Word: thagard
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...NORMAN THAGARD HAD GONE into space four times before, but this mission was like none of his past adventures. Instead of preparing for launch on the balmy shores of Cape Canaveral, the Florida native faced the 18[degrees]F chill of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. When he chatted with crew mates, he spoke the language not of Neil Armstrong but of Yuri Gagarin. And when he tried to follow the American astronauts' ritual of eating a piece of cake before launch, the Russian flight doctors said nyet. Instead, Thagard and his fellow crew members, cosmonauts Vladimir Dezhurov and Gennady...
...countdown--just a deep voice that suddenly said, "Zazhiganiye [ignition]." As the white Soyuz rocket soared up over the brown Kazakh desert, it flew into a new era of space exploration, transforming one of the 20th century's fiercest rivalries into a partnership for the 21st century. Thagard, 51, became the first American to be shot into space aboard a Russian launcher. And after a two-day ride on the Soyuz, the physician-astronaut became the first American to take up residence in the Mir space station, where he will study the effects of lengthy space flight on the human...
...June comes the grand finale of Thagard's mission: for the first time ever, a U.S. shuttle will dock with Mir, picking up the astronaut and his two Russian colleagues and making them the first people to leave earth on one country's rocket and return home on the craft of another. The docking and six similar missions planned for the next two years are just warm-ups for the space industry's version of the Super Bowl. Between 1997 and 2002, the Russians and the Americans, with help from the European Space Agency, Canada and Japan, intend to build...
...Tuesday). Fit, trim and ready with high-fives for earth-bound colleagues, the 52-year-old physician exclaimed "It's Mother Earth" as he and two other cosmonauts emerged from their Soyuz descent capsule. Left behind: a new three-person crew on thespace station Mir, including U.S. astronaut Norman Thagard. (He aims to break the more modest American record of 84 straight days in space...
...astronaut Norman Thagard said his first day on the Russian space station Mir was quite tasty: "I'm probably going to gain weight instead of lose weight, like I do on most of my flights...