Word: thrusters
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...closed a 4,000-mile gap with its target. Thursday morning, with the spacecraft 250 ft. apart and orbiting through space at 17,500 m.p.h., Gibson and shuttle pilot Charles Precourt began the delicate and risky maneuvers aimed at linking the two great ships. One careless burst of a thruster jet, and Mir's feathery solar panels could be destroyed; too forceful a bump from Atlantis, and either or both craft could be severely damaged. And if Gibson and Precourt couldn't align their 100-ton spacecraft to within 3 in. and 2 [degrees] of its assigned position before...
...same technology they have used in the development of magnetically levitated trains. The Yamato, named for a World War II battleship, is powered by superconductive electromagnets that have been cooled down to an energy-efficient -425.47 degrees F. The magnets shoot electrified seawater through a set of jetlike thruster tubes, thus greatly reducing the noise and vibration associated with the traditional rotating propeller. But before this system can be applied commercially, the size of the magnets, which now limits the vessel's speed and cargo space, will have to be reduced...
...hours during the Thursday-morning countdown, however, the shuttle shuffle appeared destined for a scrub. All week NASA technicians had isolated small glitches, from a tiny gas leak on a main engine to a slight scratch on a thruster rocket. Finally they seemed confident that only bad weather might postpone the shuttle's launch. Although launch day dawned bright and sunny, meteorologists warned that the high-altitude winds in the shuttle's flight path, normally unruly in the Cape Canaveral region during late September, had uncharacteristically died down. The problem: Discovery's computers had been programmed to maneuver the craft...
...other snag involved the scraping off of a layer of paint on one of Discovery's small jet thrusters used to position the shuttle in orbit. But it was found that underlayers of the thermal paint were intact, and that the thruster could be bypassed if need...
Nelson grabbed one of the solar array panels, but the movement made Max tumble even faster and more erratically. With the MMU's nitrogen propellant half exhausted and Challenger down to a fifth of its own reserves of forward-thruster fuel-close to the bare minimum needed to rescue an astronaut in free flight-Crippen ordered Nelson to return. Inside Challenger 's cockpit, Mission Specialist Terry Hart, 37, tried three times to snake the remote-controlled mechanical arm past the panels to snatch the satellite, but it remained tantalizingly out of reach. Said Crippen: "We came close that...