Word: launchful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Titans of the 1990s. The past nine months have been hard ones for the Titan booster, now made by Lockheed-Martin, and for the U.S. launch industry as a whole. During that time, three Titan 4s--direct offspring of the reliable Titan 2--were launched, carrying satellites worth hundreds of millions of dollars. All three flopped spectacularly--one committing an explosive suicide 41 seconds after liftoff, the others misfiring and stranding their satellites in useless orbits. Three other rockets--Lockheed's sleek new Athena 2, and a pair of boosters from Boeing's new Delta 3 class--also conspicuously fizzled...
Rocket scientists and Wall Street analysts characterized the catastrophes as a spectacular run of bad luck. But the losses--the launch vehicles and the satellites they were carrying cost at least $3.5 billion--come at a time when the industry is simultaneously consolidating, introducing new technology and trying to boost the number of annual launches to meet rising demand. That's not a prescription for smooth sailing. "It could be a string of bad luck," says Pierre Chao, an analyst for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. "Or they are doing so many launches that something slipped...
Among these fledgling projects is the launch of a PON "virtual community," which allows interaction through the Internet between members of the program, who are from various universities. In addition to Harvard, scholars from MIT, Tufts University and the Simmons Graduate School of Management participate in the program. The initiative will allow PON members to interact much more easily, Cobb said...
...Homegrocer.com was founded only last year, and is funded with money from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the same venture capital firm that helped launch big Internet brands such as Amazon, Excite and At Home. Last month former Netscape chief executive James Barksdale invested some $5 million in the privately held online grocery company. MORE...
While the music industry fiddles, its business is going up in flames. Given how much money is at stake--roughly $38 billion in CDs, records and cassettes each year--you'd think that someone would have reached for a hose sooner. But with the launch last week of RealNetworks' remarkably useful JukeBox--a free bit of software that makes it almost too easy to convert music CDs into pass-around computer files--my hunch is that it's already too late. I can smell the burning plastic discs from here...