Word: launchful
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...space shuttle Atlantis is to thunder off the launch pad early in the evening of Wednesday, February 7, carrying the newest segment of the International Space Station, a U.S. laboratory module named Destiny. NASA managers, rarely stolid when it comes to shuttle launches, have taken to describing Destiny as a "quantum leap" in the orbiting outpost's mission and capacity. From Cape Canaveral, Brad Liston examines this latest development in the $100 billion science saga...
...right away. Destiny was designed to carry 13 refrigerator-sized science stations, called racks, each holding several experiments, but they'll be going up one or two at a time over the next several years. Altogether, the module and its science gear would have been too heavy to launch. The current space-station crew led by Bill Shepherd, the American commander, and Yuri Gidzeno and Sergei Krikalev, his Russian crewmates, will use the extra space for storage...
...space flight may now take a backseat to a "partner" that was once its bitter rival. The ISS blueprint calls for more Russian segments to arrive, including a power station and science lab of their own. But while most of the U.S. components are complete and waiting to be launched, and European and Japanese segments are at least funded, the Russians are struggling to find enough money to launch the necessary Progress supply ships, and no money is budgeted for future modules...
...once warned North Korea's Kim Jong Il that if he even threatened the U.S. with nuclear weapons, he'd be "turned into a charcoal briquette." But, Rumsfeld was prepared to use that awareness, too, warning the Europeans that without a missile shield the U.S. might be forced to launch a preemptive strike against a rogue state. Then again, he gave the Europeans little reason to believe the U.S. would deploy a system of sufficient reliability to deter it from launching a preemptive strike anyway, just to be on the safe side. "A system of defense need not be perfect...
...error-strewn, out-of-date texts--and of kids' having to lug 30-lb. book bags--are almost over. The major publishers, fearful of yet another report slamming their product, have hired more fact checkers and instituted extra layers of review. More significant, this month McGraw-Hill plans to launch its first e-textbooks--online versions of its printed texts, featuring videos, interactive lab exercises and personalized assessment tools. Factual errors, once discovered, will be corrected immediately. Five years from now the visual resolution of handheld text devices should be clear enough--and the prices low enough--that one portable...