Word: titan
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...come at a worse time for the Central Intelligence Agency. Just as Congress was debating the size of the intelligence budget for 1994, $1 billion worth of spying equipment disappeared in a flash above Vandenberg Air Force Base -- the costliest space accident since the 1986 Challenger disaster. A new Titan IV rocket carrying a supersecret intelligence-satellite system inexplicably blew up two minutes after launch. Space-spying expert Jeffrey Richelson, author of America's Secret Eyes in Space, called it a "huge embarrassment for the intelligence community...
...itself the Titan's three-satellite payload -- code-named Pacea -- was not indispensable to current intelligence operations. The solar-powered satellites, each about as big as a midsize car, are part of a continuing surveillance program called Classic Wizard, which is designed to track ships at sea, especially those from the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. If the three satellites had been deployed as planned into a triangle in space, their electronic sensing devices would have calculated the position of ships on the basis of radio and radar transmissions. But the U.S. has two such systems...
...worst fallout of the explosion was the doubt it created about the reliability of the newly designed Titan IV booster, on which both the Air Force and CIA are heavily dependent. The 12-story-high booster is the only rocket capable of launching a whole family of space-surveillance systems. Martin Marietta has delivered or has under construction about half of the 41 Titan IVs currently on order. Colonel Frank Stirling, director of the Air Force's Titan IV program, immediately grounded two other boosters scheduled for launch and said the delay could last up to a year...
...longer has a direct conduit into individual homes and businesses -- and the 1984 federal-court consent decree makes it difficult to get back into that business. Like other long-distance carriers, AT&T must go through the local telephone system and pay access fees for the connection. The telecommunications titan paid $14 billion in such charges last year...
...gravity as he goes up, up and still higher up. The trajectory has been the same for the company whose shoes the commercial touts. Since its founding 21 years ago, Nike, the Beaverton, Oregon, sportswear conglomerate, has soared to greater and greater heights, becoming the $3.7 billion-a-year titan of the industry. The key has been Nike's endorsement contracts with such top professional athletes as Jordan, baseball's Bo Jackson ("Bo knows . . ."), football's Jerry Rice and, to a lesser extent, several hundred others. But as it has lavished ever more millions of dollars on such...