ms may run across this conference, and it 
     would behoove us all to treat the mission with quiet respect. 

8.   Did Buran ever fly?  When will it fly again? 
     Buran's one and only flight (unmanned) was 15 Nov 88 with a 
     liftoff time of 6:00 a.m., Moscow time.  Now a museum piece,
     it will not fly again.  Its flight consisted of two orbits 
     at 51.6 degrees.

9.   Hurl nuclear waste into the Sun!
     Launching anything into the Sun is enormously expensive, very 
     difficult, and not terribly efficient.  The payload couldn't be
     very much, which means you'd have many launches.  Earth orbits 
     the Sun at something like 18 miles per second.  To send a 
     payload directly into the Sun, you must cancel out this 18
     mi/sec vector, leaving the payload "standing still" so it 
     will fall directly into the Sun.  If you leave it with much
     forward vector, it will orbit in a very narrow ellipse with
     the top end at Earth's orbit, and we could COLLIDE with it.
     It's very difficult to send an object up to 5 mi/sec to 
     attain orbit.  Pushing something to 18 mi/sec is vastly harder.
     We simply don't have the technology to achieve this, 
     and when we do, we might be "breeding" bacteria to resolve the 
     problem, or we might find a great use for the stuff. 

-END OF FILE-
=============
---