Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Squeezed by rising costs of the Viet Nam war, still troubled by the fatal Apollo fire and influenced by polls reporting slipping public interest in space flight, congressional economizers have been slicing away at NASA's space budget. Their efforts have been so successful that the U.S., while still committed to landing men on the moon by 1970, has virtually scrapped its once ambitious planetary exploration program. Alarmed by the trend, an eminent U.S. space scientist has forcefully spoken out, warning that the U.S. is in effect abandoning the planets to Russia. In a signed editorial in Science, University...
...teams so painstakingly assembled for the U.S. space program. On the day that Saturn 5 made its successful flight (TIME, Nov. 17), 700 NASA employees who had helped build the giant rocket were laid off at the Marshall Space Flight Center. They were victims of budgetary cuts in the Apollo Applications Program, which will use hardware left over from the Apollo flights for a variety of earth-orbital missions...
Plastic tunnels. To guard against moon viruses and bacteria, NASA will not allow the astronauts to open the Apollo hatch until a plastic tunnel has been extended to the spacecraft from a 35-ft., hermetically sealed van placed near by on the carrier deck. Carrying 50 Ibs. of lunar rock and soil samples in steel vacuum cases, they will walk through the tunnel into the van. There, in the company of a doctor and an engineer, they will be completely isolated from the outside world. When the carrier reaches a U.S. port, the van will be flown intact...
Loosened Purse Strings. From Surveyor's success has come man's first detailed knowledge of the consistency and chemical makeup of lunar soil, data and pictures that will influence the choice of the first astronaut landing site, and confirmation that the soft-landing system of the Apollo lunar module-similar to Surveyor's-is well conceived and workable...
...soft lander, NASA, Hughes Aircraft (which designed and built Surveyor) and Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (which directed the project, provided technical advice, and eventually controlled the flights) moved to rescue the floundering program. Increasingly certain that Surveyor's findings were a necessary preliminary to an Apollo lunar landing, NASA loosened the purse strings, enabling JPL to increase its Surveyor personnel from fewer than 100 to 500, Hughes from...