Word: spacecrafts
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...large (and very expensive) American telecommunications satellite, launched Thursday night aboard a French Ariane rocket, floated away to parts unknown after it detached from the spacecraft outside the earth's atmosphere early today. The Telstar 402 satellite, owned by the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., was to provide telephone and television links in the U.S. and the Caribbean for 12 years. Now red-faced officials at Arianespace, a commercial offshoot of the European Space Agency, are scratching their heads. The Telstar could represent a $200 million loss, but nobody's sweating at AT&T: "It was substantially insured," spokeswomen Mona Williams...
...offering accurate kits of secret government planes -- said today it's fashioning an alien flying saucer under study by the military. Look for the Area S4 UFO-model flying saucer, named for the highly secret U.S. military base in the mountains of Nevada, where, Testor claims, a dozen interstellar spacecraft may be stashed...
...footprints are still there in the moon dust, as crisp as the day Armstrong and Aldrin clomped across our TV screens, barely eroded by the rain of cosmic rays and the tick-tick-tick of tiny meteorites. The spacecraft debris in Mylar wrapping, the golf balls and that aluminum American flag remain for all the % universe to see. Who would have thought that those modest monuments would go unvisited for decades -- that the age of exploration would come to a halt on that lonely spot...
...will ever know for sure why the billion-dollar Mars Observer spacecraft permanently lost contact with NASA last August, just before it was to begin its surface-mapping mission. But an investigative panel has concluded that the problem was most likely a fuel leak and not, as first suspected, a faulty transistor. According to the theory, as the probe's fuel tanks were being pressurized for a final maneuver, the fuel ignited prematurely, blowing a hole in Observer and throwing it into an uncontrollable spin...
Where does all that leave NASA's more traditional strengths, deep-space science and human space flight? Diminished, perhaps, but not eliminated. Interplanetary spacecraft can be shrunk and adapted to serve both science and industry. Take the Pathfinder probe. Costing a reasonable $150 million, this ; robotic land rover will parachute to the surface of Mars in 1997 and roam around sampling the planet's atmosphere and geology. Says Larry Dumas, deputy director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, where Pathfinder is being developed: "You're getting back to a scale of spacecraft that we really haven't seen...