Word: major
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...June 20, NASA's team members used up precious bursts of the spacecraft's dwindling propellant to turn its nose horizontally by 90° and into a sideways position, which exerts increased drag against its forward movement. That change gave NASA its best chance of some final control. Explained Cindy Major, 27, one of the Houston monitors: "There is more pressure now because the attitude of the spacecraft is more sensitive. There is no room for error...
...before Columbia or any of the three other orbiters that Rockwell International is building for NASA can undertake such projects, major problems must be overcome. One difficulty: finishing the laborious job of affixing 40,000 or so silica foam tiles to the orbiter's outer skin. These shield it from the blazing temperatures (nearly 3,000° F) that the ship will encounter when it re-enters the atmosphere and glides to a landing at either the Kennedy Space Center or Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. A more serious difficulty: ironing the bugs out of the shuttle...
...trying to buy bargaining time with firepower, but without much success. Early in the week, guerrilla forces added the strategic highway town of Sebaco to their growing list of occupied places. They also destroyed the last national guard garrison in Matagalpa and closed in on Chinandega, one of two major cities in northern Nicaragua not controlled by the rebels. In a desperate attempt to break the Sandinista noose that was tightening around Managua, Somoza launched a major attack against Masaya, 20 miles south of the capital; the government offensive included heavy bombing and strafing as well as the deployment...
Meanwhile, the Carter Administration continued its scramble to devise a political solution that would be acceptable to both Somoza and the Sandinista-sponsored Junta of the Government of National Reconstruction. Washington's major worry about the junta, which set up temporary headquarters in a bungalow in San José, Costa Rica, is that two of its five members are leftists who may want to establish a Cuban-style Marxist regime in Managua. Hoping to ensure a more broad-based, and thus more democratic, future government for Nicaragua, Washington two weeks ago sent its new ambassador, Lawrence Pezzullo, to Managua...
Whatever the composition of a post-Somoza government, it will inherit a ravaged country. Nicaragua today is a wasteland plagued by food shortages and looting, and only time and hundreds of millions of dollars will revive it. The country's major industries, located primarily on an eight-mile stretch of the Pan American Highway near the capital, have been destroyed by the government bombings directed against the guerrillas who were camped there two weeks ago. More serious is the destruction of Nicaragua's crops: agriculture normally provides 80% of the country's foreign exchange. This year...