Word: booster
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...republic to an imaginary woman, Marianne, but have never allowed a real one to govern it. Last week, in a bold attempt to revive France's sluggish economy and give new zest to his flagging Socialist regime, President Francois Mitterrand named longtime political associate Edith Cresson, 57, an aggressive booster of French industry, as the nation's first woman Prime Minister...
...hangar-size workshop, stress- testing sensors cling like barnacles to prototypes of the new MiG-31 fighter and the next generation of Soviet civilian airliners, the Tu-204 and Il-114. Nearby is the T-128 transonic wind tunnel, where the space shuttle Buran and the Energiya booster rocket were tested with airstreams driven by a 1,000-kW compressor. The center is also adjacent to the Ramenskoye proving ground, the largest airfield in Europe...
Ball park. Just the words jog the memory and uplift the spirit in a way that is antithetical to seemingly analogous terms like stadium, coliseum and that ghastly civic-booster construction "sports complex." The key word is park, because nothing better conveys a small child's glee at the first glimpse of the field on an outing to the ball park. The three survivors of baseball's glory days -- Fenway in Boston, Wrigley in Chicago and Detroit's Tiger Stadium -- are islands of green in a densely urban setting. Lawrence Lucchino, president of the Baltimore Orioles, explains his team...
...appropriately -- destined for the technological trash heap than the one that came to light last week. According to documents made public by the Federation of American Scientists for the express purpose of torpedoing the scheme, the Pentagon has for several years been secretly developing a new kind of booster rocket -- code-named Timberwind -- that would loft giant weapons into space on short notice. Its power source: an onboard nuclear reactor running at extremely high temperatures and spewing radioactive exhaust directly into the atmosphere...
...interested in Timberwind? The reasons date back to the early 1970s, when NASA, with the Pentagon's blessing, decided to put the bulk of its research funds into the reusable space shuttle. Further development of conventional rocket boosters stalled. Now both agencies find themselves bumping into the limited payload capacities of the remaining rockets; NASA for hoisting its space station into orbit and the Pentagon for lifting its big directed-beam Star Wars weapons. The proposed nuclear-powered rockets would more than triple the payload of the U.S.'s most powerful booster, the Titan 4, from 20 tons to more...