Word: spacecrafts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sized vehicle scheduled to be launched in 1969 in which crews would live and work for a month at a time. In case Russia presses the challenge, the U.S. is experimenting with a laser weapon that has no recoil and therefore could be safely fired from a spacecraft...
...resulting unbalanced thrust threw Surveyor into a tumble that built up to 146 revolutions per minute after repeated but vain attempts to fire the balky engine. As the ship's solar panels whirled wildly, they were unable to fix on the sun and generate electricity, and the spacecraft's batteries began to fail...
Temporary Blindness. Only minutes after he emerged from Gemini's open hatch, Astronaut Gordon was in trou ble. Though he had done nothing more than detach a cosmic-ray counter from the spacecraft's hull and mount a movie camera on a bracket behind the hatch, his heart was beating wildly, he was bathed in perspiration and panting for breath. "I've got to rest a minute," he gasped. "I'm pooped." After regaining his breath, he inched forward to Gemini's nose, which was securely locked in the docking collar of the Agena target...
...experiment clearly proved that tethered spaceships can orbit in formation without wasting fuel. Robert Gilruth, director of NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center, immediately conjured up "colonies of vehicles fastened together in ways like this." The slow rotation of the system also provided a bonus: a small centrifugal force that acted like a weak gravitational pull, causing objects to drift toward and finally "fall" on the rear wall of Gemini's cabin. It was the first artificial gravity created during a manned orbital flight. After three hours of tethered orbiting, Conrad flipped a switch that jettisoned Gemini...
...they had enough left to make a final and unscheduled rendezvous with the Agena. At reentry, Conrad and Gordon were relieved of their duties by a new, automatic re-entry system that the astronauts sarcastically call "the chimp mode." Controlled by Gemini's onboard computer, it fired the spacecraft's thrusters at the proper time to correct its attitude and direction. Its value was evident. For it guided the relaxed astronauts to a splashdown closer to the recovery carrier than ever before in the U.S. manned spaceflight program...