Word: spacecrafts
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...spindly three-legged spacecraft sits silently on the dry, barren landscape. Suddenly, on command from controllers some 200 million miles away, the robot comes alive. A motor whirls; a slender, 10-ft. long arm reaches out, opens a small scoop and digs up some of the reddish soil...
Then the arm retracts, twists its wrist and drops the dirt into a small, mesh-covered opening on top of the spacecraft. Inside, analyzers go to work. Within a few weeks, the spacecraft sends a momentous radio message back to earth: Life exists on Mars...
...confined to the daydreams of imaginative exobiologists.* Last week technicians at TRW Inc. in Redondo Beach, Calif., were finishing two miniaturized laboratories that will be able to test Martian soil for evidence of life. Next August, in the climax to NASA'S $1 billion Project Viking, two unmanned spacecraft will be fired aloft from Cape Canaveral. After an eleven-month journey, the Viking ships will swing into orbit around Mars. Each will release a lander containing a life-seeking laboratory. After descending with the aid of parachute and braking rockets, the first sterilized package should touch down on July...
Such passages are rare in this generally amiable book. Collins has a gift for clearly describing complicated machinery, and he also has an amusing imagination. He concludes that bras will not be necessary in space: "Imagine a spacecraft of the future, with a crew of a thousand ladies, off for Alpha Centauri, with 2,000 breasts bobbing beautifully and quivering delightfully in response to every weightless movement . . . and I am the commander of the craft, and it is Saturday morning and time for inspection, naturally." ·Robert Sherrod
...Poles but for what (so far) seemed like a successful Soviet space mission. Launched just before the Nixon-Brezhnev summit, Salyut 3 was subsequently boarded July 4 by the two cosmonauts for what appeared to be a two-week stay. The Americans were most interested in the Soyuz spacecraft that the cosmonauts used to reach the orbiting space station. Soyuz is the same type of ferry craft that the Russians will launch next July in a space-age milestone: the linkup of a U.S. and a Soviet spaceship in the first international manned space mission...