Word: spaceships
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...friction of a wheel that locked on landing. Casting a baleful eye on the craft that has logged 10.8 million miles on five voyages, Air Force Lieut. General James Abrahamson, director of NASA'S shuttle program, commented, "It's beginning to look more like a used spaceship all the time." But his words were more of a compliment than a criticism. By successfully completing its first operational flight, Columbia showed convincingly that the often maligned $10 billion shuttle program finally was in business...
Arthur C. Clarke's sequel, 2010: Odyssey Two (Ballantine; $14.95), resumes the themes of his celebrated 2001, published 14 years ago. A joint Soviet-American expedition sets out to locate the spaceship Discovery and to examine the huge black monolith of 2001. The first part is easy; even Hal, the malevolent talking computer, which had to be electronically lobotomized in 2001, is reparable. But the crew can only watch as powers beyond its understanding transform Jupiter, which astronomers call "the star that failed," from an enormous sphere of gases into a small glowing sun capable of sustaining life...
...World Showcase, both intended, in the words of Disney's trumpeters, to "satisfy the imaginative appetites of the tens of millions of people . . . destined to become 'Epcot travelers.' " Visitors enter through a building that is already a symbol of the center: an 18-story geosphere called Spaceship Earth. Inside they are whisked along a track to view a depiction of man's evolution in communications from cave to spaceship, glimpsing such wonders as Gutenberg's print shop, an Audio-Animatronic Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone, and astronauts at work...
Radiating from Spaceship Earth are pavilions that explore other areas of technological endeavor. The World of Motion (sponsor: General Motors), nested within a wheel-shaped building, is a mostly light-hearted show with 24 Audio-Animatronic scenes depicting such momentous occasions as the invention of the wheel and the first traffic jam. The Universe of Energy (sponsored by Exxon) is a serious but compelling presentation whose three-acre roof with a partial photovoltaic surface is probably the largest privately built solar-energy collector in the world. Inside, life-size models of dinosaurs fight to the death; there is even...
...Another nebulous power--this one inexplicably takes hold of a few dozen common folk and draws them to a spaceship's landing site...