Word: probe
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...booster. Ever since the Challenger blew up less than two minutes after liftoff in January 1986, killing all seven astronauts aboard, the agency has seemed lost in space. Shuttle launches have been delayed by mechanical glitches more often than not. Satellites have mysteriously stopped transmitting while in orbit. Space probes have broken down en route to Jupiter and Mars. Along with the setbacks came a crisis in the spirit of space adventure -- a loss of vision and will to probe the unknown reaches of the solar system and the universe. "How do you follow putting people on the moon?" asks...
...NASA has shied away from anything but thoroughly proven electronics and other devices, figuring that a single failure could endanger an entire satellite full of instruments. That is precisely what engineers think happened to the Mars Observer last summer, when a defective transistor evidently killed a $1 billion space probe. With only a few high-tech instruments per satellite, any failures would affect only a small piece of the program...
Where does all that leave NASA's more traditional strengths, deep-space science and human space flight? Diminished, perhaps, but not eliminated. Interplanetary spacecraft can be shrunk and adapted to serve both science and industry. Take the Pathfinder probe. Costing a reasonable $150 million, this ; robotic land rover will parachute to the surface of Mars in 1997 and roam around sampling the planet's atmosphere and geology. Says Larry Dumas, deputy director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, where Pathfinder is being developed: "You're getting back to a scale of spacecraft that we really haven't seen...
Their story is paralleled by the investigative crew (Laura Dern and Clint Eastwood) sent out on their trail. In their adventures, we learn about Haynes' personal history and ultimately the psychological motives for his actions, as the investigators probe his case history and Red sheds some light on his own past dealings with Haynes...
...they have to change -- and most accept that only reluctantly -- Cubans are determined to change in their own way. No matter where you go on the island, what stratum of society you probe, you hear the same mantra: the achievements of the revolution. What they call the revolution is not communism, not socialist ideology, not even veneration for Fidel. "The achievements of the revolution" is code for cradle-to-grave health care, free and universal education, and generous social-security payments. Castro brought these benefits to millions who had almost nothing before the revolution, and after 34 years they...