Word: spacemanship
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...inch per second -- through a forest of antenna and solar arrays. It looks like a big mechanical porcupine with five to ten inches of clearance. The Atlantis crew will ram it into the docking port on the Mir. A huge metallic kiss. It's going to require some exquisite spacemanship." If all goes according to plan, says Hannifin, the space ballet will be over by 1:48 am EST. The two crews will greet each other at 3:45 am. "The Americans are bringing some chocolate," says Hannifin, "and about 900 pounds of potable water...
...talk to one another on the ground. So the managers of the Hubble Space Telescope didn't know there may have been something wrong with the mirror's shape, and the launch officials didn't know O rings could stiffen in the cold. It is no knock on the spacemanship of the astronauts to admit that space is a difficult and dangerous place -- just on the salesmanship of the agency that put them there. NASA's strategy resembles George Bush's in the Persian Gulf: get the troops over there, and then the people will have to support them. NASA...
...sealed chamber with self-contained life-support systems, after a year-the duration of a manned voyage to Mars. Moreover, NASA officials claim that Soviet scientists may soon unveil a rocket big enough to fly directly from earth to the moon, land and take off again. Such brute-force spacemanship might convince the U.S. that, as Von Braun maintains, "Russia still wants to beat us in space." If that happens, the money spigot would probably open wide again, and a new race would begin...
...Life. Only a few years ago, any meaningful voyage to Venus would have been impossible. Spacemanship of such a high order involves the creation of clever mechanical beasts that can live and function for months in a hostile environment beyond Earth's atmosphere. They must obey commands from millions of miles away, a requirement that calls for radio techniques of incredible delicacy. Giant computers, only recently developed, must plot celestial courses, and enormous vacuum chambers are needed to test behavior in simulated space. These strange space creatures are almost a new type of life, comparable in zoological terms...
...week when U.S. spacemanship and missilery had won bold successes-the orbiting of Samos, the spy-in-the-sky satellite (see SCIENCE); the clean triumph of the new solid-fuel Minuteman ICBM; the Project Mercury shot and recovery of an "astronaut" chimpanzee*-President Kennedy's grim announcements seemed curiously out of phase, as if he had stumbled upon a copy of the Soviet Doomsday Book...