Word: launchful
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...Galileo space probe that provided evidence of a water ocean beneath a thin rind of ice on Jupiter's moon Europa. Where there's water, there's usually heat, and where there's water and heat, there could well be life. Sometime after 2000, NASA is hoping to launch a Europa probe that will orbit the Jovian moon at an altitude of 60 miles--about the same distance at which Apollo spacecraft used to orbit Earth's moon--photographing its surface and taking radar soundings to look for water beneath its crust. If the radar picks up the telltale echoes...
Other hoped-for missions include a 13-year, 4 billion-mile-plus journey to Pluto and its companion moon Charon, tentatively set to launch in 2001; a comet-rendezvous mission that will take off in February 1999, fly by Comet Wild 2 in 2004 and fly back home with a bit of material from its diaphanous tail; and perhaps even a much-dreamed-of journey to Neptune's planet-size moon Triton. Says Goldin: "We're going to have the most aggressive exploration of our own solar system in the history of the human species...
Gunnison still has a chance, thanks to an unlikely coalition of conservative ranchers and left-leaning environmentalists who have put aside their cultural differences and teamed up to launch a grass-roots campaign to save ranches from the bulldozers. The Gunnison Legacy Project, as the effort is known, is the brainchild of Susan Lohr, a soft-spoken ornithologist from California, and Bill Trampe, a lean, crusty rancher whose family has been in the valley for three generations. The bird watcher and the cowboy, as Lohr and Trampe are sometimes called, hope to save 3,000 acres of ranchland...
...ranchers raise capital while saving open space and hanging on to their land. And because the property can never be developed, it loses half its market value. Thus ranchers can suddenly afford to pay taxes and keep the land in the family. Gunnison isn't the first community to launch a land-trust program: 1,200 of them have sprung up so far in the U.S. But unlike most, the Gunnison Legacy is a true grass-roots effort with no involvement from national conservation groups or wealthy landowners seeking tax breaks...
...Russia space officials still believe they can save the station they've got. In July they will launch another Progress ship, this one with electrical cables and repair equipment, and they are devising a plan for the cosmonauts to access the stricken Spektr module in an effort to tap the pod's solar panels and restore power to the rest of the station. Should this fail and Mir's systems collapse completely, the crew could abandon ship in a Soyuz spacecraft docked outside, though they've already had to plunder a bit of the escape pod's precious thruster fuel...