Word: apollo
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Continuing its program of manned space exploration, NASA also made ingenious use of castoff Apollo hardware to create Skylab. Despite a troubled beginning and now its embarrassing demise, the giant space station represented another great leap. In 1973, three teams of astronauts occupied the station in rapid succession, one remaining aloft for 84 days. That record was not beaten by the Russians until 1978. More important, it proved to all doubters-and there were many-that humans could live and work together in space for long periods, conquering both isolation and the physical effects of weightlessness, such as weakening...
...competition with the Russians to reach the moon, NASA showed that it could cooperate with them as well. In 1975, in what was a last hurrah for Apollo, the space agency launched a command module emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes to hitch up briefly with a Soviet Soyuz displaying the Hammer and Sickle. This celestial handclasp between old adversaries involved more politicking than space exploration, but it did set an important precedent for future cooperation in the cosmos as well as on earth. Indeed, although the U.S. and the Soviet Union have jousted over many other issues, they have...
...Frontier, a place where mankind can establish permanent settlements, using sun power for fuel and mining the moon and the asteroids. Said the White House coldly: "It is neither feasible nor necessary at this time to commit the United States to a high-challenge space engineering initiative comparable to Apollo." Even so, the President has shown considerable interest in the prospects for the space shuttle...
That may be more than a year behind schedule, and certainly much too late for Apollo 11 's birthday party. But in contrast to the end of Skylab, it should be a fitting follow-up to that memorable first step a decade...
...always found a use for new lands, however hostile. A century before Apollo, Secretary of State William Seward was being castigated for wasting $7.2 million to buy a worthless, frozen wilderness. Today, most Americans would consider Alaska quite a bargain, at 2? an acre...