Word: flighting
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...Shigeaki Hinohara was en route to a medical conference in 1970 when his flight was hijacked. For four days he and 130 other passengers onboard lived under the threat of death, as the communist-inspired terrorists stalked the aisles, wielding samurai swords and explosives, demanding to be taken to North Korea. "I expected to die," says Hinohara, now 94 years old. But the hijackers eventually agreed to release all of the passengers in Seoul, before taking the plane to North Korea. For Hinohara, those four days changed everything. "I believed I was privileged to live," he says, "so my life...
...second-ever manned Chinese space flight is slated to carry two astronauts on a five-day journey circling Earth, while they conduct experiments on pig sperm. But the flight's importance reaches far beyond any advances in animal husbandry that may result from exposing hog semen to weightlessness. It is the latest shot fired in a fiercely competitive space showdown between China and Japan...
...alarm bell went off at 9 a.m. on Oct. 15, 2003. That was the moment when China's Shenzhou V spacecraft lifted off the pad carrying Yang Liwei, a 38-year-old lieutenant colonel and former fighter pilot in the People's Liberation Army. Although his flight was only 21 hours long, Yang's accomplishment triggered a historic outpouring of national pride, with China's state media portraying the country's first manned space shot as a triumph of native science, technology and collective will. Soon after the success of Shenzhou V, China upped the ante, announcing plans to launch...
...with disbelief and anxiety that continues to reverberate among scientific and political circles. "We were surprised," says Masashi Okada, a launch-systems engineer at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the country's equivalent of NASA. "Obviously we knew they were working toward it, but they achieved manned flight very quickly." Japan's own space program had been in decline for years, hobbled by a habit of following the U.S.'s lead and by domestic regulatory barriers that bar programs with potential military applications. Between 1999 and 2004, the space program's budget had fallen nearly 30% to $1.8 billion...
...Japan already has a modest manned program, but it's dependent on the patronage of the U.S. Eight Japanese astronauts have been trained by NASA, and five of them have flown space-shuttle missions (including the flight of Discovery in August that marked the first shuttle mission since Columbia disintegrated upon reentry in 2003). At Tsukuba Space Center, JAXA's main campus, located about a 40-minute train ride northeast of Tokyo, Yoshiyuki Hasegawa and his team were recently putting the finishing touches on Japan's next small step. In a gigantic clean room the size of a warehouse, Hasegawa...