Word: guiana
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Just offshore lies Devil's Island, once the world's most dreaded penal colony. A short distance away, piranha-infested rivers course through the rain forest. Yet out of this equatorial backwater on the steamy coast of French Guiana last week roared a gleaming, cream-colored three-stage rocket emblazoned with the flags of eleven European nations. The fiery liftoff, heard for miles around, was a noisy, jubilant awakening for an independent space effort in faraway Europe...
...long Ariane rocket rose into high earth orbit, it evoked multilingual cheers from technicians at France's Guiana Space Center and from European space officials watching a huge TV monitor outside Paris ("Très jolie!" "Excellent trajectory!"). The rocket carried a European weather observatory called Meteosat 2, an Indian communications satellite and a packet of heat-measuring devices. The flawless launch marked the first time the European Space Agency (ESA) had sent major payloads into orbit with its own booster...