Word: apollos
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Right Stuff grew out of his "curiosity about what made men shoot dice with death." What he discovered in thousands of miles and more than 100 interviews was that pilots lived "in a world where there are no honorable alternatives." Wolfe has already done all the research on Gemini, Apollo and Skylab, and plans to write about them as well. Why did the current book take six years? "It was a structural problem," he says. "There are no surprises in the plot and a great many characters...
Opposition had been growing long before Apollo XI left the pad at Cape Kennedy. The $25 billion price tag for the manned space program, spread out over ten years, provided a nice target for those who thought we should "solve our problems on earth before we worry about space." The public image of NASA and space exploration evolved into one of tremendous waste, of massive expenditures for little or no return...
...when moonshots started boring people and networks no longer felt like covering them in depth, support for space fell faster than Skylab. Nixon, whose obnoxiousness had interrupted the moonwalk, turned around and canned the last three Apollos. The funds for the proposed space station were cut sharply, meaning that Skylab would be built on the cheap, out of a mishmash of spare parts from the Apollo programs. NASA wanted to put the station into a higher orbit than the one ended in Australia last week, but the money wasn't there...
...white blotches, reminded one scientist of a cheese pizza. Eight volcanoes were photographed in mid-eruption. A frosty covering of ice dominated another of the satellites; still another is criss-crossed by ridges that resemble those caused by continental drift on earth. Eleven worlds have come into focus since Apollo...
When they get there, they might want to switch on the experiments left behind by the Apollo astronauts. Sending data back to earth about moonquakes, solar wind levels, and so on, they were still operating in September 1977 when it was decided that we couldn't afford to pick up the signals. So the instruments were turned off. Only a few scientists were upset; no one else cared one way or the other. Welcome to the Space...