Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Through the remainder of the outbound flight, Apollo 11 astronauts were less talkative than their Apollo 10 predecessors. "It's all dead air and static," said an official in Mission Control...
...Just going over Mount Marilyn," said Armstrong, referring to a triangular-shaped peak named for the wife of Apollo 8 Astronaut James Lovell. "Now we're looking at what we call Boot Hill. On the right is the crater Censorinus P." The spacecraft passed over Sidewinder and Diamondback, two of the sinuous rills that had caused Apollo 10 Astronaut John Young to wonder "if some time long ago fish hadn't been jumping in those creeks." Commented Collins: "It looks like a couple of snakes down there in the lake...
...point, Houston radioed to Apollo 11: "We've got an observation you can make if you have some time up there. There's been some lunar transient events reported in the vicinity of Aristarchus." Astronomers in Bochum, West Germany, had observed a bright glow on the lunar surface?the same sort of eerie luminescence that has intrigued moon watchers for centuries. The report was passed on to Houston and thence to the astronauts. Almost immediately, Armstrong reported back, "Hey, Houston, I'm looking north up to ward Aristarchus now, and there's an area that is considerably more illuminated than...
...thing the astronauts did not observe was Apollo's companion in lunar orbit?the Soviet Union's unmanned Luna 15 moon probe (see p. 17). Arriving in the neighborhood two days before the U.S. spacecraft, Luna went into an orbit as close as ten miles from the moon and eventually landed. The chances that Luna would be visible from Apollo 11?much less collide with it?were estimated by Houston's Christopher Columbus Kraft, director of flight operations, as about "one in a billion...
None of the astronauts slept very long before awakening to the most momentous day of their lives. Collins got six hours, Aldrin and Armstrong five apiece. During Apollo's eleventh revolution of the moon, Aldrin and Armstrong donned their space suits and crawled through a tunnel for a final checkout of the lunar module before its long separation from the command module. They paid particular attention to Eagle's propulsion systems?the tanks containing the hypergolic fuels that fire the descent and ascent engines, and the pressure gauges on the helium that forces the fuels into the combustion chambers, where...