Word: rocketted
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With North Vietnamese rocket and artillery fire raking their converted tennis-court helipad, TIME Correspondents Roy Rowan and William Stewart, along with Photographers Dirck Halstead and Mark Godfrey, choppered out of Tan Son Nhut airport last Tuesday shortly before Communist advance units entered downtown "Ho Chi Minh city." Rowan's and Stewart's accounts of the final American evacuation, cabled from the U.S.S. Blue Ridge in the South China Sea, appear in this week's Indochina cover section...
...First the airport was hit by enemy rocket fire. Then, without us even firing a shot, the province chief gave the order to disperse. Everyone fled; even wounded soldiers got out of their hospital beds and walked off. On the road, I saw armed soldiers forcing people out of their cars and countless instances of theft; some soldiers were even carting sacks of fertilizer and driving 100 tractors out of a warehouse owned by a relative of President Thieu. Saigon is going to go too; wherever we go, the Communists are going to get there...
...control that the Communists were not far away. At midweek units of the North Vietnamese army and its Viet Cong allies started probing key government positions in the Saigon area. Often, as at Tay Ninh, 50 miles northwest of Saigon, the attacks were no more than random artillery or rocket barrages. At Tan An, which straddles strategic Highway 4 and is only 20 miles southwest of Saigon, Viet Cong commandos overran the airstrip and held it for eight hours before government troops drove them...
...line dispatch, Tass reported that the mission was aborted when an upper stage of the Vostok booster rocket began carrying Soyuz 18 off course; at that point, the rocket shut down automatically and the spacecraft was set free for return to earth. The two cosmonauts, Vasily Lazarev, 46, and Oleg Makarov, 41, seem to have escaped injury, but Western observers pointed out that if the upper-stage engine had fired a few seconds longer, the cosmonauts might well have come down in China...
...attempt to reassure NASA, the Russians privately told visiting American space officials in Moscow that the rocket was an old model that had been "less diligently" checked out than usual. NASA's Deputy Administrator George Low, who negotiated the agreement with the Russians for this summer's joint flight, said the space agency had every confidence that "the problem experienced on this launch will be fully evaluated by Soviet officials and that the necessary corrective actions will be taken...