Word: liftoff
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...taking photographs, naps, and at one point producing a tiny Chinese flag?an iconic image that would soon be broadcast to 1.3 billion fellow citizens back home. The mission-control room outside Beijing burst into cheers, already buoyed by a message from President Hu Jintao who announced that the liftoff was "the glory of our great motherland." Then, Yang fished around and produced another flag, this time a pale blue one bearing the emblem of the United Nations, and held it up beside the red Chinese ensign...
...pledge to help track down the group's kidnappers. Space Tragedy BRAZIL A rocket exploded on its launchpad at the Alcantara Launch Center, killing 21 people and injuring 20. Those caught in the blast were mostly technicians carrying out final tests just days before the rocket's scheduled liftoff. Triggered by an accidental ignition of one of the rocket's four engines, the catastrophe marks Brazil's third failed attempt since 1997 to become the first Latin American nation to launch satellites into space. High Seas Chase THE SOUTHERN OCEAN An Australian customs ship and a South African polar vessel...
...scorching temperatures caused by the friction of reentry.) But I think that explanation is unlikely, because the tile-loss would have had to have been quite substantial for that to become possible. You'll hear a lot in the next few days about things falling off the shuttle during liftoff. But it often happens that they lose a few tiles, and I'd be surprised if it happened on a scale that could make an accident of this type possible...
...Achilles heel has always been liftoff, and the dangers posed by massive fuel load involved. Reentry has, of course, always been a difficult part of the space program. But this is, in fact, our first fatal accident on reentry. Apollo 13 is remembered as our most difficult ever reentry, but the ship and crew survived. The Soviets lost a crew on reentry in 1970 after an oxygen leak that caused the cosmonauts to suffocate on the way down. Reentry is a very difficult process, but the Russians mastered it in 1961 and we did the same a few years later...
Within moments of liftoff, the infrared sensors on a Pentagon satellite perched 22,000 miles above the earth should pick up the rocket's flaming plume. The satellite will alert ground-based radars in Hawaii and Kwajalein, which will begin searching the northeastern skies for the intruder. In a fully deployed system, early-warning radars in Alaska, California, Britain, Greenland and Massachusetts would get the alarm. Updates on the target's path will pour into the U.S. Space Command's outpost at Cheyenne Mountain, Colo. Computers there will assemble a "weapons task plan" based on the incoming weapon's trajectory...