Word: maines
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Cambridge, Mass., who designed the new retail spaces. "This is Washington, D.C. We wanted to maintain Union Station as a transportation center." Until Amtrak service is fully restored, within a year, rail passengers will continue to use a dreary annex built in 1975, when Park Service officials turned the main station into a tourist-information bureau. The National Visitor Center, both conceptually and physically a bust, was closed in 1981. Soon the place was overrun by bums, rats, pigeons, toadstools...
...Soviet President Andrei Gromyko, 79. In granting his "request to retire," the Central Committee cleared the way for Gorbachev to step into the office, which he did on Saturday. Gorbachev further strengthened his hand by shuffling off Yegor Ligachev, the party's former guardian of ideology and his main rival within the Politburo, to a new commission on agriculture, the quagmire of Soviet bureaucracy. According to Western observers, Gorbachev won Politburo approval of the shake-up while % Ligachev was conveniently out of Moscow on vacation...
...Hauck promptly answered with a laconic "Roger go," bringing a smattering of applause and cheers that grew into a chorus near the two-minute mark, when the spacecraft successfully jettisoned its two spent solid rocket boosters. But experienced space observers did not relax until Discovery shut down its three main engines 6 1/2 minutes later, shucked off its external fuel tank, then slipped safely into orbit about 180 miles above the earth a half hour later. Declared elated space engineer John Kaltenbach: "This was the one that had to fly. It looks damn good. Oh, it just feels so good...
...hours during the Thursday-morning countdown, however, the shuttle shuffle appeared destined for a scrub. All week NASA technicians had isolated small glitches, from a tiny gas leak on a main engine to a slight scratch on a thruster rocket. Finally they seemed confident that only bad weather might postpone the shuttle's launch. Although launch day dawned bright and sunny, meteorologists warned that the high-altitude winds in the shuttle's flight path, normally unruly in the Cape Canaveral region during late September, had uncharacteristically died down. The problem: Discovery's computers had been programmed to maneuver the craft...
...cost for each launch rose from a promised $10 million to as high as $300 million. In a frantic effort to accelerate its schedule, NASA began to cut corners. Officials at the Marshall Space Flight Center responsible for certifying the launchworthiness of the external tank, the boosters and the main engines of each shuttle began issuing more and more waivers on questionable "criticality" items like the O rings that had shown signs of erosion and charring on earlier flights. In fact Challenger was flown with at least four procedural waivers...