Word: earthwards
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...novel, in fact, begins with a big bang: the blowing up, by Sikh terrorists, of a jumbo jet, Flight AI-420 from Bombay to London, at 29,002 feet over the English Channel. Two passengers, cartwheeling and conversing, plummet earthward. One is Gibreel Farishta, India's most popular movie star, who is in disguise and fleeing his fame after suffering a life-threatening illness and discovering in the process that there is no God. The other is Saladin Chamcha, a prosperous performer of voice-overs for commercials on British television, returning to his adopted land after a melancholy visit...
...mirror earthward, Discovery had to fly with its nose forward and pitched downward. When it passed over the Maui facility on its 37th orbit Wednesday, the shuttle was instead flying backward with its nose pitched slightly upward. A NASA spokesman sheepishly called the mistake a "ground- based accounting error...
...were swung forward for a low-altitude test, Benefield apparently forgot to switch on a mechanism that shifts fuel among various tanks. The B-lA's center of gravity thus stayed toward the tail, causing the bomber to rear up at a 70° angle, stall and tumble earthward...
...Soviet TV commentator was clearly excited. "The parachute is coming down, coming down!" he repeated rapidly. "Coming down!" Beneath the plume of a red-and-white chute one morning last week, a capsule drifted earthward carrying three cosmonauts, Leonid Kizim, 43, Vladimir Solovyev, 38, and Oleg Atkov, 35, to the arid steppes of Soviet Kazakhstan. The triumphant trio, who had been aloft since last February aboard an orbiting Soviet space station, were the possessors of a new space endurance record: a 237-day spin through the heavens.* A more important trophy was the cache of information gathered from experiments...
...electronics). The blast would also produce the deadly vacuum characteristic of all thermonuclear explosions, destroying almost all the atmosphere in an incoming warhead's path and effectively ending its maneuvering ability. Any warheads surviving these multiple perils would probably be burned up by frictional heat as they plunged earthward at more than 5,000 m.p.h. through dust and debris. Under its worst-case scenario, the Pentagon figures at least 70 of the MXs would survive in their superhardened silos...