Word: aiming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...light from stars appear to twinkle. The excimer laser beams would have to be bounced off mirrors in very high geosynchronous orbits over the equator, meaning that the mirrors would always hover over one spot on the earth's surface, to give the mountaintop stations a constant target to aim at. The geosynchronous mirrors would detwinkle the beam and reflect it to "battle" mirrors in low earth orbit. The battle mirrors would aim the laser beam at missiles or warheads. The mirrors would have to be gigantic, as much as 90 feet in diameter for the geosynchronous variety...
...current idea is to station a sort of gun on the ground near a group of missile silos or a city and fire electron beams at incoming "physics packages" (a remarkably polite euphemism for atomic warheads) as they re-enter the atmosphere. The beams, however, are hard to aim and control. Not to mention the price tag: Researcher Bill Barletta figures this one small part of a defensive system might cost $20 billion. Says he: "If we can't do it for that price, we shouldn't bother proposing...
Meanwhile, the Pentagon plans to spend nearly as much of its 1986 S.D.I. budget request on sensors and battle-management systems ($1.6 billion) as on weapons development ($1.8 billion). Sensors are crucial to any system: they have to find the targets first and aim at them over thousands of miles of space. Keith Taggart, a researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, likens the job to shooting out a specific window in New York City's World Trade Center by firing a rifle bullet from the top of the John Hancock Building in Chicago. The sensors also would have...
FORSTER TURNS NEXT to Elizabeth Blackwell, the world's first trained, registered women doctor, Black well gave up any ideas of marriage or motherhood in order to pursue her aim of being a doctor--and she insisted on undergoing the same training and receiving the same certification as her male colleagues. Without this, Blackwell realized that women could never gain true equality in the professions--differences in training or background would always be singled out as inferiorities...
Fusco can now take aim at the ECAC consecutive game scoring record of 32, held by Brain Cornell of Cornell (1967-69). Craig Homola of Vermont (1978-80) and fellow junior Adam Ontes of RPI, who ran 32 straight until North Dakota shut him out in last year's NCAA quarter finals...