Word: spacecrafts
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...Norman Thagard blasted off from Kazazhstan in a Soyuz spacecraft this morning with two Russian cosmonauts, becoming the first American astronaut to fly in a Russian rocket. Once the craft docks with the Russian space station Mir on Thursday, Thagard will spend 90 days working with the Russian crew, studying the cardiovascular, neurological and other physical effects on the crew of living in near-zero gravity for a protracted period of time. This mission, along with Thagard's study, is part of a joint venture among the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan, and the European Space Agency for a permanently...
People at NASA, however, are quite content to continue to do science aboard manned spacecraft. They've been doing it for years with the Space Shuttle. Scientific instruments are normally carried on the shuttles, but the astronauts are not needed to run the experiments. Aside from a few maintenance-oriented missions, for which a human presence is required, Space Shuttle missions merely do what an unmanned launch could do--at many times the cost. Using most of NASA's resources on the shuttles and Freedom means that unmanned science experiments and missions are underfunded...
...close range to the station. The eight-day mission is a rehearsal for a June mission during which the shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to become the first to dock at Mir. At Discovery's controls on this mission: Captain Eileen Collins, the first woman to pilot a U.S. spacecraft. Nineteen-year veteran Russian cosmonaut Vladimir Titov is also aboard. On a Soviet flight in 1983, he survived an explosion shortly after launch by catapaulting to the ground...
After swinging by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and shooting spectacular pictures of the planets and their moons, the U.S. spacecraft Voyager 2 had by 1990 completed its Grand Tour of the planets and was speeding out into deep space on its way to the stars. But the temptation of one last backward look was irresistible. Swinging its camera around, it took snapshots of the now distant planets as they might appear to an alien craft approaching the solar system...
...already provided early warnings of possible dangers to Earth. Data radioed from craft exploring Venus and Mars, for example, have helped make us aware of the consequences of such potential man-made disasters as the greenhouse effect and the destruction of the ozone layer. Perhaps even more important, spacecraft may one day prevent a global catastrophe by diverting a large asteroid speeding toward a collision with Earth...