The airport is used by the American space agency Nasa as a contingency landing place for its space shuttles.

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For already it was being said that our town was the likely landing place, already the TV crews were rolling in.

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Landing Place of the Pilgrims. 1620.

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According to the UPI news agency, senior Nasa officials only realised the flaw in MPL's thrusters a few days before the landing was to take place on 3 December - when it was too late to do anything about it.

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Clearance work has already taken place to unblock the waterway but a new boat house, slipway and landing stage will also be needed.

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In a statement, Sharif El-Gamal, the president of Soho Properties, which owns 51 Park Place, said workers called the city and the police as soon as they discovered the landing gear.

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The craft itself may not survive this, but it gives the project's engineers a chance to practise landing a spacecraft remotely on a relatively small target with a gravitational field that varies immensely from one place to another.

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The collection at the New York State Museum in Albany has a large piece of landing gear that went through the roof and landed in the basement of a building next to 51 Park Place.

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