Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Apollo's missions move, and Christus seek...
...Bradbury, from the cantata Christus Apollo...
...they were awesome. The awe wore off as the television cameras covered each methodical moment of successive flights, but the best of the images grew into a frieze of transcendence, chiseled on the edges of the mind like Wordsworth's intimations of immortality: the readings from Genesis as Apollo 8 spun toward its rendezvous with the dark side of the moon; the "giant leap for mankind" as Neil Armstrong set his booted foot into the moon dust; the vision of the earth from space, a milky sapphire hanging alone and fragile in the blackness; and then Apollo...
That last image may have been as much theatrical effect as spiritual experience; as the first nighttime launching, Apollo 17 was a triumph of spectacle. It was also the last manifestation of a wonder of the world, and to see it depart was like taking the last voyage on the Queen Mary or hearing the farewell concert of Toscanini...
...there some stirring of human imagination that goes beyond the gee-whiz of the spectator or the sentiment of the nostalgia buff? One need go no farther than the astronauts themselves for the answer. "I am not the same man," Rusty Schweickart says. "None of us are." The Apollo veterans have become poets, seers, preachers, all of them evangelists for the privileged vision from space that Edgar Mitchell calls "instant global consciousness." It is no coincidence that the ecologists' concept of Spaceship Earth has become a commonplace in the years of Apollo...