Word: launch
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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With nonmusical plays routinely costing $1 million to mount on Broadway and sometimes soaring to twice that, producers are increasingly tempted by one- person shows. Simply staged and lit, they are cheaper both to launch and to keep running, and every season brings one. Broadway last week had three: Tracey Ullman impersonating '50s stage mother Florence Aadland in a tour de force that has just closed; Jackie Mason opining about almost everything; and Julie Harris portraying writer Isak Dinesen. Off-Broadway, Eileen Atkins appears as Virginia Woolf. Artistically, these shows recall the theater's primal origins in storytelling. At best...
Astronomers will get a chance to answer some of these questions -- and more -- over the next two to eight years as a result of last week's NASA launch of the Gamma Ray Observatory on board the space shuttle Atlantis. The 17.5-ton GRO will circle the earth at a height of 450 km (280 miles), mapping the heavens as it peers to the very edges of the universe. "Gamma-ray scientists are starved for information," says Richard Lingenfelter, an astronomer at the University of California at San Diego. Data gathered on such violent but poetic-sounding celestial bodies...
Gamma rays are the most powerful type of radiation, thought to have been created during the explosion that launched the universe and its subsequent expansion. As distant heavenly bodies continue to collapse and explode, the only signals earth may receive of this activity are in the form of gamma rays. For example, gamma-ray bursters have been measured releasing more energy in a matter of seconds than the sun does in thousands of years. Since they carry no electric charge, gamma rays can plow through space unchanged, giving scientists a clear record of cosmic events. The atmosphere shields the earth...
...Better still, the atomic engines would be handy on a manned mission to Mars. Nonetheless, the program's political problems may be insurmountable. The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island shook America's confidence in nuclear technology, and the Challenger explosion dramatically demonstrated the vulnerability of space launches. Not surprisingly, many scientists are bothered by the idea of putting these two technologies together. In 1989, antinuclear activists, protesting potential "Chernobyls in the skies," organized the first civil-disobedience demonstrations aimed at halting a U.S. space shot. Their target: NASA's Galileo spacecraft, an interplanetary scientific mission that used...
...Multiple Launch Rocket System. The MLRS, which is mobile and can rapidly fire surface-to-surface missiles more than 20 miles, had also been doomed to no new purchases next year. Now 20,286 of the rockets used by the launchers will be bought for $152 million. The Army already has 312,057 of the missiles on hand...