Word: soiling
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Shortly before Apollo 11 was launched in July 1969, Russian scientists sent an unmanned spaceship to the moon. Its probable mission was to land on the lunar surface, scoop up some soil and beat the Americans back to earth with the first samples of moon material. Luna 15 never achieved that ambitious goal. Several hours after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first mortals to step onto the moon, the Soviet spaceship dropped out of lunar orbit, apparently crashed and was never heard from again...
Last week, in a rerun of that abortive flight, the Soviets had far better luck. Their unmanned Luna 16 landed on the moon, gathered up a small sample of lunar soil, took off again and returned its cargo safely to earth. The entire mission was an impressive technological tour de force that gave the Russians a sorely needed boost in morale (a typical Muscovite-in-the-street comment: "See, we're not so far behind the Americans"). NASA's acting chief, George Low, sent his congratulations to Moscow, and called the first unmanned recovery of extraterrestrial material...
Another skyjacking carried out by Palestinian guerrillas? Not quite. A few minutes after that scene occurred over Czechoslovakia last week, the Prague-bound BAC One-Eleven jetliner flown by Rumania's TAROM airlines landed at Munich international airport. As the hijackers stepped onto West German soil, they knelt on the runway to say a prayer of thanksgiving. While the airliner was refueling to resume its interrupted flight, another of the passengers, a 31-year-old East Berlin engineer who had had nothing to do with the hijacking, decided on the spur of the moment to capitalize on his good...
...Francisco earthquake-an event to be expected every 60 to 100 years. Water mains would burst, elevators stop and power lines topple. At least one of the area's 228 dams and reservoirs would give way. Countless Bay Area buildings would sink into the shifting alluvial soils on which they have carelessly been built; such soil can turn into quicksand during a quake. The entire region would be cut off from outside aid, as freeways, bridges and runways buckled and railway tracks twisted. Deaths would reach the hundreds-some say tens of thousands-and property damage some $30 billion...
Once man had finally stepped onto dusty lunar soil, scientists thought that they would easily be able to dispel all mysteries about the moon's composition. Alas, not so. Both seismic tests on the moon's surface and experiments on earth have shown that lunar material transmits sound at a perplexingly slower rate than ordinary terrestrial rocks...