Word: launchful
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...also preparing for his book tour, which will begin in mid-September and will take him to 20 cities across the nation. The first event in that launch will be a television interview with Barbara Walters. For that appearance, Powell went to Jamaica to get some TV footage of the land his parents left to come to America. When the book tour and its attendant publicity are over in late October, Powell will no longer be a blank political slate. And at that moment, he will read the polls again to see whether the fuller picture of Colin Powell...
...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...
...details of the movie are striking. The vest always worn by flight director Kranz is delivered to him just before launch, complete with the mission emblem attached to the front pocket. The return trajectory is calculated using a slide rule. The baseball caps given to the astronauts aboard the recovery ship are exactly like the ones that were really worn by the returning spacemen...
...Harris as flight director Gene Kranz and Gary Sinise as Ken Mattingly, who was scrubbed from the mission two days before launch, the grunts of Mission Control are efficient and almost faceless, a Greek chorus busily computing solutions. The astronauts' wives, notably Marilyn Lovell (lustrous Kathleen Quinlan), cope sensibly with despair. Lovell's partners in jeopardy (Bill Paxton as Haise, Kevin Bacon as Swigert) keep things cool, especially when they nearly freeze in their icy cabin. And Hanks provides the anchor. His Lovell--as strong, faithful and emotionally straightforward as Forrest Gump--carries the story like a precious oxygen backpack...
...terrorist raid unprecedented since the Russian civil war of the 1920s, more than 80 Chechens crossed into the neighboring Stavropol territory, concealed in trucks supposedly transporting coffins from the war zone, to launch a daring assault at high noon on the city of Budyonnovsk (pop. 100,000), some 70 miles from the Chechen border. Splitting into squads of five and six, the gunmen -- armed with automatic rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers -- fanned out across the city, joining up, according to Russian security officials, with rebels already in place...