Word: spacecrafts
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...spacecraft is a metaphor of national inspiration: majestic, technologically advanced, produced at dear cost and entrusted with precious cargo, rising above the constraints of the earth. The spacecraft carries our secret hope that there is something better out there--a world where we may someday go and leave the sorrows of the past behind. The spacecraft rises toward the heavens exactly as, in our finest moments as a nation, our hearts have risen toward justice and principle. And when, for no clear reason, the vessel crumbles, as it did in 1986 with Challenger and last week with Columbia, we falsely...
...strange how we glimpse the impossible only when it fails. How can this spacecraft exist, one that leaves the earth like a ballistic missile, a fragile plane strapped to half a million gallons of explosive fuel, but two weeks later returns as a glider, swooping in wide S turns back to earth under nature's power alone? The engineers who build these things know that so much has to work so perfectly and with such precise timing that we should expect them to fail catastrophically every 100 missions or so. That's why NASA must be America's most optimistic...
...high-wire standards of space travel. After shimmying out of their sleep restraints, the crew would stow gear and belt themselves into their seats--a process that would take a good six hours. With Columbia turned rump forward, the commander would then fire the main maneuvering engines, slowing the spacecraft and easing it toward the upper wisps of the atmosphere. Once he turned the ship around, he would surf the currents of the steadily thickening air, fishtailing this way and that until, just an hour or so after the deorbit engines were lit, Columbia's tires would make their smoking...
...atmosphere just north of Hawaii at an altitude of about 400,000 ft. (122,000 m). Shortly after, a faint pink glow began to surround the ship, as atmospheric friction caused temperatures to rise to between 750[degrees]F and 3,000[degrees]F across various parts of the spacecraft's exposed underbelly...
...high. Two minutes later, three temperature sensors embedded in the skin on the left flank of the ship quit transmitting. A minute later, temperature sensors in the left tires winked out too. All these data hiccups were reported by the mission controllers to the flight director. Finally, when the spacecraft was about 207,000 ft. (63,000 m) above Texas, Charlie Hobaugh, the spacecraft communicator, alerted the crew...