Word: astronaut
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...last count, the U.S. Air Force's North American Air Defense Command, the watchdog of all objects in orbit, listed 4,552 pieces of hardware-ranging in size from a Soviet space station to such bits of space junk as an astronaut's glove, stray cameras, and even nuts and bolts. In the coming years NORAD's job will become still harder. By the mid-1980s, the number of orbital objects may double, making it more difficult to tell what is up, and whether it belongs to friend...
DIED. Lieut. Colonel John A. ("Shorty") Powers, 57, whose minute-by-minute reports on America's first manned space launches made him "the voice of the astronauts" in the early 1960s; of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage; in Phoenix. Powers was a much decorated pilot in World War II, the Berlin Airlift and the Korean War before rocketing to fame as a NASA spokesman beginning in 1959. As Project Mercury's earth-bound "eighth astronaut," he contributed the phrase A-O.K. to the nation's vocabulary...