Word: pod
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Driving is a curious combination of public and private acts. A car isolates a driver from the world even as it carries him through it. The sensation of personal power is intoxicating. Sealed in your little pod, you control the climate with the touch of a button, from Arctic tundra to equatorial tropic. The cabin is virtually soundproof. Your "pilot's chair" has more positions than a Barcalounger. You can't listen to that old Sammy Davis Jr. tape at home because your kids will think you're a dweeb, but in the car, the audience roars as you belt...
...back?" asked my brilliant eight-year-old, Zoe. Thus began another Mr. Peabody Night in the Quittner household, with me, Zoe and Ella, 6, cruising the Web in search of infotainment. We piled into the Mac, slipped out onto the Infobahn and, faster than you can say, "Open the pod doors, Hal," found ourselves in the company of Julia...
...rest of the passengers are locked into a conference room and held hostage with the promise that until Radek is released, one hostage will be executed each half hour. What the hijackers don't know is that the President, whom everyone believes has escaped in a special emergency "pod," is beginning a little guerrilla warfare from within the bowels of the plane...
...filmmakers get a lot of small details right, like the look of the onboard conference room (President Clinton arranged a tour for Harrison Ford and director Wolfgang Petersen), but much else is imaginary. That really cool presidential escape pod? The real plane has nothing like it. The parachute deck from which passengers leap to safety? Air Force One doesn't have such a deck. It doesn't even have parachutes--they can't work in a 747's slipstream. The gun locker right near the press area? No way. But who knows--maybe an escape pod is in Bill Clinton...
Nonetheless, when Pathfinder actually reached the upper limits of Mars' wispy atmosphere, it would still have been possible for NASA to put the ship into the rough. The 1,256-lb. polyhedron-shaped pod was screaming toward the planet at 16,600 m.p.h., a speed that caused it to experience deceleration forces nearly 20 times as great as than Earth's gravity. In order to survive, the spaceship had to approach the planet at an angle of about 14.2[degrees]. "Go in too steep and you could crash and burn," says Pathfinder project scientist Matthew Golombek. "Go in too shallow...