Word: spacecrafts
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...looks as if the show may go on. With a clever bit of detective work, technical ingenuity and the aid of giant radio telescopes, scientists at ESA and NASA (co-sponsors of SOHO) have located the wayward spacecraft and started nursing it back to health; they hope to regain control of it this week. If all goes well, SOHO could be fully back in business this fall in plenty of time to monitor the sun as it approaches the peak of its 11-year cycle of activity, around...
Shortly after Glenn's historic flight in the Mercury capsule Friendship 7, his tiny spacecraft was sent on a world exhibition tour. Ghana was the first stop in Africa. I was there, and in three hot June days of 1962, 75,000 Africans were wowed by the most unusual thing they had ever seen and touched. After Glenn's flight this fall, the U.S. government should take another initiative: send this American hero on a world tour to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. A personal tour by Glenn would spotlight an unpretentious American of character, courage...
...rights, Glenn, who is concluding a 24-year political career and easing into senior statesmanship, ought to be beyond such concerns. By choice, he's not. In less than three months--36 years after he blasted into the sky inside the titanium pod of a Mercury spacecraft--he'll return aboard the relatively lavish space shuttle. Even as Congress's August recess begins and the rest of Washington's lawmakers decamp for their favorite vacation spots, Glenn will be in Houston and Florida for his most intensive month of training since being assigned to the mission...
Even a lowly yeoman like Glenn will have his hands full getting ready to fly aboard his new ship. The first time Glenn flew, he was in a mere demitasse of a spacecraft--one with a single window, 56 toggle switches and barely 36 cu. ft. of habitable space. The joke around NASA in that earlier era was that you didn't so much climb inside a Mercury capsule...
...wire baskets down from the launch pad if a fully fueled shuttle threatens to blow; shimmy down an escape pole and parachute away from the ship in the event of a postlaunch emergency below an altitude of 20,000 ft.; and rappel down ropes from the hatch if the spacecraft makes an emergency landing on tarmac. On his Mercury flight, Glenn's only safety measure was an escape rocket designed to ignite and carry the spacecraft out of danger if his Atlas rocket appeared likely to explode...