Word: spaces
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Also on Hannifin's mind was a sentimental visit he paid this year to an old friend: Baker, who along with the late Able became the first monkeynaut pair in 1959. Hannifin found Baker at NASA's space museum in Tranquility Base, Ala., playing with a plastic model of the space shuttle and living tranquilly while others venture ever deeper into outer space...
With varying degrees of fear, anger and fascination, but mostly with a detached kind of bemusement, the world this week awaits an unprecedented event: the fiery fall of the largest machine man has ever hurled into space. The American Sky lab vehicle, nine stories tall and weighing 77.5 tons, is expected to slip into the earth's upper atmosphere, then disintegrate into a celestial shower of flaming metal as spectacular as any of last week's Fourth of July fireworks displays. Somewhere, probably at sea, ten fragments, each weighing 1,000 Ibs. or more, will crash to earth at speeds...
Despite all their wondrous tracking stations, bristling with huge radar antennas and feeding the most advanced electronic computers, America's top military and civilian space scientists could not predict even roughly where Skylab would fall. Until the final hours, they could narrow the area of eventual impact only to a vast global band between 50° north latitude and 50° south latitude?a sweep of about 109 million sq. mi., or nearly 56% of the earth's area. Conceded Hal Sierra, one of the technicians monitoring Skylab's death throes from the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center near Houston...
Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which conceived and launched Skylab six years ago, took comfort in the mathematics of probabilities. Some 500 fragments of the huge space workshop will be dispersed over an area 4,000 miles long and 100 miles wide, a scattering that the scientists call, with anthropomorphic archness, Skylab's "footprint." Moreover, on each of Skylab's 90-minute orbits of the earth, nearly 67 minutes, or 75%, is spent over water. What all that means, contend NASA'S statisticians, is that the chance of any remnant striking a human being is only...
Despite the perils, many Americans seemed to take a perverse pleasure in spoofing the unwelcome visitor from space. Skylab stimulated a lot of harmless hucksterism, revived some old promotional gimmicks, even became an excuse to throw parties. Inevitably, Chicken Little emerged as a dominant theme, now crying, "The Skylab is falling! The Skylab is falling!" The analogy was not quite apt, but feathers and beaks were the dress of the day for Skylab watch parties from Minneapolis to Manhattan. Guests at the "first and last annual greater New Orleans Skylab observation party" were asked to bring binoculars, telescopes and crash...