Word: cosmonaut
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...tense days last week, the prestige of the Russian space program -- and the well-being of three cosmonauts -- was in jeopardy as a planned rendezvous in orbit went suddenly awry. A Progress rocket laden with food and other vital supplies glided up to -- and right past -- the Mir space station. Ground controllers then made a second effort to dock the two craft, but failed. By late Friday afternoon, the Progress could make only one last pass; this time cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko would try to maneuver Mir into a favorable position. Finally, with no more room for error, Malenchenko...
After two failed tries this week and with just one more chance left, a Russian cosmonaut successfully docked a food-laden Progress M-24 rocket with the orbital space station Mir. The risky move may have saved Russia's manned space program from extinction. If the manual attempt had failed, the three cosmonauts on board Mir would have had to abandon the craft and board an emergency re-entry vehicle. High jinks on the ground made their predicament far worse: underpaid ground-support technicians stole many of their edibles before takeoff, and the cosmonauts were subsisting on recycled wastewater...
...soft, clear evening of April 14, 1961 -- two days after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin went into his triumphal orbit and three days before the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion -- Kennedy tilted back on the hind legs of a leather chair in the Cabinet Room and, I believe, decided to send Americans to the moon. I watched it happen in one of those unusual episodes when Kennedy opened a window on the inner White House for an outsider. Maybe he understood that, as astronomer Michael Hart wrote, the moon landing would "be forever remembered as one of the greatest achievements...
...space- based nuclear reactor, admitting that the Russians' design was superior to anything in the U.S. A Soyuz space capsule is on the potential shopping list as well, to be used as a kind of lifeboat to get astronauts away from a failing space station. Later this year Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who was stranded in space for months by political maneuverings during the Soviet Union's breakup, will fly on a U.S. shuttle. In 1995 an American astronaut will be a guest aboard Russia's Mir space station. And in the same year, a shuttle will hook up with...
...followed events on the ground with interest, for politics kept him aloft. After the aborted coup in August, newly emergent Kazakhstan, where the launch facilities are located, demanded that a Kazakh cosmonaut be put into space. The mission directors complied last October but had to talk a less than thrilled Krikalev into staying in orbit an extra five months to help train the new crew...