Word: mir
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Iraqi soldiers also reclaimed a string of mountain peaks on the northeastern frontier, placing them in good position to recapture the strategic Kurdish city of Halabja. Iranian leaders tried to sound optimistic, but they could not hide the reversal of their fortunes. Said Prime Minister Mir Hussein Mousavi: "War is a complicated and technical matter, and naturally at a certain point retreat will help the final victory...
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 space doctors seem more sanguine. While no American has stayed in space for more than three months, the Soviets have repeatedly staged manned flights of longer duration, capped by the 326-day stay of Cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko last year aboard the orbiting space station Mir. "The experience of that flight," says Dr. Arkadi Ushakov of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, "testifies that we should be optimistic about long-duration space flight. Our knowledge in the field of weightlessness is growing, and we are learning what countermeasures need to be taken to ensure health and safety...
...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...