Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Schmitt's preparation began long before Apollo was conceived. The son of a mining geologist, he grew up in Silver City, N. Mex., and decided early in life to become a geologist himself. As a youngster he visited mining camps, explored Indian reservations and made rock-hunting forays into the lunar-like deserts of the Southwest. At Caltech he studied under Ian Campbell and other noted earth scientists, including some of the men who will be watching his every move over TV from Mission Control's science support room...
Schmitt's companion on the surface of the moon will be the mission commander, Navy Captain Eugene Cernan, 38. A veteran astronaut, Cernan took a space walk during the 1966 earth-orbiting flight of Gemini 9 and flew the Apollo 10 lunar module to within nine miles of the moon's surface in 1969, during the final test of the Apollo system before an actual landing. Born on Chicago's North Side to first-generation Czechoslovak-American parents, he excelled in athletics in high school but turned down college football scholarships in order to study engineering...
Commander Ronald Evans, 39, Apollo 17's third crew member, is also a Navy flyer. In fact, he and Cernan were studying together at the Navy's Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., in 1963 when Cernan learned that he had been accepted by NASA and Evans was told that he had been turned down (he made it three years later). "That night," Evans recalls, "Gene and I went out and got totally sloshed." Born in the Kansas wheat-belt town of St. Francis, where his father worked for a wheat-silage company, Evans was an Eagle Scout...
...BEFORE Apollo 15 carried him to the moon in July 1971, Astronaut Worden had never been particularly introspective. Poetry had had no place in his life; he rarely read any, and he had never written a line. But something happened to Worden as he orbited the moon alone in the command ship Endeavor while his crewmates explored the lunar surface. Since his return, he has been moved to put his feelings about space flight into verse, some of it deeply personal and soul searching. Worden's new interest is only one example of an extraordinary postflight phenomenon. In spite...
Deeply Moved. Schweickart himself is a striking example of what might be called the Lunar Effect. Before the flight he was totally committed to his life as an astronaut. But as he floated outside Apollo 9 on his space walk 160 miles above the earth, he was overwhelmed by emotion. "I completely lost my identity as an American astronaut," he says. "I felt a part of everyone and everything sweeping past me below." Now he spends long hours at a Houston clinic for drug addicts, takes part in a volunteer telephone-counseling service for troubled youngsters, and is involved...