Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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With sufficient funds, NASA intends to launch nine more Apollo flights to the moon in the next three years. Lofted by the same powerful Saturn 5 boosters that have been Apollo's workhorses, U.S. astronauts will range over increasingly rugged areas. The scheduled Apollo 12 flight in November will take them to the Ocean of Storms. On subsequent missions, they will touch down near the Crater Censorinus, the Sea of Serenity, the Crater Tycho and finally such forbidding abysses as the craters Aristarchus and Copernicus...
NASA also hopes to keep its manned space effort alive by using surplus Saturn 4B rockets-which now serve as the third stage of the Apollo launch vehicle-for earth-orbiting flights. This effort, dubbed the Apollo Applications Program, will begin in 1971 with a 28-day flight by three men-one a doctor. These vehicles are only forerunners of a giant space station that NASA plans to orbit by the late 1970s. The first station will probably accommodate twelve people, including the first American spacewoman. It will remain aloft for at least ten years, with crew members rotated every...
Obviously it takes brave men to climb into that capsule and undergo the immense risks that lie between the earth and the moon and the earth again. Yet, to thoughtful skeptics, the superorganized voyage of Apollo 11 suggests that lone, individual courage belongs to the past. The astronauts often seem to be interchangeable parts of a vast mechanism. They are buffered by a thousand protective devices, encased in layers of metal and wires and transistors, their very heartbeats monitored for deviation. Most of their decisions are made by computers. Hundreds of ships, planes, doctors and technicians stand by to rescue...
...with it. So does sheer ego, plus the simpler notions of patriotism and unwillingness to let the team down. What is important is that individual valor can be preserved in a collective age. Hemingway once defined courage as "grace under pressure." In their balloon-shaped, ungainly suits, the Apollo 11 astronauts have demonstrated that man, despite his murderous and chaotic past, can still achieve a state of grace...
...Times may have forgotten, but some time ago, an editorial-page column dismissed Rocket Pioneer Robert H. Goddard as one who "seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." What bothered the Times was Goddard's idea that rockets could fly through a vacuum. After Apollo 11 's launch last week, the Times recanted. Under the heading A CORRECTION, the paper declared: "Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well...