Word: spaceflight
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...Soviets have shared their knowledge about long-term spaceflight, mostly through informal contacts rather than formal publication. Says one NASA specialist: "We have a book summarizing these lessons. We've got their diets. We try to make our people very aware of what the Soviets have done, because our own experience is all short duration and our data base is very...
...very least, McConnell's book will inform debate about the future of manned spaceflight in the United States. It's a laboriously researched work--and a testimony to the simple truth that high technology and bureaucratic shortsightedness...
...Soviet Union has an "almost frightening" ten-year lead over the U.S. in the practical exploitation of space. That is the jarring message of the 1986 edition of Jane's Spaceflight Directory, published in Britain last week. Editor Reginald Turnill's appraisal is based partly on the fact that the Soviets have already launched the Mir space station, possibly the base module for an even larger structure, while it is likely the U.S. space station will not be operational until 1996, at best. "That's the ten-year gap, and this was the case before Challenger exploded," Turnill declares...
...crossed a particularly notorious intersection in her hometown of Concord, N.H. She joked about it, but clearly couldn't have known the irony of her words. For if she had died in a car accident in Concord, instead of in the worst disaster in 25 years of manned spaceflight, most of us probably wouldn't have cared less. It has taken the cathartic postmortem of recent days to give meaning to her death, and to her life. It is a sad truth, one unintended lesson that this everyday schoolteacher left behind...
...important questions about the recent technological tragedy. Rather than gleaning the fact of our mortality from the death of Christa McAuliffe and the other six astronauts, the editorial should have posed questions to NASA. It should take something less than the worst disaster in a quarter century of manned spaceflight to point out to us that people do die. We should be asking: Was the shuttle accident due to damaged fuel tanks or broken turbine blades? How can these mechanical faults, if they in fact were the cause, be avoided in future flights? These queries need answers...