Word: apollos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...satellite. Lovell waxed more metaphoric as he described the great blue ball, 233,000 miles away, that he, Frank Borman and William Anders had left some 69 hours earlier. "The earth from here is a grand ovation to the big vastness of space." The world listened, enthralled. Space capsule Apollo 8 had encountered Spaceship Earth...
...flight of Apollo 8 accomplished ten revolutions around the moon, and ended with an uneventful splashdown in the Pacific. It was a marvelous Christmas gift to the human race -- and especially to the U.S., battered by war, assassination and domestic strife. For the first time, men saw the entire globe floating in the void. It was the centerpiece of a new era, a new consciousness: the Space Age. In the cramped confines of an 11-ft.-long module, blasted aloft by a 363-ft. Saturn 5 rocket, the three astronauts embodied an American urge for restless exploration, wedded...
...contractors, and it cost $33 billion. The quest also cost the lives of three fellow astronauts: Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee, who had died on the launching pad the previous year. Some critics sneered at the outpouring of ingenuity and treasure. A "moondoggle," one detractor labeled the Apollo 8 flight. A Congressman termed it a "garish spectacle." It could be seen -- and was -- as history's most elaborate form of escapism...
...centuries ago who first heard news of the New World," Lyndon Johnson told the astronauts by telephone aboard the carrier Yorktown. "You've seen what man has never seen before." One of those things, which was to grow in significance in forthcoming decades, was the earth's finitude: with Apollo 8, humanity had found a godlike perch from which to examine its collective limits...
...immediate aftermath of Apollo 8 was a land rush of follow-up flights. Said Thomas Paine, acting administrator of NASA in 1968: "We are at the onset of a program of space flights that will extend through many generations." Since then, there have been other triumphs and other disasters. Yet the wonder of that lunar vista has remained a lure and an accomplishment, a sign that amid riot, war and discontent, something was still worth striving...