Word: orbitals
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...possibilities back then seemed limitless, and it was easy for Rutan's generation to imagine they would all get to taste zero-gravity one day. It didn't work out that way. After NASA reached the moon in 1969, its focus shifted to unmanned probes, orbital experiments and a costly low-orbit shuttle system. The imagined future of Everyman as astronaut evaporated. This year, more than four decades after Shepard's flight, only two Americans have made the jump into space from U.S. soil--both launched not by NASA but by Rutan's tiny company, known for build-your...
...officials and Taliban fighters and sympathizers in the frontier Pakistani cities of Quetta and Peshawar. Those exiles include Mohammed Omar, the one-eyed mullah who formerly led the Taliban. Pakistan's reluctance, according to a senior Kabul official, stems from its "nostalgia" for when Afghanistan was firmly within its orbit of influence. Letting the Taliban remain free gives Pakistan a card to play if or when the U.S. decides to vacate Afghanistan. "If money and support were to stop from the Pakistani side, the Taliban would be finished," says Mullah "Rocketi," a former Taliban commander who earned his nickname...
...example, he observes, when it was first realized that planets go around the sun, astronomers hoped they might find an underlying principle that would explain why the planets orbit at the precise distances they do. But now we know the orbits are the result of pure chance. The elliptical shapes of planetary orbits, on the other hand, led to the truly profound discovery of Newton's laws of gravity. "My own feeling," says Brian Greene, a superstring theorist at Columbia University and author of the best-selling The Fabric of the Cosmos, "is that we can give a deeper explanation...
...Over Zanzibar on his 22nd orbit, panel lights indicated that one of Cooper's three inverters [which convert battery power to alternating current] had gone dead. He tried to start a second, but could not. Cooper's sole remaining inverter was needed to power cabin-cooling gear on re-entry. Now Cooper would have no automatic aids at all in bringing his capsule down ... It was up to Cooper?with some dramatic help from the calm, crisp voice of [ground liaison] John Glenn ... Cooper and Glenn ran swiftly, surely down a check list of the operations Cooper must perform...
...nomination. Their latest (and Jaoui's second turn behind the camera after The Taste of Others) is Comme une Image (Look at Me), the story of Lolita, an awkward young woman, and her father, Etienne, a self - obsessed celebrity author. As Lolita brings other people into her father's orbit, their efforts to become part of his clique cause marriages to crumble and friendships to implode. Darker and more nuanced than The Taste of Others, Look at Me picked up the Best Screenplay award at Cannes and knocked Steven Spielberg's The Terminal out of the No. 1 spot when...