Word: space
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cause for panic, said the U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. It had merely been "a space age difficulty ... There is no danger...
...pedaled was the fiery return to earth of Cosmos 954-a Soviet spy-in-the-sky satellite carrying a nuclear reactor to power its ocean-scanning radar and radio circuitry. The craft crashed into the atmosphere over a remote Canadian wilderness area last week, apparently emitting strong radiation. American space scientists admitted that if the satellite had failed one pass later in its decaying orbit, it would have plunged toward earth near New York City-at the height of the morning rush hour...
...nuclear package on board Cosmos 954 was itself not a total mystery to U.S. intelligence. The U.S. has long used similar power sources in space. The Cosmos 954 reactor included 110 Ibs. of highly enriched uranium 235. This is a long-lived fuel whose "half-life"-the time it takes for half the material to lose its radioactivity-is an astonishing 713 million years...
...maneuvering over the Soviets' sagging satellite began in mid-December. It centered, at first, in a green-painted chamber housed half a mile deep within the solid pink granite of Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain, headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). There, technicians at the Space Defense Center track the 4,600 pieces of machinery now floating in space -including no fewer than 939 satellites...
...more than willing to join the search. U.S. officials properly let the Canadians deal with the offer-and Trudeau obviously was in no hurry to accept Russian help. Plainly, the U.S. and Canadians wanted some time to study any recovered fragments. Western scientists could learn a lot about Soviet space engineering, its radar capability, and just how close the Russian spy satellites had come to being able to distinguish the movement of U.S. submarines in the oceans' depths...