Word: aloftness
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...unstable that no pilot can react fast enough to keep it from dropping out of the sky. Yet the X-29A flew precisely as planned last Friday in its first test flight from California's Edwards Air Force Base. Pilot Chuck Sewell kept the X-29A aloft at 15,000 ft. for nearly an hour, maintaining a relatively slow speed of 270 m.p.h. His secret: three built-in computers checked all flight-control surfaces 40 times a second, automatically making adjustments to keep the plane airborne. "If I lose all the computers, the airplane self-destructs in two-tenths...
...March to scare the leftist Sandinista government by creating the impression that the Washington-backed rebel effort was more widespread than it was. The airborne handbooks, coated in plastic to make them water-resistant, were among 3,000 printed at CIA headquarters. But only a fraction were ever sent aloft, because the agency was short of money and the balloon blitz had no discernible effect on the Sandinistas...
...legend "R T-M S B-N B-10." But when the letters and number are pronounced, young readers can crack the code: "Our team is bein' beaten." A Martian has descended from a spaceship. The line explains, "N-M-E L-E-N." A doctor holds aloft a test tube and announces, "I F D Q-R!" The whimsical drawings and ingenious punch lines are M-U-S-N from the beginning...
...death drama, no derring-do, no right stuff. Yet many experts believe it is more valuable to scientific discovery, and at a fraction of the cost. While the space program seemed to most of the public to be languishing in the late 1970s, with no astronauts being sent aloft, NASA was thrilling scientists and astronomers with its unmanned space expeditions...
...Columbia. Back on terra firma, Allen collaborated with Writer Russell Martin on a book, Entering Space, published this month (Stewart, Tabori & Chang; $24.95). Illustrated with scores of photographs, a few of which appear here, Entering Space is a knowing and scrupulously detailed account of the most ambitious American adventures aloft. It gives a sense of the prosaic minutiae and the dumb-struck wonder of traveling through space. Some excerpts...