Word: mir
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While the American space program has been crippled since the Challenger disaster in January 1986, Soviet cosmonauts have been gaining invaluable experience aboard the orbiting Salyut and Mir space stations. And though U.S. astronauts are scheduled to return to space this September in the shuttle Discovery, which was wheeled to its Kennedy Space Center launching pad last week, NASA Administrator James Fletcher concedes that the Soviets are now "way ahead of us in manned flight." If each nation goes its own way, he predicts, the Soviets could land humans on Mars at least five years before the U.S. could...
Another possible hazard on a long space journey has its source on planet earth: human nature. Soviet flights have demonstrated that performance levels begin to decrease as the days stretch into months. Cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko, whose 326 days aboard the space station Mir set a space endurance record last year, was down to only two hours of productive work a day toward the end of his eleven-month flight and had become decidedly peevish. "Leave me alone," he once snapped to mission control. "I have a lot of work...
...Soviet Union. For the edification of the ruling class, Nikita Khrushchev denounced the late dictator's terror tactics in a secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956. Intellectuals were allowed a whiff of free air in 1962 when the literary journal Novy Mir published Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novella of Stalin's prison camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. But Arbat is of a different order: it is not only indicative of Mikhail Gorbachev's leash-loosening policies but also an official seal of disapproval on the past. Now every literate Soviet citizen...
Shmelyov, a member of the Institute of Economics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, last year published an article in the Soviet journal Novy Mir that criticized efforts within the Soviet government to hinder Gorbachev's economic reforms...
Sometime next year, when the Soviets launch one of their Proton rockets toward their space station Mir, a pharmaceutical experiment on board could mark a new cooperative era in space. The package, a crystal-growing project, will be the first commercial payload put into orbit for a U.S. company by the Soviets. Glavkosmos, the Soviet civilian space agency, has agreed to conduct several such experiments aboard Mir under a contract with Payload Systems, a Wellesley, Mass., consulting firm. American firms that want to explore low- gravity manufacturing and other space-based technologies are turning to the Soviets because...