Word: flash
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None of the spectators at the Army's White Sands Missile Range had ever seen anything quite like it. With a burst of smoke and a flash of light, a 40-ft.- tall white obelisk shuddered briefly, popped off a launch pad and rose 150 ft. over the New Mexico desert. Then it suddenly stopped in midair, moved sideways for 350 ft. and started back down, engines firing all the way. At the last moment, four rodlike pods shot out of the tail to ease the bullet-shaped rocket gently to the ground...
...ranch where Buffalo Bill Cody assembled his Wild West show (complete with conquered Sioux Chief Sitting Bull) and sent it out on tour aboard U.P. trains. "I don't need an economist to tell me when things are good or bad," Young says as he watches for the flash of headlights over the windswept horizons, signaling long freights coming from east and west. If Young records more than 100 trains a day, as he has lately, he knows commerce is getting better someplace. The American freight rails have the capacity to carry three or four times the freight they carry...
...spectacular fireworks high over Southern California last week couldn't have come at a worse time for the Central Intelligence Agency. Just as Congress was debating the size of the intelligence budget for 1994, $1 billion worth of spying equipment disappeared in a flash above Vandenberg Air Force Base -- the costliest space accident since the 1986 Challenger disaster. A new Titan IV rocket carrying a supersecret intelligence-satellite system inexplicably blew up two minutes after launch. Space-spying expert Jeffrey Richelson, author of America's Secret Eyes in Space, called it a "huge embarrassment for the intelligence community...
...returned to replant and prosper. This was different. The river, recalls Crystal, "was like something possessed." For weeks now, the Mississippi has occupied their five-bedroom home, its undercurrents "shaking the house apart, ripping away the studs from the siding and Sheetrock," as Nick describes it. Unlike past flash floods, which were over in days, the waters may not recede for four months, and the family may not be able to replant their soybean crop for two years...
...Franjo Tudjman, for another round of peace talks. Everyone felt the mood of deja vu, but this time the Muslims had to choose between taking what little they might get in a settlement now, or holding out for more -- and losing everything. Washington debated whether it could use a flash of air power to warn the Serbs away from Sarajevo without encouraging the Muslims to balk at signing an agreement. That was as much a sop to conscience as a calibrated military action, and, as usual, America and its allies could not agree on how much would be just right...