Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Although an onslaught of astronaut sniffles and sore throats at Cape Kennedy last week delayed the orbital flight of Apollo 9, an unmanned spacecraft named Mariner 6 was successfully launched from a nearby pad. Its ambitious mission: to search for evidence that life can exist on Mars...
...triumphant tour of Europe last month, Apollo 8 Astronaut Frank Borman amused his audiences by insisting that he, James Lovell and William Anders were older than they would have been had they not flown to the moon. "I think we should get overtime for that," he complained. Borman was joking about his pay, but he was quite serious about his aging. During their moon mission, the astronauts aged about 300 microseconds (300 millionths of a second) more than the people they left behind on earth...
...live and work for long periods under the sea, the project has been beset by delays. First there was a steel strike; then some of the steel that was delivered turned unexpectedly brittle at low temperatures. Redesign of the oxygen system was called for after the fatal Apollo fire, and that was followed by a series of seawater and helium leaks. At week's end no one would predict how long it will be until Sealab is again judged seaworthy...
...astronauts finally reach the surface of the moon, they will land in an ungainly-looking little craft that is officially named the Lunar Module (LM) but is becoming known as "the Spider." Scheduled to be tested in manned flight for the first time next week during the flight of Apollo 9, the Spider is the homely offspring of a concept of Aeronautical Engineer John Houbolt, an unsung hero of the U.S. space program. NASA officials now agree that without Houbolt's lonely campaign early in the 1960s, the U.S. would have been hard pressed to meet John Kennedy...
Last week, as they prepared for the forthcoming Apollo 9 mission, officials in Houston paid tribute to Houbolt, who quit NASA in 1963 and now works for an aeronautical-research firm in Princeton, N.J. "I just thank my lucky stars that guys like Houbolt came along," said Caldwell Johnson, chief of the manned-spacecraft-design office. "I suppose that Columbus had some help...