Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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During his space walk on the fourth day of the Apollo 9 mission, Astronaut Russell Schweickart shot photos of Astronaut David Scott, who was standing in an open hatch of the command module (Gumdrop). Scott, at the same time, was taking pictures of Schweickart standing on the platform of the docked lunar module (Spider). Inside Gumdrop, Astronaut James McDivitt was busy photographing Schweickart. "Now we're all taking pictures of everybody taking pictures," Schweickart commented. The photographic frenzy continued unabated for the remainder of the mission. Thus last week the world was treated to pictures as varied and excellent...
Using 70-mm. Hasselblad still cameras, 16-mm. Maurer movie cameras and roll after roll of color and black-and-white film the Apollo astronauts literally photographed everything within sight: Gumdrop, Spider, the third-stage S-4B rocket, themselves, and the curved expanse of earth below. During the somewhat more relaxed final half of their mission, they also tried out a variety of filters and specialized film to shoot infrared, green-light and other pictures that should teach scientists more about the earth and its resources...
...know-how during eight hours of intensive briefings and practice assignments with the cameras and film they are to use on their mission. Each is issued training cameras for more practice during off hours and asked to turn in exposed film so that experts can criticize their techniques. The Apollo 8 crew became skilled enough to make a home movie-complete with hand-lettered titles and credits that were held up in front of the camera-on their way to and from the moon. After thorough editing, NASA released only selected portions of that film...
...midweek, NASA officials decided that recovery would be too dangerous in the tossing waters off Bermuda and ordered the astronauts to stay in orbit for one additional revolution. Thus, as the earth revolved beneath Apollo's orbit, the next pass over the Atlantic enabled the astronauts to splash down far from the storm, in the calm waters off Grand Turk Island, in the Bahamas. There, the only whitecaps were those churned up by recovery helicopters...
After debriefing the astronauts and studying telemetry from Apollo 9, NASA will announce on March 24 whether it will maintain the current schedule (Apollo 10 in mid-May, the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission in mid-July) or move directly to a landing mission in June. Whatever the decision, there is now more confidence than ever that U.S. astronauts will be walking on the surface of the moon this summer...