Word: ballooned
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After more than 60 years on the dustheap of aviation history, the Zeppelin is making a comeback--sort of. The fiery death of the Hindenburg put an end to the hydrogen-filled balloon for passenger travel, and even when the lifting gas was replaced by helium, passengers never again trusted the big airships. The last Zeppelin made, the LZ 130, rolled out of the hangar in Friedrichshafen, near the Swiss-German border, in 1938, and it was eventually turned into scrap. At 246-ft. long, the ship that Danneker will pilot, the new Zeppelin NT--for new technology--will disappoint...
What has given an old technology a new boost is lightweight materials like foamed carbon fibers, similar to those used in the Brietling Orbiter 3, the balloon that Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones used in last year's record-setting flight around the world. Piccard is the grandson of Auguste Piccard, the famed physicist and part-time aviator who in 1932 became the first man to reach the stratosphere in a balloon. In 1988 an engineer named Klaus Hagenlocher began poring through the Zeppelin archives and persuaded the company's CEO, Friedrichshafen Mayor Bernd Wiedmann, to resurrect the airship...
...year trip to the Florida Supreme Court envisioned by most experts, or the 75-year flood of individual trials that Webb was crowing about - ought to do the rest. The tobacco lawyers' shrill and relentless hubris might just have resulted in an award that's more like a balloon than a bill, overinflated and ready to burst...
Each sensor's 65,000 pixels will feed signals into the interceptor's brain, where lightning-fast calculations involving heat, light, mass and motion are cranked into databases searching for the ballistic fingerprints of enemy warheads. As the interceptor rushes toward its possible targets (the warhead, the balloon and the launch container), it will keep them all within view for as long as possible before discarding the ones its computers say have the least likelihood of being the warhead...
...limitations are still severe. (See previous story.) Critics argue that simple countermeasures by enemy states--such as the use of radar-absorbing materials or balloon decoys--may be enough to foil the U.S.'s pricey shield. Rogue states looking to deliver bombs could simply send them in on cargo ships or in suitcases. One of the few skeptics in Congress, Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, has proposed an amendment to next year's defense-authorization bill requiring that the missile shield be given more realistic tests employing the countermeasures that foes would be likely...