Word: spacelabs
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...test flight, Spacelab will contain some 70 experiments designed by scientists from the U.S., Western Europe, Canada and Japan. Among them: a French experiment that will measure the radiation produced by sunlight's action on hydrogen; a West German high-resolution camera that will map the earth's surface; a U.S. study that may help explain the life cycle of stars and galaxies. Other tests will determine the advantages of fabricating specialized terrestrial materials (crystals, alloys, ceramics) in conditions of weightlessness rather than on earth. There are also studies to see how humble forms of life adapt...
...Spacelab was built in West Germany under the auspices of the eleven-member European Space Agency (ESA). Packed with everything from computers to miniature automated factories, it is a major advance over Skylab, the U.S.'s first scientific work station in orbit, which was occupied by three successive teams of astronauts in the early 1970s. Spacelab is also considerably more sophisticated than the current Salyut 7, which the Soviets hint may be the first building block of a larger orbital station. Spacelab's uniqueness lies in the versatility of its three major components: 1) two cylindrically shaped laboratories...
Like pieces of an exquisitely machined Erector set, these parts can be fitted together in different ways. For its debut next week, Spacelab has been configured in what designers call its "long module": the two cylinders have been mated to form one continuous workshop, about 13 ft. in diameter and 23 ft. in length. Positioned between the extended cylinder and the shuttle's tail assembly is a single pallet, holding 18 experiments, involving such equipment as cosmic-ray detectors, spectrometers and TV cameras. On future flights, as the experimental load increases, the tunnel can be lengthened and additional pallets...
...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...