Word: spacecrafts
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...computers loaded with more than 600,000 lines of exquisitely precise program codes; it has pumps the size of trash cans that can discharge superheated gases at the rate of half a ton a second. Barring the reality of flying saucers, Columbia is the most ambitious and versatile spacecraft ever contrived. Heretofore, space explorers have had to blast payloads into the heavens with rockets that later burned up, falling back to earth in showers of shrinking fragments. The shuttle will honor round-trip reservations, going up and coming down intact, not once, but time and time again, if all goes...
...Kennedy Space Center or another at Edwards Air Force Base in California?or even, in an emergency, one at the White Sands Missile Test Range in New Mexico. Fulfilling this feat cannot be breezily taken for granted. One sobering fact is that the Columbia, unlike every other U.S. spacecraft, will be launched without having undergone unmanned test flights in space; to bring it back alive, the astronauts must go along on the very first trip. If only for that reason, the launch may be the riskiest NASA has ever undertaken. The odds? John Naugle, NASA'S former top scientist...
...obvious or unclassified but do clearly include the role of setting out satellites for surveillance and warning systems. Devices planted in the heavens by the shuttle could also guide missiles to a bull's-eye. Says Defense Secretary Harold Brown: "We plan to begin the transition of our operational spacecraft to shuttle launch by 1983. Our dependence on the shuttle will become critical...
Four days and 3.3 million miles after its closest encounter with Saturn last month, the Voyager 1 spacecraft cast a last backward glance and transmitted this stunning portrait of the ringed giant. The photograph shows a crescent Saturn casting a shadow on its own rings, from the perspective a traveler might get by approaching from the stars, rather than from the interior reaches of the solar system. Re-created bit by electronic bit in computers at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and released last week, the shot is so detailed that patches of the planet can be glimpsed through...
...atmosphere. The magnetometers for locating and measuring magnetic fields are carried on the opposite side of the antenna, on a derrick-like boom (13m, 43 ft.), to keep them free from magnetic distortion. Power to run all this equipment comes from three cylindrical Plutonium generators carried below the spacecraft to keep the radiation from affecting the instruments...