Word: airlessness
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...called attention to lines in some of the pictures that might be edges of an ancient lava flow; he agreed with the Russians and many American scientists that the porous surface resulted from the explosive expansion of gases in the lava as it emerged onto the moon's airless surface...
According to Cooper's equations, by "dropping" in airless, frictionless, straight-line tunnels, passenger vehicles powered only by the pull of gravity could theoretically travel between Washington and Moscow, which are 4,850 surface miles apart, in the same time it would take them to travel from Washington to Boston, only 400 miles away. "One can envisage a transportation system without timetables," says Cooper, tongue in cheek, "with the world's cities linked by tunnels, the departure time universally on the hour, and the arrival time 42.2 minutes later...
...incestuously pregnant sister and helps the play achieve an astonishingly tender tension between sickness and sweetness. The boy (Michael Warren Powell) and girl (Joanna Miles) live in a fantasy playroom of imaginary companions and real toys, such as a miniature Ferris wheel. The atmosphere has a suffocating intimacy, an airless immunity to reality that recalls Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles, with its similarly incestuous relationship. Reality finally intrudes with cruel pathos as the girl's birth pangs become her death throes...
Electronic Collision. So frail that it can hold its shape only at weightless, airless altitudes, that wide wing is the working element of a satellite, built by Fairchild Hiller Corp., for detecting micrometeoroids. Pegasus' 208 rectangular panels are covered on both sides with thin sheets of copper and aluminum separated by plastic. The metal sheets are electrically charged, but normally no current flows between them. When a micrometeoroid penetrates the aluminum, it will punch a hole in the plastic and fill the hole with metal vapor that is a good conductor of electricity. Although the gas will dissipate quickly...
...spirit of Edgar Allan Poe hovers over these playlets, not only in brooding menace, but in the sealed and airless abodes where characters are filled with the breath of death. The actors seem perfectly attuned to this death's dream kingdom, most notably Frances Sternhagen, who is scrupulously convincing as she shifts from the droning drab of The Room to the animated superficial niceties of professional wifeliness in A Slight Ache...