Word: boosterism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...idea is certainly appealing. All of the murderous megatonnage of those fearsome intercontinental ballistic missiles would be rendered useless. The Soviet Union launches a surprise nuclear attack? Zap! U.S. laser beams from outer space blast the enemy booster rockets out of Soviet skies before they can dispatch their multiple warheads on long lethal flights...
...space shuttle Columbia was still resting in its hangar at Florida's Kennedy Space Center following the postponement of its launch scheduled for Oct. 28. Officials suspected there were flaws in the thermal insulation on the nozzle of one of Columbia's two strap-on solid-propellant booster rockets. Similar coating on a rocket nozzle recovered from the previous shuttle flight in August turned out, on postflight inspection, to be just a hairline away from burning through. Some space officials said that if the rocket had fired only a few seconds longer, it would have lost all directional...
...Kennedy Space Center), overseeing such landmark projects as the launches of the first U.S. manned spaceflight and Apollo 11 's moon mission; of a heart attack; in Cocoa, Fla. Debus worked closely with Wernher von Braun, the father of modern rocketry, to design the Nazis' V-2 rocket booster, then became a passionately loyal American cit izen after the German surrender. In the 1950s he worked on the Army's first missile capable of carrying and delivering a nuclear warhead, the Redstone...
...account remained sketchy, the details not altogether clear. One morning early last week, according to U.S. intelligence sources, a booster rocket exploded into flames on a launching pad at the space center in Tyuratum, in the Central Asian Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. Atop the rocket was a manned Soyuz space capsule bound for a rendezvous with the orbiting space station Salyut 7. Luckily, the safeguards apparently worked without a hitch, and the two or three spacemen aboard survived the disaster...
Murphy is his own greatest booster, his own severest critic. "One drawback to making it so young," he notes dispassionately, "is that I have to grow in the public eye. I still think of myself as a stand-up comedian, a performer, not a movie actor. Certainly not, at this point, a movie star. I do still get a kick out of seeing myself on a movie screen, 30 ft. high, though the oh-wow-I'm-in-a-movie period has left me. Some day, I'd like to produce and direct pictures. But the biggest kick...