Word: aires
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...diplomatic maneuvering over the Soviets' sagging satellite began in mid-December. It centered, at first, in a green-painted chamber housed half a mile deep within the solid pink granite of Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain, headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). There, technicians at the Space Defense Center track the 4,600 pieces of machinery now floating in space -including no fewer than 939 satellites...
...might, in fact, have been the result of a malfunction in the measuring equipment. "It is unlikely there is anything on the ground," he said about the Soviet reactor. That was puzzling, since the chief of the crew manning the equipment on the original sniffer plane was a U.S. Air Force specialist who is a highly respected nuclear physicist and unlikely to be confused by false sensor readings. Were the Canadians and Americans trying to bluff the Russians into thinking that their spacecraft had totally disintegrated? No one on the outside could be sure. The search for localized radiation continued...
...board reach critical mass and explode either on re-entry or on impact with the earth? It could not, Dobrynin insisted. Brzezinski signed a National Security Council directive alerting the CIA, NASA and the Defense and State departments to the probable re-entry of Cosmos 954. Special U.S. Air Force teams trained in radiation detection and decontamination techniques were alerted to fly to any impact site...
...check for high-altitude radiation in the Canadian wilderness. A 22-man Canadian nuclear-accident support team, equipped with radiation-proof suits and ready to collect any satellite debris on the ground, flew from Edmonton to Yellowknife. A 44-man team of U.S. military technicians arrived from Andrews Air Force Base and Nellis Air Force Base...
...which has been using SNAP (Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power) power packs since 1961, has had three accidents. A Navy navigation satellite failed to reach orbit in 1964 and disintegrated in the atmosphere over Madagascar. A meteorological satellite was aborted on launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in 1968, and the nuclear package was recovered intact. As Apollo 13 returned from an unsuccessful moon flight in 1970, the three astronauts had to jettison their unused moon lander, and its power pack plunged into the Pacific Ocean near Australia...