Word: mir
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...total dependence on manned launch vehicles to deploy spacecraft, the U.S. has been forced to play a catch-up game. Since January 1986, the Soviets have launched scores of satellites, sent two / scientific probes to Mars, and ferried a stream of cosmonauts between the earth and the space station Mir -- all with the aid of antiquated but tried- and-true expendable rockets. In the process, they have pushed far ahead of the U.S. in knowledge of the effects of extended space flight on humans...
Trouble struck the Soyuz TM-5 spacecraft soon after it left the Soviet orbiting space station Mir and started on its way home. The cosmonauts had just completed a six-day mission in which they performed routine experiments with the two Mir cosmonauts, who are spending a year in space. Lyakhov, 47, and Mohmand, 29, an Afghan pilot, had returned to the two-stage Soyuz capsule for the three-hour trip back to the Soviet Union, leaving Physician Valeri Polyakov behind to continue monitoring the health of the station crew...
...successfully completed the separation from Mir early Tuesday morning, then crawled into the cramped re-entry vehicle and jettisoned the compartment of the Soyuz craft that contained toilet facilities and living space. They had just settled in to await the firing of the computer-controlled rocket that was programmed to decelerate the spacecraft from its orbital speed for the descent into the atmosphere. Accounts of what happened next differ, but indications are that as the ship passed through a twilight region of space between day and night, an infrared sensor, which fixes the spacecraft's position in relation to earth...
...television pictures beamed to earth last week from the Soviet space station Mir were a series of firsts: the first pictures from space of Astronaut Abdul Ahad Mohmand, 29, an Afghan air force pilot who rocketed from Baikonur space center in Soviet Central Asia to a midweek space-station rendezvous, accompanied by two Soviet cosmonauts; the first pictures beamed by Soviet television of an Afghan orbiting the earth while reading passages from...
Whatever combination of forces was at work, they came to a head on July 16. That evening, according to U.S. intelligence sources, there was a meeting in Tehran of senior political officials, including Montazeri, Rafsanjani, Prime Minister Mir Hussein Mousavi and Ahmed Khomeini, the Ayatullah's eldest son. With Montazeri providing crucial support to Rafsanjani, his rival, the group decided to recommend that the elder Khomeini agree to the cease-fire. The next day they convened again and received what Rafsanjani described as a "historic and important decision of the Imam," presumably similar to the message later read on Iranian...