Word: earth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...couple last week marked another milestone in the space age. For the first time, a vehicle designed to orbit the earth, land and fly again was flight-tested-but not alone. As 10,000 people watched, the U.S. space-shuttle orbiter Enterprise soared off a runway at Edwards Air Force Base in California, while locked tenaciously atop a huge and expensively modified Boeing 747 jumbo jet. The combined load of 293 tons (72 of them in the 122-ft.-long Enterprise] not only rose smoothly ("No tail shake at all," reported 747 Pilot Fitzhugh Fulton Jr.) but maneuvered as gracefully...
...next crucial phase comes in July, when the Enterprise, while aloft, will fire charges to release itself from the three pylons that hold it to the 747. The orbiter will then glide to earth to test a landing on its own. If all goes well, the Enterprise will be rocketed into space from Kennedy Space Center in 1979 (TIME, Feb. 14). It will land at Edwards, then be shuttled back to Florida atop the 747 for more launchings. Eventually the Enterprise and its successive sister ships should be able to wing their own way back to runways near their launching...
...last months, he lived in a drab New York City hotel room, forbidden by his superiors in the Roman Catholic Church to work in his beloved Paris, surrounded by few friends. He died at 73, on Easter Sunday, in 1955. The earth at the cemetery near Poughkeepsie was still frozen; when he was finally buried, only gravediggers were in attendance. Yet the gaunt figure of this French priest in exile, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, looms large over the intellectual history of 20th century Catholicism...
Teilhard never recanted his basic notion about the existence of a spiritual reality that suffused all matter (man and animals included) and had evolved into a "noosphere"-his term for a layer of human awareness that enveloped the earth like some psychic biosphere. As this envelopment progressed, Teilhard believed, man would eventually transcend his individualism and converge at the "Omega Point" with the Omega -God. Instead of God's creation at the beginning of time, Teilhard emphasized instead his ongoing and future creative activity. To orthodox critics, this vision destroyed the distinction between man and nature, and veered perilously...
...STYLE throughout much of Laughing Last is choppy and down to earth--deliberately so. It seems the technique is intended to give the reader the feeling of a friend informally telling him the family secrets--closeted skeletons and all--over a drink. Sometimes, however, this tape-recorder like roughness creates non sequiturs. With a few exceptions, though, the unbuttoned style is a success, drawing us into the story, giving it immediacy and, in the end, making us care...