Word: rocketings
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...launch pad and rose 150 ft. over the New Mexico desert. Then it suddenly stopped in midair, moved sideways for 350 ft. and started back down, engines firing all the way. At the last moment, four rodlike pods shot out of the tail to ease the bullet-shaped rocket gently to the ground...
...first time a spacecraft had ever come back to earth tailfirst, although similar landings have been made on Mars and the moon. "My jaw dropped," says Tom Williams, director of communications for McDonnell Douglas, the defense contractor that built the odd-looking rocket. "I'd never seen a space vehicle stop on a dime before. It was like something in a monster movie...
...worse time for the Central Intelligence Agency. Just as Congress was debating the size of the intelligence budget for 1994, $1 billion worth of spying equipment disappeared in a flash above Vandenberg Air Force Base -- the costliest space accident since the 1986 Challenger disaster. A new Titan IV rocket carrying a supersecret intelligence-satellite system inexplicably blew up two minutes after launch. Space-spying expert Jeffrey Richelson, author of America's Secret Eyes in Space, called it a "huge embarrassment for the intelligence community...
...worst fallout of the explosion was the doubt it created about the reliability of the newly designed Titan IV booster, on which both the Air Force and CIA are heavily dependent. The 12-story-high booster is the only rocket capable of launching a whole family of space-surveillance systems. Martin Marietta has delivered or has under construction about half of the 41 Titan IVs currently on order. Colonel Frank Stirling, director of the Air Force's Titan IV program, immediately grounded two other boosters scheduled for launch and said the delay could last up to a year...
...frightening and familiar when the guns begin to boom in the Middle East. Was this the start of another Israeli invasion? The end of the peace talks -- again? Israel, which launched the brutal assault in southern Lebanon -- in retaliation, of course, for ambushes on Israeli occupation troops there and rocket attacks on northern Israel -- insisted it was none of the above. Just Operation Accountability, intended to make the guerrillas of Hizballah and Ahmad Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine -- General Command...