Word: spacecrafts
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Aldrin scorns such plans. So modest a passenger spacecraft could carry just a handful of people, which could push the price of even a steerage seat to $100,000. Instead Aldrin prefers a concept that airlines using wide-body planes embraced long ago: carry lots of people at once and drive down the per-passenger cost. To get such an orbital airbus flying, he founded ShareSpace, a nonprofit company designed to help fund and promote mass-market space travel. ShareSpace's vision for cosmic tourism includes Earth-orbiting ships carrying as many as 100 people and clusters of modules that...
...controversy over Jupiter's rings is over. The process that created them, however, is not. Cornell University researchers announced Tuesday that the gossamer-thin disks, first discovered by the Voyager spacecraft in 1979, were in fact space dust thrown up by micrometeorites bombarding the inner moons of Jupiter; they are not, as previously thought, particles of a moon that died or never had a chance to form. The bombardment, says TIME space writer Jeffrey Kluger, continues even now: "These moons continue to be pummeled." It's a good thing, too. "The rings need to be refreshed periodically," Kluger explains. "Otherwise...
Earlier there seemed little hope of saving SOHO after the spacecraft stopped responding to controllers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. At the time SOHO scientist Arthur Poland lamented, "There is a real fear we won't get it back...
...hadn't the spacecraft responded to controllers' signals before? Perhaps, suggested an ESA scientist, the probing signals were too complex for the weakened SOHO to comprehend. Early in August controllers sent a much simpler message. Result: contact! SOHO responded by transmitting its carrier signal. It was still alive and, as its batteries gradually charged, able to transmit a modicum of data...
Only then will the SOHO team begin a two-month period of restarting and evaluating the spacecraft's systems and scientific packages in preparation for full operation in the fall. "So far we've found no damage whatsoever," says ESA's Credland. "It's incredible." Considering the odds that were stacked against the little spacecraft, incredible is probably an understatement...