Word: spacecrafts
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...detection devices as well as radar, is so discerning that it can track an object even smaller than a basketball at a range of 20,000 miles. Even an astronaut's glove is being tracked. Beyond Skylab, the heaviest object aloft is now Salyut 6, the Soviets' manned spacecraft. Every month about 40 man-made objects re-enter the atmosphere, but only a fourth survive to strike the earth. There has never been a reported injury, although the fall of Cosmos 954 over northern Canada in January 1978 led to fears of radioactive contamination from its nuclear power packs (there...
...options are limited. On June 20, NASA's team members used up precious bursts of the spacecraft's dwindling propellant to turn its nose horizontally by 90° and into a sideways position, which exerts increased drag against its forward movement. That change gave NASA its best chance of some final control. Explained Cindy Major, 27, one of the Houston monitors: "There is more pressure now because the attitude of the spacecraft is more sensitive. There is no room for error...
...choices were to be made on the basis of a complicated "hazard index," a computer calculation used to determine the final orbital paths that would take the spacecraft over the least densely populated areas. Frosch has already made one firm rule about reaching those last critical decisions: Skylab will not be sent into an orbit posing a high hazard in hopes of later reaching an orbit of lesser risk. That is because NASA is simply not certain that its efforts to select the precise final orbit will work. To do nothing in such a situation is preferable to taking...
...metal fragments to endanger wholly innocent earthlings. Some of the agency's sympathizers blamed the "bean counters" in the Federal Government's budget bureaucracy during the Nixon Administration for forcing NASA to build its Skylab "on the cheap," mainly with leftover hardware from the successful Gemini and Apollo manned spacecraft programs. Astronomer Mark Chartrand III, chairman of New York City's American Museum-Hayden Planetarium, claimed Congress was at fault in its financial shortsightedness. Said he: "Hell, if I had my way, I'd target Skylab to fall on Congress while it is in session...
...Skylab debris strikes a populated area, the U.S. Government will hear about it in a hurry. The State Department last month designated one member in each of its overseas missions as a Skylab officer to brief foreign governments on the facts of the spacecraft's fall and what the U.S. was prepared to do in case of serious damage. In India, the U.S. specialist, Thomas Vrebalovich, went to unusual lengths to pacify critics of the American space venture. He told journalists that if NASA faced the choice of steering Skylab toward either India or America, it would most certainly select...