Word: pods
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...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...
...space officials still believe they can save the station they've got. In July they will launch another Progress ship, this one with electrical cables and repair equipment, and they are devising a plan for the cosmonauts to access the stricken Spektr module in an effort to tap the pod's solar panels and restore power to the rest of the station. Should this fail and Mir's systems collapse completely, the crew could abandon ship in a Soyuz spacecraft docked outside, though they've already had to plunder a bit of the escape pod's precious thruster fuel...