Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...columns' redundant injunctions to "Avoid troublesome people" and "Try to get along with higher-ups." Last week the inane appropriateness of Jeane Dixon's March 10 message for Gemini was good for a laugh when Mission Control Center relayed it to Astronauts McDivitt and Scott (both Geminis) in Apollo 9. The sage advice: "Don't get into any disagreements today, and group activity is preferable tonight." But somebody out there is gobbling up this kind of thing; astrology columns now run in some 1,200 of the 1,750 dailies...
...first it was only a tiny speck in the sky. Then, as Astronaut David Scott peered through the window of Apollo 9's orbiting command module, the speck grew into the most ungainly manned craft ever sent into orbit. Said Scott: "You're the biggest, friendliest, funniest-looking spider I've ever seen." He was talking to the lunar module, known as Spider, and it bore two other astronauts who had earlier left Scott to guide it through space. By flying their ship through orbital maneuvers designed to simulate those to be used by astronauts returning from...
...hours earlier, McDivitt and Schweickart had crawled from Gumdrop-the Apollo command and service module-and made their way through a narrow tunnel into Spider. Then, after a few uneasy moments when the docking mechanism snagged, Scott worked Gumdrop loose and fired his thrusters briefly to separate the two craft. With McDivitt at the controls, Spider shoved off onto its maiden solo flight. It moved into a different orbit from Gumdrop's and at one point fell more than 100 miles behind. Then McDivitt began maneuvering back toward the suspenseful rendezvous and docking. Had they not been able...
...While Apollo 8 was within 4,000 miles of the earth, Alley found, the spacecraft's speed was the predominant factor; time slowed up and the astronauts actually aged more slowly than mere earthlings. But beyond that distance, as the effects of earth's gravity lessened, Apollo's time began running fast. Over the entire journey, Alley says, Apollo's time passed more quickly than earth time by the 300 microseconds...
Despite Alley's calculations, Borman's tongue-in-cheek overtime demand is valid only for Astronaut Anders, who made his first space flight in Apollo 8. When Borman and Lovell were crewmates on the two-week orbital mission of Gemini 7, the time dilation effect was dominant for the entire period; the two astronauts thus aged less than those on earth by approximately 400 microseconds. Lovell's time also slowed down by about 100 microseconds during the four-day flight of Gemini...