Word: thruster
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...time, U.S. officials had their doubts (and some still do), mainly because of the problem-plagued Soyuz, which one expert bluntly described as "primitive as hell." Cramped and crudely engineered, in the opinion of the Americans, it carries too little fuel for its thruster rockets; by contrast, the Apollo's computer-controlled thrusters have an excess of power. A more serious U.S. objection is that the Soyuz is controlled almost entirely from the ground; the cosmonauts have limited means of coping with emergencies on their...
...loss of the thrusters on Apollo's service module was not in itself critical. Experience in NASA'S ground simulators has shown that an Apollo spacecraft can be steered with only one service-module rocket cluster-or even with only the thrusters on the command module. What worried space-agency engineers was the possibility of further deterioration in the propulsion system. The small thruster systems, as well as Apollo's big main engine at the rear of the service module, use the same type of oxidizer. What is more, the chemical had come from the same batch...
...nearly obscured their original check lists with fresh flight data radioed by Houston, Duke and Young apparently overlooked one item and forgot to close a circuit breaker in Orion. Result: when the Lunar Module was finally cast loose from the mother ship, its computer could not fire its small thruster rockets. Thus, Orion could not be sent crashing back onto the moon's surface, where telling shock waves from its impact were to have been recorded by sensitive seismometers. Instead, the now-useless craft was left to orbit indefinitely around the moon...
...look almost roly-poly-890 ft. long, 170 ft. wide, but drawing only 39 ft. fully loaded. At this draft, it can slide easily into most major ports, while still carrying 800,000 bbl. of oil. Much more maneuverable in narrow channels than the monster tankers (thanks to powerful "thruster" propellers set at right angles to its bow and stern), the ship will include several safeguards against oil leaks. One drawback: it will cost at least 8% more to build than a conventional tanker of the same capacity...
...hour stint with his "white team" of flight controllers when the first hint of trouble came from 205,000 miles away in space. Quickly responding, he made the first of the long night's many important decisions, ordering the astronauts to turn off a fuel cell, check their thruster rockets, and power down the guidance and navigation systems. Though he may well have anticipated the worst, Kranz never faltered or showed signs of panic. "We've got a bad situation in the oxygen tanks," he told the Manned Spacecraft Center's deputy director, Christopher Kraft, "one that...