Word: apollos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After Komarov's death, the Soviets halted manned space flights for 18 months and extensively redesigned the Soyuz capsule. NASA was also cautious. It suspended manned flights for 21 months after the Apollo fire, a period of agonizing self-appraisal. Admitting that no one had realized the extent of the fire hazard in a capsule full of pure oxygen, NASA switched to cabin atmospheres that consisted of 60% oxygen and 40% nitrogen while the spacecraft was on the pad. The agency also developed a new type of hatch that could be opened in five seconds. As NASA workers last week...
...moon landing, talking by phone to Neil Armstrong and Edwin ("Buzz") Aldrin on the lunar surface. "This certainly has to be the most historic phone call ever made." It was even more, and Nixon knew it. He launched a global diplomatic odyssey timed to take advantage of the Apollo 11 success. His itinerary placed him on the aircraft carrier Hornet just as the moon crew was fished out of the ocean and lifted onto the TV screens of people all over the globe. Without the continuing spectaculars in space, Nixon's demise because of Watergate would have produced even more...
There was, at the apex of detente during Gerald Ford's Administration, a brief hope that space could become a bridge rather than a barrier between the superpowers. In 1975 astronauts and cosmonauts aboard an Apollo and a Soyuz spacecraft linked in a display of heavenly symbolism. But such episodes proved to be merely minor exceptions to the rule that space was inevitably where the superpowers would extend their rivalry...
While no one at NASA will even speculate on when shuttle flights might resume, other knowledgeable officials cite the sole precedent: after a fire destroyed an Apollo spacecraft on the launching pad and killed three astronauts in January 1967, it took 21 months before manned space flights resumed. "We've got to reckon in about those terms," says New Jersey Republican Jim Courter, a member of the House Armed Services Committee who follows the space program closely. The moratorium could be shortened if the flaw turns out to be something that can be fixed fairly quickly. But it could stretch...
...tribal war, political ineptitude and state-approved brutality that badly eroded the once lustrous prospects of a country that Explorer Henry Stanley called "the pearl of Africa." Uganda probably reached its nadir under the infamous Idi Amin Dada, who seized power in 1971 from the country's first leader, Apollo Milton Obote. During Amin's eight-year reign of terror, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people were killed, and thousands more were forced into exile. After the dictator expelled the country's Asians, who traditionally controlled Ugandan commerce, the economy collapsed. Production of coffee alone, the country...