Word: changes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...odds against Mars' being reached before 2030 is over. The Chinese had reasons of their own to be interested. On New Year's Day, Beijing announced that it was beginning its own lunar program, with a first unmanned landing set for six years away. The program is called Chang'e, a reference to the story of the lonely Chinese fairy who fled to the moon after stealing her husband's immortality pills. If China's lander cruises anywhere near the U.S. outpost, it may touch off a Sino-U.S. space competition reminiscent of the old U.S.-Soviet space race...
...Things move a lot faster with such a system, but the engine as a whole is heavier and cruder and the big reactor causes jitters among environmentalists, who would just as soon see nothing nuclear aboard any rocket that could blow up before it leaves the atmosphere. Astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz says a plasma-propulsion rocket being developed in NASA's labs will go faster still, getting man to Mars in 40 days. Though a decade or more from realization, it uses magnets and abundant gas like hydrogen to produce acceleration...
Hewitt doubters cite the precedent of the nuggetty Chinese-American Michael Chang. At the French Open in 1989, at the age of 17, Chang became the youngest man to win a grand slam title. But though he spent seven years in the Top 10 and retired only last August, he never won another one. Chang's game was built on the same pillars as Hewitt's: reliable, though not explosive, groundstrokes, a terrier's speed and tons of grit. Chang's problem - and for a while last year it looked like Hewitt's problem, too - was that grinding out matches...
...tennis really changed so much that it can no longer accommodate players of all shapes and styles? "Lleyton's a more complete player than Chang was," argues John Alexander, who suspects weariness and injuries were what hurt the Australian, along with a playing style that became too conservative - a flaw Hewitt seems to have corrected. "People tend to talk about power - about serving and forehands - and they're the fashionable things to talk about," says Hewitt's childhood coach, Peter Smith. "I always felt that Lleyton had qualities that others didn't notice, subtle qualities they couldn't measure...
...government and continues to claim that Taiwan is a renegade province of mainland China. Can successful negotiations take place with a knife pressed to our throat? The Taiwanese have no intention of becoming citizens of China under a communist government that does not respect basic human dignity. Chi-Chang K. Shieh Tainan, Taiwan...