Word: rocketing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This does not speak, however, to the unforced skill with which the star manipulates his 52 assistants. A masterly marksman, he can scale an ordinary playing card across the stage with such force that it pierces a watermelon, and can rocket a card to decapitate a plastic duck. He can make a card rise from the deck as if by levitation, or tear one up and make it reappear whole. In Jay's supple hands, what is commonly known as a card trick is something approaching art. To watch him work a deck is to see him write haiku...
Pentagon officials are distressed over reports that Iran is trying to buy a sophisticated underwater mine from China. The rocket-propelled antiship mine, dubbed an EM53, can be planted on the sea floor and then propelled by rocket engine toward a target ship...
...these are not the 1960s, and in recent years NASA's reputation has plummeted faster than a burned-out rocket 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...
...that putting humans into space remains extraordinarily dangerous. Both the Office of Technology Assessment and NASA itself, quietly, have agreed that the chances of catastrophic failure for the shuttle are currently 1 in 78 -- not exactly reassuring for the astronauts. Among the potential dangers: the shuttle's solid-fuel rocket boosters emit irregular bursts of extra power that put stresses on the ascending shuttle. The space agency twice overrode its own safety rules to let launches go forward. It doesn't have to do that anymore -- not because the boosters have been improved, but because the rules have been relaxed...
...North's manpower advantage over the South, which has only 633,000 active armed forces. What is new is an appreciation of the North's heavy investment in modern artillery, massing most of its 4,500 self-propelled guns and 2,000 mobile rocket launchers within range of Seoul...