Word: station
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Over the horizon Tueller sees more astronomy and astrophysics experiments as well as Earth monitoring, such as observing the ozone hole, and perhaps even semipermanent balloons to replace some of the cellular-phone towers dotting the landscape. Assuming, of course, there's any money left over from the space station...
...Russian cosmonauts aboard the soon-to-be-launched International Space Station find themselves running short of borscht, there will be a very good reason: the technicians on the ground ate it all. The Russian space agency has been running on fumes since the end of the cold war, but never more so than in the past few years. Employees at the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan often go unpaid and sometimes slip away at the end of their shifts taking pilfered electrical components with them. Some of those employees, less interested in fencing stolen goods than simply eating a decent...
...comical in watching the once feared Russian space agency reduced to such pratfalls, and there was a time when U.S. officials might have enjoyed the show. But Washington is not laughing, and with good reason. On Nov. 20, the first piece of the 16-nation, NASA-led International Space Station is set to be launched from Baikonur--marking the start of an eight-year construction project that ranks as the greatest peacetime engineering job in history--and a bankrupt Russia is only one of the problems it faces...
...station is three or five or 12 times over budget, depending on who's counting the fiscal beans, and while everything from rubles to yen to pounds is supposedly bankrolling the work, it's American dollars that are really keeping it going. The project is also 14 years behind schedule and will probably slip further before construction on the 360-ft.-long, 460-ton skyliner is done. Worst of all, once the ISS gets into orbit, there are very real concerns about whether it will have anything truly useful...
Barring a catastrophe, there is little likelihood that the space station won't fly. Too much money has been spent and too much metal has been cut for it to be scrapped now. But however much work the ISS eventually does, the lessons it yields will probably be less scientific than bureaucratic--lessons about how, and how not, to get a project like this done. "Most of the functions of the space station have disappeared," says Alex Roland, chairman of the department of history at Duke University and a former NASA historian. "NASA is mortgaging its future for the next...