Word: cosmonauts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...soft, clear evening of April 14, 1961 -- two days after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin went into his triumphal orbit and three days before the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion -- Kennedy tilted back on the hind legs of a leather chair in the Cabinet Room and, I believe, decided to send Americans to the moon. I watched it happen in one of those unusual episodes when Kennedy opened a window on the inner White House for an outsider. Maybe he understood that, as astronomer Michael Hart wrote, the moon landing would "be forever remembered as one of the greatest achievements...
...space- based nuclear reactor, admitting that the Russians' design was superior to anything in the U.S. A Soyuz space capsule is on the potential shopping list as well, to be used as a kind of lifeboat to get astronauts away from a failing space station. Later this year Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who was stranded in space for months by political maneuverings during the Soviet Union's breakup, will fly on a U.S. shuttle. In 1995 an American astronaut will be a guest aboard Russia's Mir space station. And in the same year, a shuttle will hook up with...
...science-fiction fan. The crew of a rocket ship returns to earth after a long space voyage only to find everything changed. It was exactly that way for Sergei Krikalev. When he blasted off in May 1991, he was one of the proudest of elites, a Soviet cosmonaut. Last week, when he came back after 313 days in orbit, he found a different world...
...followed events on the ground with interest, for politics kept him aloft. After the aborted coup in August, newly emergent Kazakhstan, where the launch facilities are located, demanded that a Kazakh cosmonaut be put into space. The mission directors complied last October but had to talk a less than thrilled Krikalev into staying in orbit an extra five months to help train the new crew...
...country would disintegrate before his mission was over? By the time October rolled around, the Baikonur facility was on the verge of belonging to Kazakhstan , rather than the Soviet Union. As a public relations measure, space-program authorities decreed that instead of a sending a replacement for the cosmonaut, a native Kazakh should go up for a short and politically expedient visit. Poor Krikalev got some fresh supplies but no relief. Ten months after his sojourn began, he's still circling the earth every 90 minutes, day and night, stranded 350 km above the planet. He may finally come down...