Word: space
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even hardened video-game junkies know that when the quarters run out, it is time to quit playing. That time has come for Bally, the entertainment powerhouse that once had the whole country zapping Space Invaders and propelling Pac-man through a maze. After 57 years of making pinball machines and, later, video games, the Chicago-based company announced it would sell its arcade-game division to WMS Industries, its major competitor, for $8 million. Video games earned Bally $91 million in 1982, but in 1983 the video craze cooled and profits plummeted to $5.2 million. Bally, which owns four...
Throughout the book, Brinkley reveals with his typical biting wit, keen insight and damning criticism many of the not-so-heroic aspects of Washington during these years: a rapidly expanding bureaucracy and its petty infighting over exceedingly short supplies and space; a rigidly circumscribed, deeply impoverished and grossly ignored Black community; a non-existent municipal government that was in effect run by one of the nation's most outspoken racists, Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo, chairman of the obscure Senate District Committee beginning in 1944; a financial elite far more intent on improving their social status by flattering their fellow...
...centrifugal force -- to the spacecraft. This might be accomplished by spinning a very large craft around its own axis. Other schemes envision three ships hooked together in a cartwheel-like arrangement that makes three revolutions per minute, or two vehicles attached by a half-mile-long tether rotating through space as the entire system speeds toward Mars. Still another idea is to schedule a daily workout for each crew member inside an on-board centrifuge, where resisting the centrifugal force would simulate working in gravity...
...Space Scientist Carol Stoker, at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, points out that there would be benefits of artificial gravity beyond the physiological ones. "Toilets would flush properly, things wouldn't float in the air, and just think of surgery in zero gravity," she muses. Malcolm Cohen, chief of the neuroscience branch at Ames, worries about the possible physiological effects of rotation. "Weightlessness is the devil we know," he says, "and we have some idea how to overcome its effects. But artificial gravity in space is a devil we don't know well." Still, he concludes...
Along with an ambitious schedule of unmanned missions, the Soviet probes of the Martian moon Phobos are paving the way for a manned flight to Mars. The fact has not been lost on many Americans, who think the U. S. space program should aim at putting humans on the Red Planet. The cost is stupendous, the technology tricky, and the hazards real, but Mars still beckons. See SPACE...