Word: aloftness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Soviet Union, the Berezovoy-Lebedev mission has sparked a rare public debate over one major question: How long can a person stay aloft before suffering irremediable harm? Cosmonaut Valeri Ryumin, who had set earlier flight records by orbiting the earth for 175 and 185 days, believes the safe limit has been breached. Says Ryumin, now a senior program chief at the Soviet space control center outside Moscow: "It appears to me that four months is the optimal period...
Until now such observations have been made with extreme difficulty. Since water in the earth's atmosphere absorbs most infrared light, astronomers had to send up instrument-packed balloons and rockets, go aloft in specially equipped planes or perform infrared work in high-altitude observatories like the one atop Hawaii's 14,000-ft. Mauna Kea volcano. But thanks to some extremely innovative, indeed, out of this world, engineering, IRAS bypasses the obscuring atmosphere entirely...
...answers. The weight of the argument and the heat of the debate are what count now. And of all the people who have floated these questions into the cultural ozone?scientists and sociologists, computer freaks and microchip madmen, quick-buck artists and free-falling futurists?none has kept them aloft for so long, or turned them to such profitable purpose, as Steven Paul Jobs...
While struggling to get aloft, Pershing II was also attracting critics determined to keep it grounded. Reviewing the Pentagon's budget request for the fiscal year ending October 1983, the House Appropriations Subcommittee early last week recommended withholding more than $500 million in production funds until the Pershing II has successfully completed its tests. After the missile's encouraging flight, however, it is unlikely that the full Appropriations Committee or the House will go along with such a cutoff...
...real sense. Astronaut Vance Brand, 51, had barely brought down the shuttle in a textbook landing-"painting the numbers on the runway," as pilots say-when other NASA hands began thinking of collecting the fees for Columbia's services. During the five-day mission, the shuttle had carried aloft two commercial communications satellites, one of them American, the other Canadian. NASA will earn more than $18 million for this orbital freight hauling, hardly enough to cover Columbia' s fuel bill, but a first small step in turning the shuttle into a self-supporting enterprise...