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...NASA STICK WITH THE SPACE SHUTTLE SO LONG? Though the space shuttle is viewed as futuristic, its design is three decades old. The shuttle's main engines, first tested in the late 1970s, use hundreds more moving parts than do new rocket-motor designs. The fragile heat-dissipating tiles were designed before breakthroughs in materials science. Until recently, the flight-deck computers on the space shuttle used old 8086 chips from the early 1980s, the sort of pre-Pentium electronics no self-respecting teenager would dream of using for a video game...
...routine--at least by the high-wire standards of space travel. After shimmying out of their sleep restraints, the crew would stow gear and belt themselves into their seats--a process that would take a good six hours. With Columbia turned rump forward, the commander would then fire the main maneuvering engines, slowing the spacecraft and easing it toward the upper wisps of the atmosphere. Once he turned the ship around, he would surf the currents of the steadily thickening air, fishtailing this way and that until, just an hour or so after the deorbit engines were lit, Columbia...
...these tiny cracks were found in fuel lines makes it all the less likely that larger, lethal cracks could have gone unnoticed. A fuel explosion is also a possibility but again a remote one. When the ship re-enters the atmosphere, there's not much juice left in the main maneuvering rockets or in the spritzy little thrusters arrayed around the spacecraft...
...Frum himself as an infant. John Frum, "dressed all in white," he says, here too urged people to stick to kastom, but went to Green Point only after appearing at nearby Sulphur Bay, initially as a lion. He promised too that Americans, many of whom were stationed on the main island of Efate during World War II, would one day bring development to the area...
...about 1:30 in the morning on the 9th, we gathered at the Bockscar, and [Major Charles] Sweeney [the pilot] and the flight engineer ran through the preflight tests. The engineer discovered that the transfer pumps, which transfer gasoline from the reserve tank into the main tanks, weren't working. There was 600 gal. of gasoline there, but we wouldn't have access to it. But Tibbets told him, "You don't need that gas, so there's no reason to delay this...