Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Cancelled Dinner. That, however, was the end of the post-landing celebrations. All further activities were cancelled, including a steak and lobster dinner, and NASA doctors began treating the three men for a potentially serious lung problem. Unknown to the watching world, the glowing hot Apollo had begun filling with what the astronauts described as a "brownish-yellow gas" as it plunged through the 24,000-ft. level. Scarcely able to breathe, the spacemen choked through the harrowing four-minute descent. After the splashdown, they struggled for another five minutes, while suspended upside down in the capsized craft...
...apparently was highly corrosive nitrogen tetraoxide (N 2 O 4 ), used as an oxidizer (or combustion agent) in Apollo's small attitude-control thrusters. If it is inhaled, the gas may cause only slight pain and coughing at first; but later, as it works its way into the lung tissue, it can lead to burnlike damage called pulmonary edema, filling the lungs with fluid. During their night aboard the carrier, the astronauts experienced considerable discomfort from coughing and were given cortisone in order to reduce lung inflammation. Next day when the carrier docked at Pearl Harbor, the three were...
...problem was the only real mishap in a nearly perfect double exercise. Leaving behind the orbiting Apollo after their 44-hour handclasp in the sky, Soyuz earlier in the week came to a near bull's-eye touchdown on a dusty Kazakhstan plain, ending what Soyuz Commander Aleksei Leonov in his colloquial English said was a flight that seemed to go "as smooth as a peeled egg." The Kremlin promptly hailed the joint mission with yet another barrage of pronouncements. Exulted Izvestia: SUCCESS IN OUTER SPACE FOR PEACE. The Russians had more reason to crow. At week...
...that the U.S.-Soviet flight had "shown a sometimes skeptical world that perhaps there is a real chance for world unity." That theme is sure to be heard repeatedly later in August when the two Soyuz cosmonauts arrive in the U.S. for a tour. But no reruns of the Apollo-Soyuz space spectacular are possible until the 1980s, when American astronauts again take to orbit aboard the space shuttle, a new generation of reusable craft that launch from a pad and land on a runway...
...warm afterglow of the first joint American-Soviet mission, NASA officials are already talking about inviting the Russians to take part in the shuttle program, possibly by using it to visit a future Soviet space station. But as last week's precarious Apollo landing served to re-emphasize, such facile space politics carries human as well as diplomatic risks in exposing men and their fragile machines to the still formidable hazards of unforgiving space...