Word: planes
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...experienced an array of problems--engine malfunctions, damage to the heat-shielding tiles--that have nearly produced other disasters. Seeing this, some analysts proposed that the shuttle be phased out, that cargo launches be carried aboard by far cheaper, unmanned, throwaway rockets and that NASA build a small "space plane" solely for people, to be used on those occasions when men and women are truly needed in space...
Switching to unmanned rockets for payload launching and a small space plane for those rare times humans are really needed would cut costs, which is why aerospace contractors have lobbied against such reform. Boeing and Lockheed Martin split roughly half the shuttle business through an Orwellian-named consortium called the United Space Alliance. It's a source of significant profit for both companies; United Space Alliance employs 6,400 contractor personnel for shuttle launches alone. Many other aerospace contractors also benefit from the space-shuttle program...
...strange how we glimpse the impossible only when it fails. How can this spacecraft exist, one that leaves the earth like a ballistic missile, a fragile plane strapped to half a million gallons of explosive fuel, but two weeks later returns as a glider, swooping in wide S turns back to earth under nature's power alone? The engineers who build these things know that so much has to work so perfectly and with such precise timing that we should expect them to fail catastrophically every 100 missions or so. That's why NASA must be America's most optimistic...
...called Tanna's chiefs together and predicted the coming of new and strange objects and ideas. "He said there is a big boat coming, a plane and the icebox, the truck, and this place will be different," says senior man Johnson Kuanu. Some new things, he told them, would be good, including parts of Christianity, and some bad. "He said we had to be careful." Along a winding track leading from the banyan, a wind-blown cliff looks down to where the forest surges to meet the sand. This is where John Frum is believed to have first appeared...
...hole about 8 inches in diameter to look out. I was the weaponeer-basically, I was in charge of the bomb. We flew to the rendezvous point, where we'd meet two other airplanes one with instruments to measure the blast and another holding observers. The observer plane didn't show up. We circled, and after about 35 minutes, I said to Sweeney, "Damn it, proceed to the first target...