Word: payloads
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...Aerospatiale of France said they will spend $36 million over the next five years to study the feasibility of a second-generation supersonic jetliner. It is a high-flying ambition. The current Concorde, operated by British Airways and Air France, has a range of 4,000 miles and a payload of just 100 passengers. Concorde II would fly twice the distance carrying as many as 300 passengers. The new plane would streak through the stratosphere at Mach 2.5 (2 1/2 times the speed of sound, or about 1,875 m.p.h., in contrast to the current model's Mach...
...Owned by Intelsat, a Washington-based consortium of 118 countries, , the satellite, which was to handle phone calls and television transmissions, failed to separate on schedule from its booster and tumbled into a useless low orbit. Though Intelsat technicians managed to lift it a bit higher, the five- ton payload nonetheless seemed destined to plunge back to earth within a few months, unless NASA can arrange a rescue by the space shuttle...
NASA and the Defense Department have already begun work on two new launchers to make space-station construction feasible. One is a heavy-lift unmanned rocket for massive payloads. The other is the National Aerospace Plane, or "Orient Express." Smaller than the shuttle, it would take off like an airplane from a runway, soar into space to deliver its human cargo, then return and land. And NASA has plans to convert the present shuttle into a cargo-only model, with a larger payload than the manned version. Together, these launchers would give NASA much needed flexibility...
...space rocket that stalled helplessly on a White Sands, N. Mex., test stand last week seemed to symbolize the fears critics have long expressed about the Strategic Defense Initiative. What fizzled was not the payload -- a satellite designed to generate Buck Rogers-style neutral-particle beams in space -- but a thoroughly conventional solid-fuel Aries booster. Coming after an aborted mission in March using a Delta launcher, the unsuccessful mission crystallized suspicion that SDI is so riddled with potential failures that it will never get off the ground...
...Minister claims that India can produce a nuclear bomb "overnight," though Gandhi said in 1986 that it would take "maybe longer than . . . a few weeks" for India to deploy A-weapons. In February 1988 India successfully tested the Prithvi, a 150-mile-range ballistic missile that can carry a payload of 2,000 lbs., more than enough for a nuclear warhead...