Word: weightless
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...project is being paid for by Kentucky Fried Chicken, which is interested in anything that relates to its product. Says Vellinger: "If space chickens turn out to be better than earth chickens, Kentucky Fried Chicken might be interested in raising chickens in a weightless environment." In other words, the colonel wants to see if space chickens have the right stuff...
...They put on powder blue NASA flight suits and duck-billed hats with gold braid on them. They threw themselves into training. When it came time for their shuttle missions, they imitated precisely the cadences and vocabularies they had heard so many times on television beaming in from their weightless heroes. "That's affirmative," one camper would say, all business, laconic: "You are a go for nominal de-orbit burn." They caught just right the astronaut's modulations of stoical understatement and occasional jubilant gee whiz. "We're bringin' this bird home!" the commander of one mission cried when...
...canister housing the satellite. Other frustrations included a sticky latch on an air lock in the Spacelab, which prevented mission specialists from maneuvering the Very Wide Field Camera outside to survey ultraviolet radiation from interstellar sources, and a failed effort to monitor crew members' urine production in a weightless environment...
...future, the near weightless, germ-free environment of space may be ideally suited to manufacturing certain drugs, including interferon and insulin, as well as growth hormones and metal alloys. "We can speed up research drastically. For every new chemical created on earth, we could make five in space," says James Rose, a research director at McDonnell Douglas, the St. Louis-based aerospace company. The Administration has tried to encourage more space investment with tax breaks. It also heavily subsidizes the cost to private companies of launching satellites from the space shuttle. The U.S. Government does so because of stiff foreign...
...Douglas, the St. Louis aerospace company. The firm has long made propulsion systems and other hardware for the U.S. space program and the shuttle. On five nights earlier this year, McDonnell Douglas and Johnson & Johnson, the New Jersey medical-supply company, ran electrophoresis experiments, which allowed precise separation under weightless conditions of biological materials. Although one batch was contaminated, the others permitted the removal of impurities too small to be extracted on earth. One possible outgrowth: production of insulin-producing cells to control diabetes. Says Isaac Gillam, the NASA official in charge of commercial programs: "We will see products manufactured...