Word: rocketings
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...Mogadishu street where Cliff Wolcott died on Oct. 3 last year doesn't even have a name. For Wolcott, one of 15 helicopter pilots who took part in the ill-fated operation aimed at capturing warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid, luck ran out when he spotted several armed Somalis firing rocket-propelled grenades at his Black Hawk attack helicopter. Turning the craft broadside to give his gunners a bet- ter shot, Wolcott became a perfect target. A grenade exploded into the side of the chopper. "Super six-one is going down," he yelled into his headset, "Six-one is going...
...hold his aircraft steady while 15 Rangers "fast-roped" to the ground by sliding down a 40-ft. line at a rate only slightly more controlled than a free fall. In the cockpit, Jollota could hear the thunk-thunk-thunk of his rotors punctuated by the deadly whoosh of rocket-propelled grenades. With two Rangers still on the ropes, the chopper took a direct hit that chewed holes in a main rotor blade. The steel-nerved pilot bit off the impulse to flee. "It was remarkable," said a crewman aboard a nearby helicopter. "They just sat there as the RPGS...
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...
...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...