Word: space
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...freedom; freedom means no home. That is the dilemma facing all the tumbledown souls who drift through the peeling Springsteen homes and long, open highways of Jayne Anne Phillips' fiction. Castoffs from the counterculture, sleeping on floors or living in cars, unsure of where they stand in time or space, few of them know how to keep jobs, let alone take care of themselves. Phillips' characters lack purpose and authority. Their world is fluid, but they do not quite go under. They simply float...
...operating with 30 staffers and a $1 million budget (mainly raised from foundations), the Archive started as a storage space for Armstrong, dubbed the "Great Accumulator" by his former colleague and co-author Bob Woodward (The Brethren). Armstrong, 41, who worked for the Senate Watergate Committee before joining the Post, began collecting documents by the carload in 1982 for a book about U.S. foreign policy. When his Post computer showed signs of overload, Armstrong created a place where Government documents like his could be stored and shared: a kind of national-security Nexis...
When the 170 million-horsepower Energia rocket thundered from its launching pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome near Tyuratam in Kazakhstan on May 15, the Soviet Union took another stride in its steady march toward pre-eminence in space. Streaking eastward, the massive heavy-lift rocket reached 6,000 m.p.h. and 30 miles in altitude before the first stage separated and dropped to earth as planned. At nearly 14,000 m.p.h. and 60 miles up, the second stage fell away and splashed into the Pacific Ocean "in strict conformity with the flight mission," as the official report put it. Then, unexpectedly...
...failure was nothing compared with the magnitude of the feat. For the first time, the Soviets successfully tested the brand-new Energia, a 220- ft. rocket capable of thrusting more than 100-ton payloads into orbit, at least four times that of the U.S. space shuttle's orbiter. A Soviet TV commentator declared in a post-launch videotape that the new rocket could lift into space "the blocks from which cities will be built." Even U.S. observers were impressed. "It's the most powerful rocket in the world -- ever," said James Oberg, a Houston-based expert on Soviet space ventures...
Indeed, the nagging suspicion among American space observers that the Soviet Union is pulling ahead of the U.S. is turning into reality. While the American space program is gridlocked over when and how to deploy a space station, for example, the Soviet Mir (Peace) station, up for more than a year, has been manned for half that time and is now being expanded. This year the U.S. has carried out only four successful orbital launches, while the Soviets have had 37. The U.S. space shuttle is grounded until at least the summer of 1988. In the meantime, the evidence grows...