Word: spaces
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...begins a dazzling new era in space exploration...
More than three years have passed without an American astronaut in space, and the once vigorous U.S. program of unmanned planetary exploration has been at low ebb since the Viking landings on Mars in 1976. Compared with the ambitious Soviets, whose cosmonauts have just spent almost 140 days orbiting the earth, U.S. space officials have had little to crow about. All that is about to change. Last week the U.S. made a dramatic start on what should be a spectacular twelve months in the annals of space exploration...
...flawless launch, NASA lofted into earth orbit an $87 million remote-controlled astronomical observatory that should help answer some of the most fundamental questions about the universe. Two days later, some 29 million kilometers (18 million miles) further out in space and closing in on Venus, a U.S. spacecraft ejected the first of four probes that will thoroughly analyze the atmosphere of the cloud-shrouded planet before hitting its scalding surface...
...reporter turning up at one of her lectures at Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History noted that the speaker somehow managed to discuss museums, stones, stuffed birds, cave paintings, Cro-Magnon man, children, parents, grandparents, dinosaurs, whales, the possibility of life in outer space, education, the youth revolution of the 1960s, the oneness of the human species, pollution, evolution, growing up in New Guinea, relations between the sexes, communes and the fragmentation of communities...
...moreover, one very special special effect: human flying. In Star Wars, audiences wanted to see space flights and talking robots. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, they wanted to find out what flying saucers and extraterrestrial beings might look like. In Superman, they will want to see if modern movie technology can make a man fly convincingly. "The film stands or falls on whether the characters appear to fly," says Terence Stamp, who plays the villainous General Zod. "If they do, the picture is a success." By Stamp's definition, at any rate, the movie will...