Word: orbitals
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shuttle Atlantis is once again in orbit - this time for a final servicing visit to the venerable Hubble Space Telescope - and once again the world is sweating out reports of damage to the spacecraft's thermal tiles caused by debris shed from the external fuel tank during liftoff on Monday. It was just that kind of mishap that doomed the shuttle Columbia and its seven-member crew back in 2003, allowing superheated gases to penetrate the ship during re-entry and causing it to disintegrate. That was the second shuttle to be lost in flight, after the explosion of Challenger...
...does turn out that the damage is more serious than that, it will be occurring on a particularly bad mission. Most of the shuttles' trips to orbit these days are for visits with the ISS. The station is a roomy place - by spacecraft standards at least - and if a shuttle's underside is found to be too badly damaged to allow a safe re-entry, the astronauts could simply bunk down in the ISS until another shuttle or Russian Soyuz ships could bring them home...
...Canadian lumberjack with an indigenous girlfriend (the beguiling Lynn Collins, who has played Ophelia and Juliet and knows how to telegraph troubled love). He should know he cannot escape his roiled physical and psychological destiny; there ain't no sanity claws. Soon he's drawn back into the orbit of Stryker, whose plan is to pour adamantium into Logan's system, giving our boy the power to fight and destroy his murderous bro. "We're going to make you indestructible," Stryker says in one of his many generic Dr. Frankenstein lines. "But first we have to destroy you." And then...
...Joyce Tyldesley, an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool and author of Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt, published last year. It's a symbol that has not always been flattering. Centuries of Western literature evoked Cleopatra as a lustful seductress, corrupting the stoic Roman men who strayed into her orbit. European empires seized upon this metaphor of temptation and decadence: after Napoleon's ill-fated invasion of Egypt, the French government issued a commemorative coin nevertheless, depicting France as a virile Roman conqueror standing over a bare-breasted, feminine figure of the East...
...North Korea Rocket Launch Fizzles In a move U.S. President Barack Obama called "provocative," North Korea fired a long-range rocket that crashed into the ocean. Pyongyang claimed it had successfully put a communications satellite in orbit, but experts in the U.S. and elsewhere said the mission, which violated a 2006 U.N. resolution, was a failure...