Word: thruster
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hours during the Thursday-morning countdown, however, the shuttle shuffle appeared destined for a scrub. All week NASA technicians had isolated small glitches, from a tiny gas leak on a main engine to a slight scratch on a thruster rocket. Finally they seemed confident that only bad weather might postpone the shuttle's launch. Although launch day dawned bright and sunny, meteorologists warned that the high-altitude winds in the shuttle's flight path, normally unruly in the Cape Canaveral region during late September, had uncharacteristically died down. The problem: Discovery's computers had been programmed to maneuver the craft...
...other snag involved the scraping off of a layer of paint on one of Discovery's small jet thrusters used to position the shuttle in orbit. But it was found that underlayers of the thermal paint were intact, and that the thruster could be bypassed if need...
Nelson grabbed one of the solar array panels, but the movement made Max tumble even faster and more erratically. With the MMU's nitrogen propellant half exhausted and Challenger down to a fifth of its own reserves of forward-thruster fuel-close to the bare minimum needed to rescue an astronaut in free flight-Crippen ordered Nelson to return. Inside Challenger 's cockpit, Mission Specialist Terry Hart, 37, tried three times to snake the remote-controlled mechanical arm past the panels to snatch the satellite, but it remained tantalizingly out of reach. Said Crippen: "We came close that...
First there were two small red flashes in the starry sky above California's Mojave Desert, as the space shuttle Challenger fired thruster rockets to steady its attitude. Then, after a wait of about three minutes, ground observers glimpsed the unlighted shuttle. Silently it glided into view just 200 ft. above the end of runway 22. In the glare of blue xenon searchlights, Navy Captain Richard Truly, the mission commander, flawlessly guided the orbiter, nose up, to its first nighttime landing. Challenger's arrival at Edwards Air Force Base last week, at 12:40 a.m. California time, ended...
...unmanned Cosmos satellite and then in June with the manned Soyuz T-9 capsule to form a single orbiting complex. The linking of the Cosmos with Salyut 7 has doubled the amount of working space available to cosmonauts aboard the space station. In addition, the latest Cosmos has thruster jets that enable it to change the orbit of the whole complex, leading TASS to dub it a "space tugboat." It also has a bell-shaped descent module, a detachable section that can ferry materials and experiments back to earth-something that the Soviets previously could not do with the cramped...