So the ISS's value for science and even as a staging post for deep space travel is not clear-cut.
Safety aside, the dam upstream from Dujiangyan is the staging post for rescuers heading toward the epicenter.
The championships are an important staging post ahead of the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi in a year's time.
One pictures this silent necropolis suddenly bursting to life as a chaotic staging post on the well-travelled route to purgatory and paradise.
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They believed in it, with the single market but a staging post.
In fact, it could be a mere staging post on the way to far higher prices and perhaps to a true oil shock.
During this era in the mid-2000s, Gao remote, lightly governed and long known as a hub for black-market trade became a staging post for cocaine traffickers.
Turkish leaders say bluntly that they will not tolerate Syria again becoming a staging post for PKK operations, and have sent reinforcements to the border.
In fact, the Commonwealth Games, originally an image-improving project for the city, have now become merely a staging post in a vast urban renewal scheme.
Berlin is no longer a big staging post on the road to the Oscars, now that the Academy Awards are held only a few days later.
Located near Kabul, it has been used as staging post for a number of large-scale attacks in the city and has been the recent focus of counter-insurgency operations.
To find the body's secret weapon, scientists remove cells from a lymph node - a part of the circulation system used by immune cells, but which also often forms a "staging post" for cancer as it spreads around the body.
Yet, to the many in Iran who would like better relations with the West, evidence that al-Qaeda has used Iran as a refuge, as a transit route, and perhaps even as a staging post for attacks, is a dangerous embarrassment.
And it was in Bandera that the Great Western Trail began, and with it the cult of the cowboy: 300, 000 head of longhorn cattle, most rustled from Mexico, herded through its broad main street every year in the 1870s and '80s, a last staging post to stock up on liquor and chilli brick before the long, hard ride to Dodge City, Kansas.
It seemed as if India's state-dominated system might not be a staging-post towards full liberalisation but instead the end destination.
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The Americans said the mosque was a staging-post for the insurgents and that weapons confiscated included mortars and an anti-aircraft missile.
So, if linguistic diversity increases with time, then Africa, where humanity evolved, and Asia, its first staging-post to world domination, should be the greatest Babels.
No Spanish government would agree to abandon its claim to Gibraltar: from that point of view, a deal with Britain would be merely a staging-post on the road to outright sovereignty.
Accordingly, he started a concert series called KnightSounds two years ago, involving contemporary composers, theatrical staging and a post-concert performance of nonclassical music.
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Spain is staging what amounts to the rich world's first big post-credit-crunch election.
On Friday morning, the colonel returned to the staging area, where his staff had set up a forward command post -- a tent and a series of antennas in the compound yard of an abandoned three-room house with barrel-vault ceilings made of mud brick.
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