Word: rocketings
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...Baekeland, plastics pioneer --Tim Berners-Lee, Internet designer --Rachel Carson, environmentalist --Albert Einstein, physicist --Philo Farnsworth, inventor of electronic television --Enrico Fermi, atomic physicist --Alexander Fleming, bacteriologist --Sigmund Freud, psychoanalyst --Robert Goddard, rocket scientist --Kurt Godel, mathematician --Edwin Hubble, astronomer --John Maynard Keynes, economist --The Leakey Family, anthropologists --Jean Piaget, child psychologist --Jonas Salk, virologist --William Shockley, solid-state physicist --Alan Turing, computer scientist --James Watson & Francis Crick, molecular biologists --Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher --The Wright Brothers, visionary aviators...
...begin this tale of Chinese spying, American bungling and diplomatic trembling, but let's take the day in 1955 when Shanghai-born Qian Xuesen goes home. He had fled the Japanese occupation of China and landed at M.I.T., then earned a Ph.D. at Caltech, where he joined a rocket-research group to pioneer supersonic aerodynamics and thin-shell-stability theory for ballistic missiles. At the university's prestigious Jet Propulsion Lab, he helped design Private A, the first U.S. solid-fuel missile that worked. Then he was invited into the U.S. Army as a colonel to fashion the Titan ICBM...
...launch of Loral's Intelsat 708 communications satellite in Sichuan province in February 1996 was a fiery disaster. The Chinese-made Long March rocket that was supposed to propel the American satellite into space crashed into a hillside 22 sec. after lift-off and exploded, raining flaming rocket fuel and red-hot shards of the 3-ton satellite on a nearby village. China initially said six villagers choked or burned to death, and later upped the number to 56, but U.S. estimates put the fatalities closer...
...experts, headed by a top Loral official, was tapped to investigate. It drew up a preliminary report on specific reasons the Long March may have failed--and faxed it over to the Chinese. This technical feedback, a federal investigation concluded, may have helped China improve the accuracy of its rocket and missile programs. The Defense Department found that Loral and Hughes, another satellite company on the committee, had engaged in a "serious export-control violation" by performing an unlicensed defense service. The State Department asked the Department of Justice to consider criminal prosecution...
...says Hughes spokesman Richard Dore. The information Hughes is criticized for sharing with the Chinese, he says, "was certainly not of a sensitive, national-security nature." Loral chairman Bernard Schwartz insisted to shareholders last week that his company didn't help the Chinese discover what went wrong with their rocket, but simply reviewed China's own analysis. In general, though, it may actually serve American strategic interests to have China use U.S. technology. "There are lots of reasons why we'd want the Chinese to make phone calls on open equipment that we sold them rather than closed equipment that...