Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Charles Duke's jubilant Southern drawl crackled across 240,000 miles of space last week, all the world breathed a sigh of relief. After a nerve-racking delay of nearly six hours, during which NASA officials came close to calling off Apollo 16's lunar landing, Astronauts Duke and John Young had brought the landing craft Orion to a nearly perfect touchdown only 200 yards off target in the moon's mountain-ringed Descartes region. It was man's fifth successful landing on the lunar surface, and the first in the highlands, the moon...
...while, it had seemed that Christmas would never come. For Apollo 16 had suffered more than its share of worrisome glitches on its way to the moon. First, there were minor troubles -the mysterious flickering of a computer warning light, the mid-flight peeling of protective paint off the lunar module and the recalcitrant zipper on Young's space suit. Then, after the Apollo had gone into orbit around the moon and Orion, with Duke and Young aboard, had separated from Casper, came real cause for alarm...
...lunar landing can be attempted. The reason: if the command ship's engine cannot be controlled, the rocket power of the lunar lander is necessary to get the reunited ships back to earth. In fact, that so-called "life raft mode" was used to bring home the stricken Apollo 13 spacecraft two years...
...antenna had been aligned with earth, they could direct Duke's attention to a large, football-sized rock that glittered with imbedded black glass fragments. "It's a 'great Scott'-sized rock," said the delighted Duke, recalling the record 22-Ib. specimen picked up by Apollo 15 Astronaut David Scott last year...
Many of the scientific benefits from Apollo 16 are still in the offing. With a new, semiautomatic $2,000,000 electronic camera, developed by the Naval...