Word: apollos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ceremony commemorating the day 20 years ago when America's Apollo astronauts first set foot on the moon, President Bush last week outlined his vision of America's role in space...
...after Apollo, something went wrong with the nation's space program. Despite successes -- such as the Skylab space station and the series of unmanned missions that will reach its climax next month when Voyager 2 arrives at Neptune -- the program seemed to founder. The space shuttle, for example, was oversold as the one answer to U.S. space-transportation needs. But it is too big to put astronauts in space efficiently, too small to launch the largest payloads and too unreliable to live up to the 60-flight-per-year schedule once promised. The result, even before the Challenger accident...
...crux of the problem is that the leadership Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson gave the Apollo program was not continued by their successors. That leadership gap may soon end, though. As early as this week, President George Bush is expected to announce his vision for the U.S. space program. No one knows what Bush will say, but some members of his National Space Council, chaired by Vice President Dan Quayle, reportedly favor a return to the moon, followed by a manned trip to Mars...
...even 20 years later, looking with a more observant eye at the live footage of the first landing on the moon, it is easy to see why the Apollo mission captured the imagination of the nation as it did. Twenty years (and more) of science fiction movies have been unable to recreate the silent majesty of the lunar landscape on the day it was first marred by human footprints...
...monetary costs are easy to figure: $25 billion for the Apollo program, more than $35 billion for the fleet of four space shuttles. Not so easy to assess are the benefits that we have gained by sending people into space...