Word: lunar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...easy to forget the moon. The images of NASA's celebrated lunar landings are lasered onto the national retina, and perhaps no two things are better remembered than the sister ships that made the trips: the cone-shaped Apollo command module and the leggy lunar lander. If NASA has its way, those kinds of spacecraft will be flying again soon. They will not, however, be your daddy's moonships...
...lunar lander will be similarly improved, with updated electronics and materials. It too will be a larger ship than its predecessor, big enough to carry all four astronauts down to the surface while the mother ship idles empty in lunar orbit. That not only gets the most bang for the exploratory buck but also eliminates the lonely specter of the single astronaut who used to be left to mind the orbiter while the others went prospecting below...
...rockets--both adapted from shuttle engines--will get all this hardware into space. The larger of the two will loft the lunar lander and other equipment into Earth orbit. A second, smaller rocket will follow, carrying the CEV. The crew vehicle and the lander will then link up and fly off to the moon...
...Indian astronauts drinking sodas on the moon. But backbreaking poverty remains all too evident, the country still has only 3,000 km of freeway, and finding enough water to drink is an annual battle for tens of millions. (Oh, and there are no real-life plans for an Indian lunar landing.) There's a handy Hindu concept to explain these paradoxes. Maya means wonder, as in Mayanagri (city of dreams), the Hindi nickname for Bombay. It also denotes a willful fantasy - of the kind, for example, that would have a U.S. President last week expressing his "joy" at seeing...
...billion Trips made by Chinese for the lunar New Year holiday, which began Jan. 29--the largest annual migration of humans...