Word: mile
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Still, Dream No. 1 is simply to get the shuttle up, into orbit and then safely back to earth on a 2.8-mile-long landing strip at the Kennedy Space Center or another at Edwards Air Force Base in California?or even, in an emergency, one at the White Sands Missile Test Range in New Mexico. Fulfilling this feat cannot be breezily taken for granted. One sobering fact is that the Columbia, unlike every other U.S. spacecraft, will be launched without having undergone unmanned test flights in space; to bring it back alive, the astronauts must go along...
According to U.S. experts, a 20-megaton nuclear warhead, 1,000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, detonated over Boston would destroy everything within a four-mile radius. Up to ten miles away from ground zero, fire storms would devastate all buildings and trees. Of the 3 million inhabitants of metropolitan Boston, 2.2 million would be killed outright. Almost every survivor would be maimed, burned or in shock. Of the 6,000 physicians in the area, only 900 would be fit enough to treat the injured. In time, survivors would develop new and virtually incurable ailments...
Pacific Palisades was anything but pacific that night. Parents on the advisory council for the local public schools were angrily debating plans for a court-mandated busing program. When Dave Thomsen, 36, a management consultant, objected to shipping small children 20 miles away to school, someone shouted, "Thomsen, if you don't like the way Los Angeles schools are run, why don't you just leave?" Thomsen walked out, followed by half a dozen parents. "If this were 200 years ago," he said, "we'd be starting our own school." So they did, a mile away from...
...suddenly. Rita Schwinghamer saw a newspaper story announcing that the town would be sold at auction the following day by its owners, a family of local ranchers. "We thought it would be a good idea to buy," says Rita. They did not have time to visit Navajo, a 250-mile drive from Phoenix, but did look it up on a map. Their bid of $615,000 was the best submitted by eleven prospective buyers, including a Baltimore nightclub owner who wanted to turn the town into a haven for retired strippers...
While the U.S. remains traumatized by the Three Mile Island incident, other industrialized nations are moving rapidly in the field of nuclear power. The most aggressive program now belongs to France, which plans to draw 75% of its electricity from the atom by 1990. In 1983 France will complete work on its massive 1,200-megawatt Super Phenix, the country's second fast-breeder reactor. France also leads in developing types of nuclear-waste disposal technology...