Word: shepards
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When the first American flew into space in 1961, Burt Rutan was a 17-year-old college freshman. Listening to news of Alan Shepard's groundbreaking suborbital flight on the radio, Rutan was euphoric. He too hoped to go into space one day--and was disappointed that a cautious NASA had allowed the Soviets to beat the U.S. to the prize. "We could have had the first man in space," Rutan recalls, "and we sent a monkey instead...
...taste zero-gravity one day. It didn't work out that way. After NASA reached the moon in 1969, its focus shifted to unmanned probes, orbital experiments and a costly low-orbit shuttle system. The imagined future of Everyman as astronaut evaporated. This year, more than four decades after Shepard's flight, only two Americans have made the jump into space from U.S. soil--both launched not by NASA but by Rutan's tiny company, known for build-your-own-airplane kits...
Such docu-plays aren't new. The Laramie Project (based on the Matthew Shepard killing), Anna Deavere Smith's monologues and Loose Lips, a satiric revue from the '90s, were all drawn from real-life words. But the form has lately been flexing its dramatic muscles. The Exonerated, an off-Broadway hit from 2002, fashioned a case against capital punishment by assembling interviews with former death-row inmates exonerated of their crimes. In The Permanent Way, a hit at London's National Theatre this winter, David Hare created what is likely to be the only good play ever written about...
...Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) officer was sent to Shepard Street near the Radcliffe Quad on a report of a shuttle...
Those findings could be significant. The CDC estimates that in the U.S., secondhand smoke causes 35,000 deaths a year from heart disease--a figure some experts believe will have to be revised upward, since 60% of Americans, smokers and nonsmokers, show biological effects of tobacco-smoke exposure. Shepard did offer some reassurance for city dwellers who have to pass through nicotine clouds every time they enter and leave an office building. Exposure for a few seconds probably doesn't do much harm, he says, because the toxins in cigarette smoke are quickly diluted in outside air. --With reporting...