Word: rocketting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...strongly forging ahead in space exploration. From the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Central Asia, the Soviets launched the first in a projected series of supply missions to their new manned space station called Mir (Peace). The unmanned cargo vessel Progress 25, boosted into orbit by a workhorse Proton rocket booster, hooked up on Friday with Mir, bringing food, fuel, water and other supplies to Cosmonauts Leonid Kizim and Vladimir Solovyev, whose own Soyuz T-15 spacecraft docked with the orbiting space station on March...
European space officials watched nervously last week as a gleaming white Ariane 3 rocket awaited the final seconds of countdown on its jungle-ringed launching pad in French Guiana. While the Ariane program has generally been a success, three of its 16 missions since 1979 have ended in costly accidents. This time the European Space Agency's unmanned craft carried a payload of two satellites worth a total of $200 million: G-Star II, owned by the U.S. communications company GTE, and Brasilsat S2, a Brazilian counterpart. The countdown ran smoothly until just 4.9 seconds before ignition, but then...
...breakdown temporarily frustrated the eleven-country European consortium's continuing effort to demonstrate its rocket's reliability and clinch an even larger share of the lucrative satellite-launching business. Ariane has been the free world's only active satellite carrier since the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger on Jan. 28, which put the U.S. program out of commission for a year or more. The shuttle's hiatus leaves a big opening in the launching market, a business worth at least $500 million a year. Between now and 1990, an estimated 60 commercial satellites will need a lift into orbit...
Several entrepreneurs in the U.S., along with government-run rocket . programs in Japan and China, now aim to give Ariane a run for its money. NASA, which previously tried to protect its turf by discouraging U.S. satellite- launching entrepreneurs, earlier this month came out in favor of private rocket services to take up the slack left by the shuttle's interrupted schedule. Reason: Congress is worried that U.S. companies will become dependent on foreign satellite-launching services...
...evidence suggests that Rockwell's drug situation had anything to do with the Challenger tragedy. The solid rocket booster that is suspected of causing the explosion was made by Chicago-based Morton Thiokol, and no reports of drug use among its employees have surfaced. Nonetheless, any drug abuse among production workers in the space program or the defense industry carries grave risks. Says Frankel: "In this kind of ultra-high-tech work, the guy who makes the little adjustments, the screwer-on of parts, the bolter of nuts, is just as important as the project's chief engineer...