Word: spacecrafts
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...Pickering, 57, head of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it has been a zingy decade-notably in the space race with Russia. Pickering's box score: 500 satellites, 13 successful moon missions, 2,000 hours of manned flight and twelve hours of human excursion outside a spacecraft for the U.S., v. 250 satellites, eight moon shots, 530 hours of manned flight and 20 minutes outside a spacecraft for the Soviets...
...gave themselves only a 40% chance of a successful landing. If one of Surveyor 7's three feet landed on a high rock, the craft would tip over, rendering its cameras and testing equipment useless. Or the feet might straddle a rock, which would then smash into the spacecraft's delicate underbelly. In an almost shoot-the-works mood, therefore, Surveyor 7's controllers fired the retrorockets at the end of the 66-hour, 225,000-mile journey last week. The craft obediently braked from 6,000 m.p.h. to less than 7 m.p.h., fell freely...
...plan was to lower a "golden jewel box" to the moon's surface, dig an 18-inch hole with the spacecraft's mechanical arm and claw, then use the arm to put the jewel box in the hole. By bombarding the claw-dug moon material with alpha particles and measuring the speed and number of the rebounding particles, the 8-in.-sq. box could identify the chemical composition of substances beneath the moon's surface. Contamination by material from other parts of the moon and from meteorites would be avoided...
...plan ran afoul of Surveyor 7's first glitch. After firing a small explosive charge to free the box, the scientists began lowering it on a nylon cord. Halfway down, the box stuck. Using the spacecraft's TV camera to hunt for the source of the trouble and working with duplicate models, JPL scientists and engineers from JPL and Hughes Aircraft, designer of the moon robot, struggled to set it free. Twice they nudged it with the digger arm. No luck. All it did was swing a bit. Then they tried again, using the arm to steady...
Plastic tunnels. To guard against moon viruses and bacteria, NASA will not allow the astronauts to open the Apollo hatch until a plastic tunnel has been extended to the spacecraft from a 35-ft., hermetically sealed van placed near by on the carrier deck. Carrying 50 Ibs. of lunar rock and soil samples in steel vacuum cases, they will walk through the tunnel into the van. There, in the company of a doctor and an engineer, they will be completely isolated from the outside world. When the carrier reaches a U.S. port, the van will be flown intact...