Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Seen by millions of earth-bound television viewers against the dark background of space, the deliberate, exquisitely choreographed ballet of the two spacecraft looked like something out of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001. Gliding silently 140 miles high over the Atlantic, the U.S. Apollo made its slow, gingerly approach to the beetle-shaped Soviet Soyuz, whose features appeared so clearly on TV screens that sunlight could be seen glinting off its winglike solar panels. Then came the slight bump as the two ships, now somewhere over the North Atlantic, made contact. "We have succeeded!" Apollo Commander Tom Stafford...
With that simple exchange, the Apollo and Soyuz crewmen celebrated an impressive technological achievement: the first rendezvous and docking of spacecraft of two different nations. Next on their agenda was a round of high-altitude, high-budget diplomatic theater carefully scripted for maximum political impact. Thus three hours after the docking, the TV cameras winked on inside the surprisingly spacious Apollo...
...seems the Soyuz-Apollo crew has landed on Mars, where it is greeted by little men with soft hair that covers their entire bodies. "Who are you?" one of the astronauts inquires...
Unlike the Apollo sinps, the Soyuzes lacked onboard computers, advanced inertial guidance systems and backup cooling and heating systems. Almost all activities aboard Soviet spacecraft are controlled from the ground, down to such trivial matters as shutting off lights at bedtime. NASA gives its astronauts almost total autonomy, a policy that paid off well in crises. Some Americans groused openly about the "brute force" character of Soviet engineering. When NASA Administrator Thomas Fletcher learned that Tom Stafford was one of the more vocal grousers, he warned all three astronauts against bad-moutinng a mission that had the blessing...
THOMAS P. STAFFORD, 44, Apollo's Annapolis-trained commander, is an Air Force brigadier general, a coolly gifted pilot and co-author of two basic manuals on test flying. Stafford has logged 290 hr. 15 min. in space, dating back to ins first Gemini flight in 1965 with Wally Scinrra. In orbit, Math Winz Stafford liked to amuse inmself by using pad and pencil to race mission control's computers in solving maneuvering problems; sometimes he won. Stafford was born in Weatherford, Okla., and he and ins wife Faye have two daughters. Though often nettled by Soviet secrecy...