Word: gibsonized
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When James ousted 16-year incumbent Kenneth Gibson in 1986, the new mayor radiated hope for a city still scarred by the 1967 race riot that killed 26 people and left the city a wasteland of empty, brick-strewn lots. His natural charisma bridged social strata. One morning he suavely persuaded a company's executives to remain in Newark, then spied a homeless man on the street. "He bought the guy lunch, gave him a pep talk and told him to clean up and report for work at the sanitation department," recalls a subordinate...
...seemed inconceivable back then that those two fighter pilots would someday be on the same flight crew. Yet when the space shuttle Atlantis roared off the pad at Cape Canaveral last week in America's 100th manned launch, the two men, Robert ("Hoot") Gibson and Anatoli Solovyev, along with four other U.S. astronauts and Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin, were both on board. Their mission was a more ambitious reprise of the earlier Apollo-Soyuz flight: rendezvous and dock with the Russian space station Mir, orbiting 245 miles above the earth...
Atlantis climbed quickly into a matching orbit with Mir and, over the next day or so, slowly closed a 4,000-mile gap with its target. Thursday morning, with the spacecraft 250 ft. apart and orbiting through space at 17,500 m.p.h., Gibson and shuttle pilot Charles Precourt began the delicate and risky maneuvers aimed at linking the two great ships. One careless burst of a thruster jet, and Mir's feathery solar panels could be destroyed; too forceful a bump from Atlantis, and either or both craft could be severely damaged. And if Gibson and Precourt couldn't align...
Sighting through a camera mounted within the shuttle's docking assembly and aiming at a target in Mir's matching equipment, Gibson gently nudged Atlantis toward the Russian station, foot by agonizing foot. At 30 ft. he stopped to make sure the alignment was perfect. It was. As millions watched on live TV and listened to the terse, four-way conversation between the two spaceships and their ground controllers at Houston and Kaliningrad, Atlantis approached to within a few feet, then inches...
Atlantis Commander Hoot Gibson gave a Houston Rockets T-shirt to Cosmonaut Anatoly Solavyev, as theRussian and American crews wrapped up the final day of their joint mission aboard the Mir space stationin a celebratory mood. Pulling on the shirt, Solavyev, who became a Rockets fan while training for the mission at the Johnson Space Center, took advantage of gravity-free conditions to vault over his fellow spacemen. Astronaut Norman Thagard, who celebrated his 52nd birthday aboard the MIR space station feeling like "a lab rat" as fellow astronauts collected blood and other biological samples, said he wished he could...