Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...would be enveloped by deadly gases in its glowing tail, people bought comet pills to ward off its effects, and held end-of-the-world gatherings. In 1985, when the comet returns-as it does every three-quarters of a century -it should get a friendlier reception. In fact, NASA is planning a scientific welcoming party in space...
Next to Concorde, Meteor is a paltry piece of goods. The astrophysicists who must save the world from a comet attack include such garden-variety stars as Natalie Wood and Brian Keith (both with Russian accents) and Sean Connery (inexplicably cast as a NASA scientist). Karl Maiden stomps through the film in such a rage that you would think a hotel had refused to honor his traveler's checks. When the comet's "splinters" finally hit earth, wiping out a Swiss ski resort and a drive-in theater in Pisa, all Meteor...
Chester Arthur Kinsman is one of Bova's ideal astronauts. These are not the sterile, blandly patriotic robots projected by NASA flacks, but intensely human and necessarily flawed men--and women--who believe in what they are doing and possess enough independence to reject or exploit bureaucratic maneuvering that surrounds them. As Bova portrays it, the path into space--whether it be military, industrial or political--will be strewn with the carcasses of careers and programs that, regardless of merit, lose behind-the-scenes struggles of power and influence...
...when -did life begin? Cyril Ponnamperuma, 55, a Ceylon-born geochemist at the University of Maryland, has been seeking answers to this question for much of his career. He has created precursors of life in laboratory simulations of the earth's primitive atmosphere and while with NASA in 1970, identified amino acids (the building blocks of protein) in the Murchison meteorite, which had fallen in Australia a year earlier. Last week, at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Washington, Ponnamperuma presented three new pieces of evidence that the processes leading to the formation of life can take...
John Glenn, for example: Wolfe sketches him as a bit of a prig, a jogging, strait-laced Presbyterian driving an underpowered Peugeot, who scolded his colleagues for their after-hours whoopee. The current Senator from Ohio, Wolfe suggests, may have gone to NASA officials in an effort to replace Shepard on the first flight. Others, too, according to Wolfe, would act in ways that demonstrated that "feeling of superiority, appropriate to him and to his kind." Gus Grissom almost certainly blew the hatch too soon, flooding and sinking his capsule, and then stubbornly maintained that the machine "malfunctioned." Scott Carpenter...