Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...anxiously scanned the pre-dawn skies. At 5:41 a.m., shouts of "There it is! There it is!" rose from the aircraft carrier's huge flight deck. For a split second, a tiny orange speck, no brighter than a faint shooting star, shone against the thick, purplish clouds. Apollo 11 had come home; now it was streaking through the earth's familiar atmosphere after completing the most momentous journey in man's history. Two of the three human beings aboard the returning spacecraft had actually landed on the moon, strode effortlessly across its tortured surface and brought...
...heat shield ever so slightly, to give the command ship more lift. That maneuver, a departure from the original flight plan, carried the craft 205 miles farther downrange to avoid a Pacific storm. A few moments later, swaying gently under its three bright orange and white chutes, Apollo 11 dropped into the Pacific nine miles away from the Hornet and only 1.7 miles off target...
...over 4,000 miles away in Houston's Mission Control, nerve center of the flight, John F. Kennedy's 1961 pledge that the U.S. would land a man on the moon "before this decade is out" flashed on a display board. Near by, a smaller screen carried Apollo 11 's Eagle emblem along with the immensely proud statement: "Task accomplished . . . July...
...Apollo's Star Performer...
Buoyed by the presence of human companions after 27 hours 47 minutes of solitude, Collins took over as Apollo's star performer. During a telecast to earth on the second night of the homeward voyage, Collins hammed it up by showing earthlings how someone could drink water in space. Turning a spoonful of water upside down, he left the globules eerily suspended in the gravity-free cabin. Then, like a trout snapping at a fly, he "captured" the drops with his mouth...