Word: complexity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last week that trip moved a step closer to reality. From its launching pad at the Baikonur space complex, near Tyuratam in the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, a Proton rocket carrying an unmanned spacecraft rose on an orange and blue column of fire that illuminated the night sky. Turning lazily eastward, the rocket sent the craft off on an ambitious mission: to scout Mars and probe Phobos, one of its two tiny moons. Far below at the sprawling complex, technicians swarmed over a sister ship that is scheduled to be launched this week on a similar mission. Exulted Roald Sagdeyev...
...wrote, "completely and utterly ignores reality." Among the concerns raised by the proposed mission, she wrote, are the "potential for spying, for technology transfer, for interference in our political system, for the 'hostage holding' effect it would have on our space program and on our future." Her conclusion: "A complex, expensive, 25-year-long joint research program is like a marriage. It should be entered into soberly, advisedly, for better or for worse -- and only after a very long engagement during which trust is built and loyalty tested...
Even as the celebration went on, the thoughts of space experts turned to future Mars odysseys. Scientists and engineers in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union are involved in the design of complex unmanned craft that will travel to the planet. Some American scientists are even conducting tests on a model of the robotic vehicle that may one day rove the Martian surface. Others are considering the ships that will carry human crews to Mars, the orbiting space station needed to launch them, the size and safety of the crews and the most practical routes through space. Though some...
...before the shootdown? But enough has become known in the week since the tragedy to suggest a terrible conclusion, one with dismaying implications for a nuclear-armed world: the U.S., and by extension other countries using high-tech weapons, may have become prisoners of a technology so speedy and complex that it forces the fallible humans who run it into snap decisions that can turn into disaster...
...appearing in dreams, Jupiter descending from the heavens) and robust battles. In one chilling scene, two panels of the back wall bang open to reveal opposing armies about to pour onto the stage. The most impressive coup de theatre, however, belongs to Star Tim Pigott-Smith, a specialist in complex villains. He invades the bedroom of a sleeping princess, robs and molests her while voicing a cascading confusion of emotions -- first pride, then shame, then lust, then greed -- with the naked horror of a man facing his true nature for the first time...