Word: deserting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...realistic characters, emotional appeal, and an arresting, poignantly developed central conflict. The play treats the struggle between civilization and primitivism; more specifically, between an Ivy League-educated Hollywood screenwriter and his brother, a near-illiterate renegade who has just emerged from five months of solitary foraging in the Mojave Desert. Thrown together in their mother's house--she is vacationing in Alaska and her well-behaved son is baby-sitting her plants--the do-good and the no-good brothers clash, switch roles, and clash again...
Next day the astronauts were awakened at 3 a.m. E.S.T. for another try. This time, the winds on the desert were down to 15 m.p.h. Circling over White Sands in a jet, Astronaut John Young, commander of Columbia's first mission, observed with a touch of hyperbole: "Visibility is CAVU [ceiling and visibility unlimited] to Mars." With that, Mission Control gave the go-ahead for White Sands. On Columbia's 129th orbit of the earth, 14 more than planned, Lousma and Fullerton braked to re-enter the earth's atmosphere and began a long zigzagging descent over...
Fortunately, Columbia's computers knew where they were. After streaking across Arizona and New Mexico, the delta-winged craft emerged right on target at the sprawling, mountain-rimmed missile testing grounds. Columbia then made a wide right turn, aligned itself with one of the desert runways and plunged downward at breathtaking speed, dropping at an angle seven times steeper than that of a commercial jet. At 4,000 ft., its fall was accelerated by a fluke wind that caused the speed brakes in the shuttle's rudder to retreat automatically. Finally, only 143 ft. off the ground, Lousma...
After the shuttle's main wheels touched the chalky ground, its nose suddenly veered up, almost as if it were about to take off again. Mission controllers had a brief, horrifying vision of the nose gear thudding back down on the hard desert floor and collapsing under the jolt. But Lousma gently leveled the ship off and let it roll out to a halt. Initially, NASA officials speculated that Columbia's lurching might have been caused by an unexpected gust of wind. But later they insisted that Lousma had eased the stick back, probably to slow the ship...
About one thing there was no doubt: at touchdown, Columbia was moving at 250 m.p.h., about 30 m.p.h. faster than in either previous landing. The ship required nearly three miles of desert before coming to a stop, almost a mile more than before. Even before Lousma and Fullerton exited, inspectors had begun looking over the ship for damage. Though about 50 heat-shield tiles were chipped or missing, the underlying aluminum was only superficially scorched...