Word: planetful
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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CAPE CANAVERAL: Mars Pathfinder's long journey to the red planet must begin, like any other, with a single step. For NASA scientists, that first step was delayed again early Tuesday morning as Pathfinder's scheduled launch was scrubbed again for the second time in as many days. The weather, Monday's culprit, was near-perfect; this time a computer on the ground was to blame, failing with just over a minute remaining in the countdown. A backup computer also would not work, leading officials to suspect a software problem. NASA scientists say they must launch the $196M Pathfinder...
...fallen too, with slashed budgets leading to fewer launches and worried whispers in the international community that even those missions were dangerously underfinanced. Lately, however, Russia has been funneling all its space resources into the launch of its Mars '96 probe, an unmanned spacecraft designed to orbit the Red Planet, dispatch a quartet of landers to the surface and, perhaps most important, return the country to the spacefaring pre-eminence it once enjoyed...
...Star Trek" episode, we would visit the world of Adolenscia. Beaming onto the planet in a fog of cannabis, we would stumble over mountains of discarded jeans, Beatles records and love beads. After five minutes of soaking in the atmosphere, one of our number, probably a faceless engineer of one sort or another, would be seized by a group of crazed teenagers while we looked at our feet. Later, while rescuing the poor engineer, we would learn that teenagers have no regard for justice, other people's feelings or the right way of greeting strangers. Beaming back to the ship...
...achieved in fruit flies and nematodes, they could at least improve our life expectancies--the number of years even our shortened telomeres and caramel-gummed cells would allow us to achieve if illness didn't claim us first. For much of the time our species has been on the planet, that figure is thought to have been a mere 20 years--barely long enough for contemporary people living contemporary lives to move out of their parents' home. The fact that those lives now routinely exceed 80 years is a monumental achievement. A little more progress in studying telomerase, glycosylation...
Captain Jean-Luc Picard is building up a head of righteous steam about the Borg, the evil race that once enslaved Picard and has now infested the Starship Enterprise with plans to do something very naughty to Planet Earth. Well, the Captain will not abandon ship. He will face up to the Borg, he says. "And I will make them pay for what they've done." As Patrick Stewart delivers this line with a majestic ferocity worthy of a Royal Shakespeare Company alumnus, the audience gapes in awe at a special effect more imposing than any ILM digital doodle. Here...