Word: gagarin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Larissa Tsibliyev knew better than to interrupt her husband, so it was hard for her to speak up when Gagarin, the couple's beloved terrier, keeled over from the oven fumes. Too, she held her peace when the water sprinkler finally kicked in, knowing that the fire department would eventually turn the system off when it came to fight the blaze Vasily had started in the trash bin under the window. Larissa felt it was her duty not to criticize at home when things were going so poorly at work...
Tsibliyev's service record bears her out. At 43, he's a veteran air force pilot, a graduate of the three-year Gagarin academy at Star City and a cosmonaut with 10 years' experience. In 1993 and 1994 he spent 197 days on the Mir station and completed five space walks. When he returned, he was awarded the country's highest honor: Hero of Russia. He also learned that his sister had died while he was aloft. In a melancholy coincidence, he will be told when he lands this time that his stepfather has died, news that has been kept...
...Russian space program, the comeback was supposed to begin this month. Ever since the fall of communism, the agency that gave the world Sputnik, Gagarin and the space station Mir appeared to have fallen too, with slashed budgets leading to fewer launches and worried whispers in the international community that even those missions were dangerously underfinanced. Lately, however, Russia has been funneling all its space resources into the launch of its Mars '96 probe, an unmanned spacecraft designed to orbit the Red Planet, dispatch a quartet of landers to the surface and, perhaps most important, return the country...
...none of his past adventures. Instead of preparing for launch on the balmy shores of Cape Canaveral, the Florida native faced the 18[degrees]F chill of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. When he chatted with crew mates, he spoke the language not of Neil Armstrong but of Yuri Gagarin. And when he tried to follow the American astronauts' ritual of eating a piece of cake before launch, the Russian flight doctors said nyet. Instead, Thagard and his fellow crew members, cosmonauts Vladimir Dezhurov and Gennady Strekalov, carried out a Russian tradition: they urinated on the tires...
...What can we do now?" he asked his assembled experts, noting that the Soviet edge in big rockets enabled Gagarin to circle the earth. "Is there any place where we can catch them? Can we leapfrog...