Word: lifeboat
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Aboard Mir, "Get in the spacecraft" meant get in the Soyuz lifeboat, and get in the Soyuz lifeboat meant big trouble. There had not been a day in the 11 years Mir had flown that a sleeping Soyuz hadn't been parked at its docking port, ready to carry the crew back to Earth in the event of an emergency. But in those 11 years, there hadn't been a day when such an emergency had actually arisen. Now it looked as if it were going to, and it would be Michael Foale, the American guest, who would have...
...save their station and perhaps themselves, they would have to get moving fast. Though the thrusters on Mir were powerless to make the sweeping maneuver necessary to orient the solar panels, the thrusters on the Soyuz might not be. Like a pickup truck pushing a tractor trailer, the little lifeboat just might be able to nudge the mammoth Mir far enough for its panels to catch a shaft of sunlight...
THURSDAY, AUG. 21 Strictly speaking, Foale did not have to help Tsibliyev and Lazutkin into the Soyuz lifeboat. The cosmonauts, after all, had been certified to fly the Soyuz line of ships long before Foale had even got his first close look at one. What's more, even if they had needed assistance, there were other people aboard the station today to handle the job. Earlier in the week, cosmonauts Anatoli Solovyev and Pavel Vinogradov had arrived in a Soyuz of their own to relieve the two Russians. Foale would be going home too, but his ride aboard...
...academically in a private school, no one needs a study to show that most private schools are safer and more orderly. For inner-city parents, vouchers can represent salvation from a system in perpetual disrepair, even if they offer just a fraction of poor children a way into the lifeboat of private schooling...
...Force, a happy 50th, and some condolences. Empathize civilian-style along with Jimmy Stewart in 1966's Flight of the Phoenix. It's Lifeboat in the desert, or maybe a grim, post-war Gilligan's Island, with Stewart as an old-dog Skipper forced to yield to the "push-button world" and the ice-cold young German (the Professor?) who embodies it. You'll wince, maybe proudly, when Stewart tells us that "the little men with the slide rules and the computers are going to inherit the Earth." And then consider that this week, the whole thing could have been...