Word: spaceflight
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...Manned spaceflight for its own sake is typical of NASA's thinking, argue critics of the agency. The function of the space program, says Astronomer Sagan, is "to put people up in tin cans in earth orbit and then bring them down again. People are going up in order to ... go up. It is a capability without a mission." Concludes Sagan: "We do not have a space program, if one assumes that a program has goals and purposes...
...staid British publishers of Jane's Fighting Ships have added a new and somewhat ominous catalog to their authoritative line of reference books: Jane's Spaceflight Directory. Explains Editor Reginald Turnill: "The sort of superpower pushing and shoving that we are familiar with down on earth is moving into space." The directory, released last week, claims that the Pentagon has, for some time, been training "a new breed of military astronauts." It also mentions reports-officially discounted by both sides- that the Soviets have already practiced "blinding" U.S. satellites with laser beams...
Although the lost satellite cast a shadow over the mission, Challenger's commander, Vance Brand, 52, a former Marine pilot on his third spaceflight, and his four crewmen, including Copilot Robert ("Hoot") Gibson, 37, a space novice, faced other weighty matters. In many ways Flight 41-B, as the mission is called under a new numbering system fathomable only to NASA bureaucrats, is the most ambitious sortie into space to date. It features a full agenda of experiments, including one intriguing test devised by a high school student to see if zero-g can relieve the agony of arthritic...
DIED. Kurt Debus, 74, German scientist who was director from 1952 to 1974 of NASA'S Cape Canaveral facility (now the Kennedy Space Center), overseeing such landmark projects as the launches of the first U.S. manned spaceflight and Apollo 11 's moon mission; of a heart attack; in Cocoa, Fla. Debus worked closely with Wernher von Braun, the father of modern rocketry, to design the Nazis' V-2 rocket booster, then became a passionately loyal American cit izen after the German surrender. In the 1950s he worked on the Army's first missile capable of carrying and delivering a nuclear...
Sally Ride's spaceflight has corroborated the first impression I had of the U.S. when I arrived on its shores as an immigrant from Paris: American women are out of this world...