Word: liftoff
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Louis Gallois and Christian Streiff LIFTOFF...
...NASA knows it may never be able to completely keep every inch of the shuttle fuel tank's polyurethene foam intact during takeoffs. In this flight, the foam cracked and dislodged before liftoff, all after NASA decided to eliminate 37 pounds of it in a new tank coverage design before Discovery was rolled out to the launchpad. It was a move Hale called the "largest aerodynamic change that we have made to the space shuttle since it first flew...
North Korea's test of its long-range Taepodong-2 missile early Tuesday morning was a spectacular failure, plunging into the ocean 40 seconds after liftoff. But the poor quality of the saber didn't do much to calm the diplomatic fury set off by Pyongyang's saber rattling. Most notable, however, was what was missing from the response. After weeks of talk of harsh rhetoric and debate in the media over preemptive military strikes to knock out the test missile, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday called for the issue to be discussed by the six-party forum...
...Should the liftoff take place as planned, it will be another 15 months before the spacecraft settles into its low, circular orbit around Mars. After that, it will have a full two years to conduct its surveillance work - a long life for a robot ship, and one that should return a rich trove of science...
...mission control inside the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the sense of calm was noticeably higher than that during liftoff nearly a month ago when two minutes into the flight it was learned that foam debris which doomed Columbia had also fallen from Discovery's detachable fuel tank...