Word: pads
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rocket that soared upward from its launching pad in Texas last week was not very long (37 ft.) or, by modern standards, very fancy. The flight of Conestoga I, an arc 192 miles up and 326 miles out over the Gulf of Mexico, was perfect but fleeting, less than eleven minutes from blastoff to splashdown. The dummy payload was just a 1,100-lb. tank of water. Said Donald ("Deke") Slayton, the former astronaut who was flight director for the launch: "We didn't have a single anomaly in flight...
Hannah, 60, a wealthy Houston land developer and space buff, had failed on his first try: a year ago, near the same Matagorda launching pad, SSI's inaugural rocket, built for $1.2 million by a young self-taught engineer, blew up during a test of its liquid-fuel engine. Chastened, Hannah got serious. He hired an experienced California contractor who had built 22 rockets for the Government, got a solid-fuel Minuteman motor from the National Aeronautics and Space Ad ministration (cost: $365,000), and hired Slayton and seven other full-time employees to help...
...want to wait for cheaper space on NASA'S booked-up space shuttle. Hannah says a dozen energy companies are interested (they might conduct geological surveys from space), and SSI hopes to have commercial satellites orbiting two years from now, and monthly launches from a planned Hawaiian pad...
...polyglot refuse heap of humanity remains. Los Angeles is a Japanized nighttown of sleaze and silicon, fetid steam and perpetual rain. This baroque Tomorrowland juggles images from a dozen yesterdays: walk out of the rain and into a 1940s world of overhead fan blades and women in shoulder-pad jackets moving to the cadence of a keening alto sax. The filthy streets are clogged with Third World losers and carnivores, while 10 ft. above them the police cars hover, monitoring the future as it molders into chaos...
...Lebanon. The vetoed resolution, explained U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Jeane Kirkpatrick, was "not sufficiently balanced." Summing up the U.S. attempt at evenhandedness, a State Department spokesman declared: "Israel will have to withdraw its forces from Lebanon, and the Palestinians will have to stop using Lebanon as a launching pad for attacks on Israel...