Word: thagard
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...flight was Gemini and Apollo veteran John Young, widely respected as an iceman at the stick. If you're going to fly so tricky a ship, you have to be. "When you re-enter, you're moving at 25 times the speed of sound," says former astronaut Dr. Norm Thagard. Hitting the atmosphere at that velocity is "not unlike slamming into a brick wall, if you're not at the correct attitude...
...brick with wings, as the engineers have often called the ship, has a very fine margin of error. Lose your purchase on the air and go into a spin, and there's almost no way to pull out of it. "The attitude needs to be very, very precise," says Thagard. "You can pick up heat so fast you get a breakup...
...Norman Thagard, the only other American to live aboard Mir, spent 115 days on the station last year, losing 17 lbs. and complaining afterward of the "cultural isolation" he felt while aloft. Lucid found that she was sometimes treated like a second-class passenger. Her crewmates occasionally left Mir to conduct maintenance outside. When they did, they placed red tape over the communications panel, a blunt sign to their guest that she was not to fool with a system they assumed she did not understand. The cultural gulf threatened to get even wider when a ranking officer in the Russian...
Captain Kirk never seemed to mind outer space. But before NORMAN THAGARD, left, with cosmonauts, returned from 115 days in orbit on Russia's Mir space station, he had some things he wanted to get off his chest. First, the food was only so-so (tinned perch was a staple). Then there was the lack of news from home. "The cultural isolation is extreme," griped Thagard, who referred to himself as a "lab rat." NASA officials said they have begun to look into the psychological effects of long-term missions in space, where people can indeed hear you complain...
...were done, the 10 space travelers had to transfer food and water, which Atlantis had brought to replenish Mir's dwindling supplies. The astronauts and cosmonauts also had a full schedule of experiments that would occupy them for the next five days. Many of them involve medical tests on Thagard and the Mir crew to analyze the effects of long-term space flight on their bodies...