Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Apollo 11 crew has been in full-time training since January, spending 12-hr. days often seven days a week going over and over the 294-page flight plan, rehearsing every move they will make in flight simulators, checking and re-checking the command module and lunar module. They practiced a single maneuver?the powered descent to the lunar surface?at least 150 times. Flight Surgeon Berry was seriously concerned about their grueling schedule. He feared that the men might become so tired that their resistance to disease would be dangerously low and that they would catch...
...committed the U.S. to landing men on the moon before the end of this decade, virtually none of the equipment capable of making the half-million-mile journey existed. Now, eight years later, a great spaceship made of more than 15 million parts is poised for the flight. If Apollo 11 completes its momentous mission, Kennedy's pledge will have been redeemed with five months to spare-a remarkable accomplishment. It is all the more remarkable for the fact that man did not actually enter the space age until twelve years ago, when the Russians launched Sputnik...
...space program was truly embryonic when Kennedy, on May 25, 1961, set a lunar landing as the nation's goal. Only two months earlier, he had decided to put off a decision on whether to go ahead with the Apollo program. Then came Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight, the first ever made by man. Two days after the Soviet breakthrough, Kennedy convened the nation's top space experts at the White House. "If somebody can just tell me how to catch up," he said. "There is nothing more important...
That the butterfly now exists is, above all, a tribute to superb management techniques. This was the biggest and most imaginative Government-industry-university team ever put together for a single project. At its peak in 1966, Apollo involved 400,000 men and women at 120 universities and laboratories and 20,000 industrial firms; its budget for that year alone was $5.9 billion...
...John C. Houbolt, 50, former chief of theoretical mechanics at NASA's Langley Research Laboratories in Hampton, Va. Houbolt, a civil engineer, is responsible for the lunar-orbit rendezvous that is the key maneuver in Apollo's entire flight plan. In what he remembers as "an intuitive flash," Houbolt realized that tremendous weight savings would be gained by this rendezvous method, permitting the use of a smaller launch vehicle. Often scorned by colleagues, Houbolt fought a two-year battle, finally put his job on the line by appealing directly to NASA headquarters. His arguments prevailed in the fall...