Word: baikonur
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...themselves running short of borscht, there will be a very good reason: the technicians on the ground ate it all. The Russian space agency has been running on fumes since the end of the cold war, but never more so than in the past few years. Employees at the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan often go unpaid and sometimes slip away at the end of their shifts taking pilfered electrical components with them. Some of those employees, less interested in fencing stolen goods than simply eating a decent meal, have even broken into provisions intended for cosmonauts and made...
...space agency reduced to such pratfalls, and there was a time when U.S. officials might have enjoyed the show. But Washington is not laughing, and with good reason. On Nov. 20, the first piece of the 16-nation, NASA-led International Space Station is set to be launched from Baikonur--marking the start of an eight-year construction project that ranks as the greatest peacetime engineering job in history--and a bankrupt Russia is only one of the problems it faces...
...second is Globalstar's chief drawback. Its service is not scheduled to kick off until 1999--a year behind Iridium's schedule. And this month Globalstar ran into a potentially more serious snag. Minutes after a Ukrainian-built Zenit-2 rocket carrying 12 Globalstar satellites thundered skyward from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Sept. 10, its engine failed. The 460-ton rocket fell back to Earth, showering debris across southern Siberia and driving Globalstar's stock down 40% overnight. The $190 million payload was covered by insurance, but the disaster delayed the system's debut even further...
Russia's ahead in the space race again. The world's first space-bound bureaucrat -- Yuri Baturin, a former security adviser to Boris Yeltsin -- blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan Thursday, heading for a two-week stay aboard Mir. NASA, of course, has sent lawmakers into orbit; Senator Jake Garn took a junket on the Space Shuttle back before the Challenger disaster, and John Glenn heads off in the fall. But never has America put a presidential aide in space. Can this one fly? "We can teach anyone to become a cosmonaut as long...
...BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan: The space-age version of knights in shining armor blasted off to the rescue of Mir today. Commander Anatoly Solovyov and flight engineer Pavel Vinogradov are racing to the troubled space station to perform vital repairs ? and they were never more needed. True to form, Mir's oxygen generators broke down this morning. TIME's Dick Thompson says this latest mishap is no cause for alarm: "To the Russians, this is just life as normal," he says. The two cosmonauts are expected to dock Thursday...