Word: spacecrafts
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...space station Mir appeared to have fallen too, with slashed budgets leading to fewer launches and worried whispers in the international community that even those missions were dangerously underfinanced. Lately, however, Russia has been funneling all its space resources into the launch of its Mars '96 probe, an unmanned spacecraft designed to orbit the Red Planet, dispatch a quartet of landers to the surface and, perhaps most important, return the country to the spacefaring pre-eminence it once enjoyed...
...little more than a week ago, the grand promenade to Mars turned into a near Earth lob shot, when a booster malfunction sent the spacecraft plummeting back to Earth shortly after its launch. For a time it looked as if the craft was going to hit Australia, endangering the outback not just with debris but also with the 270 grams of plutonium it was carrying as a power source. That disaster was averted when the ship sailed past the continent and plopped ignominiously into the Pacific...
...Russian Mars probe is falling! The Russian Mars probe is falling! The prospect of the stricken plutonium-powered spacecraft's raining down on Down Under brought back memories of the U.S. Skylab's shower of pieces over the area in 1979 and threatened to overshadow President Clinton's visit to Australia last week. Fortunately, the probe crashed harmlessly in the South Pacific. But don't stop looking up yet: the earth's skies remain heavily laden with space junk. In the next 60 days, the U.S. Space Command estimates, four orbiting objects possibly large enough to survive re-entry will...
...Mars Global Surveyor, which NASA will launch this week, is one of these new spacecraft. Tipping the scale at 2,337 lbs., it is less than half the weight of the 5,672-lb. Observer. Just as important, it cost only $135 million--milk money next to the Observer's near billion-dollar price...
...breed of smaller, simpler Mars ships set to begin launching this week. He was the co-author, with former astronaut Jim Lovell, of Lost Moon, the book that served as the basis for the popular 1995 film Apollo 13. Kluger knows that when it comes to designing spacecraft, less is indeed more. "NASA engineers who worked in the old lunar program liked to point out that an Apollo spacecraft had 5.6 million individual parts," he recalls. "Even if the ship functioned with 99.9% efficiency, you could still expect 5,600 breakdowns every time you tried to fly it." Kluger...