Word: spacecrafts
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...alloy snaps, whiskers sprout from both ends of the break. In a few days, the whiskers can bridge a gap one millimeter wide (about one twenty-fifth of an inch) and carry one watt of electrical power-enough for most of the delicate circuitry in modern spacecraft. Collision with a sizable meteoroid might result in damage too extensive for whisker therapy, admits Minneapolis-Honeywell Physicist William Jarnagin, who led the team that developed the alloy. But that hardly matters, he adds somberly. "Everything would go then...
...dollars per year, but Air Force space enthusiasts believe that the stations will pay for themselves by serving as military patrols-watching and photographing activity behind the Iron Curtain, inspecting suspicious satellites and destroying them, if desirable. Patrols might carry nuclear weapons for use against the ground or other spacecraft. Some optimists believe that they might even detect hostile nuclear submarines below the surface of the ocean...
...space-conscious laymen, the very word meteoroid is heavy with menace. It conjures up visions of rocklike objects streaking the sky as shooting stars, moving at such enormous speeds that a lump as big as a pea could punch a fist-sized hole through any spacecraft. Scientists, who have calculated the probability that a spacecraft and a meteoroid would collide, are less worried than laymen, but even so, they have planned on protecting long-range space vehicles with meteor bumpers. Now it seems that spacecraft will need no such shields. Space is indeed teeming with meteoroids, but most of them...
...Fred Whipple explained that the low penetrating power of most meteoroids is partly due to their fluffy structure. Even very small meteoroids, Whipple said, are probably loosely bound clumps of much smaller particles. They may be half as dense as water, so when they hit the skin of a spacecraft they spread their effect over a larger area than if they were solid...
...promotional reasons," said a NASA memo on the subject. But Commander Alan Shepard, 39, saw no difficulty, announced that he and two Texas businessmen were putting up $1,300,000 for 1,800 (of 2,000) shares in the First National Bank of Baytown, Texas, near the abuilding Manned Spacecraft Center. NASA officials finally gave Shepard permission to go ahead, but stopped plans for the other astronauts to get in on the deal. Shepard's name, added NASA, could not be used in connection with the bank except on the business letterhead...