the machinery worked. Even the big engine housings in Columbia's tail were dramatically visible against the blackness of space...