Word: gemini
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...Houston, Texas. Early needle-nosed spaceships, designed for as little resistance as possible, were almost impossible to protect from the heat of re-entry. Faget designed a blunt nose for the Mercury, which created a shock wave that deflected the heat, a design feature later used on the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft, as well as the Soviet Soyuz...
...DIED. GORDON COOPER, 77, U.S. astronaut who flew the last mission of the pioneering Mercury space program; in Ventura, California. Cooper set records for time spent and distance traveled in space; his 191-hour Gemini mission in 1963 helped demonstrate that a future moon trip was possible. With his career cut short because of what he called "a lot of in-house politics," he retired from the Air Force in 1970 and became president of a company that tested and raced cars and pioneered the installation of jet engines. Once asked who the best fighter pilot was, he answered...
...immeasurable. DIED. GORDON COOPER, 77, one of NASA's original seven astronauts; in Ventura, California. Famously casual in his approach to pilot training - and famously brilliant at it nonetheless - Cooper flew twice into orbit, as the sole pilot of the last Mercury mission in 1963 and as commander of Gemini 5 in 1965. For a time, Cooper held the world record for time logged in space, 222 hours. In the lunar program, NASA preferred more by-the-book pilots, and Cooper never got a trip to the moon - a loss more to NASA, many space historians believe, than to Cooper...
...part of the solution - the number has grown exponentially in the past five years in Europe - but aren't dependable. There's an equally urgent need for investment in transmission and distribution, often the chief culprit in blackouts. Colette Lewiner, a Paris-based energy expert at consultants Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, points to two problems. Unlike power generation, transmission and distribution networks are "natural" monopolies that can't be liberalized; it makes no sense to build competing electric lines. Regulators have pressured transmission companies to cut costs, and the easiest way to do that is to stop investing. "Now there...
...thing, it would take a real commitment. Remember the national aerospace plane? No? Neither does anyone else, but this was one of the start-and-stop projects on which NASA lavished dead-end research dollars in the 1980s. "From 1961 to 1973," says Zubrin, "we had Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Ranger, Mariner, Surveyor, and we developed almost all the space technology we have today. What did we accomplish in the '90s? We flew half-a-dozen robotic probes and 60 shuttle missions...