Word: spacecrafts
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...conditioning's a little iffy, and you could wait light-years for room service, but the location is unbeatable. A Russian spacecraft blasted off Tuesday carrying two cosmonauts whose job is to repair an air leak aboard the abandoned Mir orbiter in preparation for its reincarnation as a galactic hotel. An international consortium led by Washington millionaire Walt Anderson has stepped in to save the stricken space station, buying the rights to its commercial use for $20 million and planning to invest a further $200 million over the next two years in turning Mir into a $20 million-per-head...
...million miles from the earth, NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft suddenly found itself under assault. Late in January, the tiny, instrument-packed spacecraft was buffeted by an exceptionally powerful burst of particles spewed out by the sun. In the space-environment control room at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) headquarters in Boulder, Colo., alarms sounded. "All of a sudden, a blast wave of solar wind showed up at the ACE spacecraft," says NOAA's Joe Hirman, "as dense as any we've seen, and, bam, 30 minutes later the earth's magnetic field got hit hard...
During solar maximums, space weather becomes stormy. The normally benign sun pounds the earth mercilessly with ultraviolet radiation, X rays and floods of charged particles, distorting the planet's protective magnetic field and inducing powerful electric currents that can wreak havoc not only with spacecraft but also with many aspects of terrestrial life...
...orbit has increased sixfold, to more than 600. They are essential for everything from telephone service and air-traffic control to you-name-it.com connections, pay-at-the-pump credit-card service and hundreds of other information-age conveniences. Yet for reasons of economy, or just plain indifference, few of these spacecraft are properly shielded...
...latest catastrophic crackup involving the $194 million Mars Polar Lander clearly shows--once again--that NASA's remote-control system to land its unmanned spacecraft softly on other planets incorporates unacceptable limitations. The best stage in the exploration of Mars will lie in a manned mission. But this can't happen until there are significant breakthroughs in rocket-fuel flights to attain far higher speeds. All exploration of Mars should be put on hold. The Red Planet can afford to wait. If life ever existed on that icy, parched-dry, dead world, it petered out not less than 3 billion...