Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...toward earth at week's end, Flight Director Milton Windier summed up the immediate import of the flight, which was designed to test out Snoopy's performance before an actual moon landing: "It's all downhill from here. I see nothing to constrain the launch of Apollo...
Hint of Trouble. Some of the minor annoyances of earlier flights were missing aboard Apollo 10. None of the crew caught cold, probably because of a less tiring preflight schedule. None suffered nausea caused by weightlessness, possibly because of in-flight head-movement exercises prescribed by the astronauts' physician, Dr. Charles Berry. For the first time since John Young smuggled a corned-beef sandwich aboard the Gemini 3 flight in 1965 and littered the spacecraft interior with crumbs, the astronauts were allowed a supply of bread. To withstand the pure-oxygen atmosphere, which quickly dries bread and makes...
...take his first drink of water, Stafford instead got a mouthful of highly chlorinated water; because of ierroneous instructions from the ground the crew had failed to open a valve to the water tank, leaving only the evil tasting liquid in the drinking tube. As on on previous Apollo missions, there were troublesome hydrogen bubbles in the drinking water, which is produced by the fuel cells in the same oxygen-hydrogen reaction that supplies the spacecraft's electricity. The astronauts were forced to take Lomotil, a medicine for taking the butterflies out of unsettled stomachs...
...first hint of more serious trouble occurred after Apollo 10 had slipped into its nearly circular 69-mile orbit around the moon. Crawling through the tunnel connecting Charlie Brown to Snoopy, Stafford discovered that the padding on Charlie Brown's hatch had been ripped during the pressurization of the lunar module early in the flight, allowing snowlike fiber-glass insulation to escape and drift around the tunnel interior. During Apollo's eleventh revolution, as Stafford and Cernan prepared to undock Snoopy for its descent toward the moon, the astronauts found that they could not depressurize the connecting tunnel...
...When Apollo 10 streaked smoothly on its course toward the moon last week, it did so with a difference. Paul Haney, for six years the cool and detached "voice" of Gemini and Apollo, was gone. His replacement on the air was Jack Riley, another laconic, low-key newsman, who sees his job not so much "as an announcer but as a supplier of information to the news media...