Word: apollo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Christmas Eve 1968, three American astronauts -- Frank Borman, William Anders and James Lovell -- were making revolutions around the moon in the Apollo 8 spacecraft. Lovell, now a corporate executive in Chicago, describes the event in a charming mix of metaphors: "It was the final bright star in the last gasp of 1968." The messy earth looked different from a distance, "that bright loveliness in the eternal cold," as Archibald MacLeish wrote...
Remember Madame Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophical Society and revealed the secrets of the universe in Isis Unveiled. There were sightings of spaceships in the 1890s, at a time when no American had ever seen an airplane, much less an Apollo rocket, but then as now a century was coming to an end. Mars was once widely believed to be inhabited by little green men, so when Orson Welles declared on the radio in 1938 that space invaders had landed, much of the nation went into a panic. And do not forget The Search for Bridey Murphy...
...Moores, a Black & Decker engineer who helped design a lunar-surface drill for the Apollo program, mated one of his company's drills with an ingenious air-lock seal. An industrial vacuum cleaner at the site sucked the dust from around the hole once the drilling got under way. To see inside the vault, technicians modified a miniature remote-controlled video camera so it could be inserted into the 3 1/2-in.-wide entrance hole. The camera, originally designed to probe the interior of nuclear reactors, provided fiber- optic light without introducing any heat into the chamber. Over the site...
...field, Gilbert plans to start a company this fall aimed at mapping every single gene in the human body. Scientists say the project to decipher the human genome--the 100,000 to 300,000 genes that shape every detail of our bodies--represents an extraordinary effort comparable to the Apollo space program in the 1960s...
...Soviets' launch capability took a quantum leap earlier this year when they successfully fired off Energia, a booster as powerful as the mighty Saturn 5, which the U.S. developed for the Apollo program and then scrapped in favor of the shuttle. With Energia, the Soviets can loft 100-ton payloads, vs. a maximum for the U.S. shuttle of 30 tons. That is enough to carry their shuttle, which is under development, or to orbit parts for a space station far larger than Mir, which could be a platform for a manned mission to Mars. Says Dale Myers, deputy administrator...