Word: spacelab
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Despite glitches, Spacelab is off to a flying start...
...exchange for the orbital laboratory, the Europeans will be getting a free ride on the shuttle. In addition, the U.S. has agreed to buy from ESA a second Spacelab, to be delivered next year, for its exclusive use. Under the pact with NASA, the Europeans agreed to rent Spacelab slots to private or commercial experimenters, at rates up to about...
Monitoring the experiments is a new breed of scientist-astronauts called payload specialists. On Spacelab's maiden voyage, they are Ulf Merbold, 42, a West German physicist whose specialty is the behavior of materials at low temperatures, and Byron Lichtenberg, 35, a biomedical engineer from M.I.T. and Brown University with a particular interest in solving the problem of motion sickness that has afflicted so many astronauts...
Originally, NASA had hoped to build the portable lab itself. But after a post-Apollo retrenchment in the space program, the U.S. turned to its European allies for help and in 1973 persuaded them to contribute Spacelab. The partnership has sometimes been stormy. While the Europeans pressed ahead with Spacelab, the shuttle encountered repeated delays and design difficulties. One example: as the shuttle's flying characteristics changed because of NASA's modifications, the original idea of fitting the Spacelab module flush against the shuttle's passenger cabin had to be scuttled, and the unit moved farther back...
Despite the tensions, compounded most recently by a one-month delay in the flight because of a faulty booster-rocket nozzle, Spacelab remains an instructive example of international cooperation in a difficult area of technology. It also may be a prelude to more ambitious undertakings. Planners are already talking of giving Spacelab an array of solar panels so that it can generate its own electricity from sunlight. It would thus be able to float freely in space between shuttle missions. Initially, the unmoored laboratory would be unoccupied, acting simply as a remote-controlled observatory for scientists on earth. Eventually, more...