Word: copilot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Meanwhile, inside the shuttle, Navy Commander Robert Gibson, 37, the copilot, drew a less enviable assignment: he had to free a jammed waste-clearing fan in the shuttle's balky $1.2 million toilet. This high-tech chamber pot, designed to work in the absence of gravity, has broken down repeatedly during shuttle flights. To the crew's relief, Gibson's plumbing skills eventually got the facility working...
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...
While Young's copilot, Air Force Major Brewster Shaw, took charge, one of three inertial measuring units, which sense any changes in the spacecraft's speed or direction, mysteriously broke down. In addition, the laws of celestial mechanics added a political problem. Each extra swing around the earth changed Columbia's path. As a result, when the ship swooped out of its last orbit, instead of coming in south of Australia and over the western Pacific, it passed only 80 miles above eastern Siberia in the militarily sensitive area of the Sakhalin Peninsula where Soviet aircraft shot...
...skipper is Veteran Astronaut John Young, 53, who flew the first shuttle mission in 1981. His total of five space flights, including a 1972 lunar landing, is a world record. Jokes Young: "I love to fly, but all of my parts are starting to wear out." Young's copilot will be Air Force Major Brewster Shaw Jr., 38, a veteran of Viet Nam, who will be making his first space flight...
...eight miles outside the city. A 500-lb. bomb landed near the hangar of Aeronica, the national airline, causing minor damage, and Nicaraguan soldiers reportedly opened fire with antiaircraft guns along the runways. The propeller-driven plane crashed at the base of the control tower, killing the pilot and copilot and touching off a fire that destroyed part of the terminal...