Word: apollo
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Today, the most underachieving machine NASA ever dreamed up got into trouble again, when computers that control the station?s oxygen, water supply and orientation failed. With the three-man station crew just joined by the seven visiting astronauts of the space shuttle Atlantis, the specter of Apollo 13 on a grand scale - with 10 astronauts in danger this time instead of merely three - immediately arose. The good news is, the shuttle and station astronauts are in nowhere near the danger the 1970 lunar crew was; in fact, they're not in much danger at all. The bad news...
...didn't tell him directly either. What he did do was tell Deke Slayton, the head of the astronaut corps, and he knew Slayton would tell Kraft, the director of all of the manned missions. Even when you're calling down your imprecation from the safe remove of the Apollo 7 command module high in Earth orbit, that took brass...
...Apollo 7 was Schirra's third and last mission. Having joined the space agency as one of the original seven astronauts in 1959, the former Korean war combat pilot became the fifth American in space, orbiting the Earth in his tiny Mercury spacecraft in 1962. In 1965, he returned to space aboard Gemini 6 with co-pilot Tom Stafford, rendezvousing with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, already waiting in orbit in Gemini 7. After those two trips, there wasn't much that rattled Schirra, but agreeing to fly Apollo 7 at all still took some spine...
...January 27, 1967, just 21 months before Schirra's mission took off, the Apollo command module had killed three of his colleagues, when a spark ignited its pure oxygen atmosphere, immolating Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee during a lockdown rehearsal on the pad. Everyone at NASA already knew that the so-far unflown Apollo was a lemon. Not long before the three men died, they sat for a photo session with a model of the command module resting on a table in front of them it. In one of the outtakes never released to the press, they dropped...
...both grew up fascinated by the Apollo astronauts and space travel," he says. "I can't think of a greater adventure...