Word: spacecrafts
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...shuttle Atlantis is once again in orbit - this time for a final servicing visit to the venerable Hubble Space Telescope - and once again the world is sweating out reports of damage to the spacecraft's thermal tiles caused by debris shed from the external fuel tank during liftoff on Monday. It was just that kind of mishap that doomed the shuttle Columbia and its seven-member crew back in 2003, allowing superheated gases to penetrate the ship during re-entry and causing it to disintegrate. That was the second shuttle to be lost in flight, after the explosion of Challenger...
...does turn out that the damage is more serious than that, it will be occurring on a particularly bad mission. Most of the shuttles' trips to orbit these days are for visits with the ISS. The station is a roomy place - by spacecraft standards at least - and if a shuttle's underside is found to be too badly damaged to allow a safe re-entry, the astronauts could simply bunk down in the ISS until another shuttle or Russian Soyuz ships could bring them home...
...that's not an option on this mission. The Hubble orbits at an altitude of about 350 miles and an inclination of 28.5 degrees. The ISS orbits lower - roughly 220 miles above the earth - and at a much sharper 51.6-degree angle. It's not hard for a spacecraft to change its altitude, but shifting its orbital plane is monstrously hard and energy-consuming, and the shuttle would never be able to pull off such a maneuver. So, the fallback for this crew is another whole orbiter, the shuttle Endeavour, which has been poised on Pad B at Cape Canaveral...
...hemp end up in blankets and upholstery. Synthetic yarns have a variety of commercial uses, including in water filtration, as carpet backing and for automotive fan belts. The technical yarns developed from stainless steel, glass or Teflon find their way into fiber-optic cables and bushings used in spacecraft...
...federal budget. But, back then, Americans also had a much greater tolerance for risk: The first successful Apollo mission was launched just eight months after the three astronauts in Apollo 1 died during testing. NASA’s tighter leash today means that riskier programs like nuclear-powered spacecraft don’t make it off the drawing board. Ultimately, NASA’s 1960s miracles were enabled by widespread public and congressional support fueled by the Cold War race to the moon...