Word: apollos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...place. Thirty years to the day after Neil Armstrong took that small step onto the lunar surface, the ghosts of the space race are everywhere. Foremost among them is Armstrong himself, who has hardly spoken in public since his immortal line on July 20, 1968, but who joined fellow Apollo 11 astronauts Edwin A. "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins Tuesday to receive the Langley Gold Medal for aviation from Al Gore. And as the space shuttle Columbia sits idle on the launchpad, its mission scrubbed until Friday because of persistent glitches, TIME space correspondent Jeffrey Kluger is reminded...
...with almost all things Kennedy, the anniversaries of man?s greatest leap have a dark side. Saturday, the day after the younger JFK went down, was the 30th anniversary of his uncle Teddy?s Chappaquiddick disaster. The scandal broke one day after Apollo 11 took off and two days before it landed; the curse shared the headlines with the triumph, as it does today. One more aquatic disaster made the news today, dredged up for reexamination ?- Gus Grissom?s capsule has been pulled from the ocean. The capsule Liberty Bell 7, which had lain in water three miles deep since...
Once the hatches of the lunar modules were opened, all that changed. Out in the dunes of the moon, the Apollo astronauts behaved like nothing more--and nothing less--than human beings. They toddled around; they fell down; they got dirty; they kept house. They knew the whole world knew they were there, yet they nonetheless made it a point to leave behind small or sweet or poignant things to mark their brief passing. Gene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, wrote his daughter's initials in the soil with his finger; Charlie Duke, lunar-module pilot of Apollo 16, left...
...sure, what propelled the Apollo crewmen to the moon was more than just "Kilroy was here" egoism. Over the course of the half a dozen landing missions, the astronauts pried loose and carried home 838.2 lbs. of lunar rocks, providing Earthbound scientists with rare tissue samples of a nearby body whose geological origins mirror the solar system's own. Priceless as the artifacts were, however, in the days of Apollo, geology was always trumped by poetry, and everybody within the space community knew...
Curiously, if there was any group that was not fully able to appreciate this victory of adventure over science, it was the Apollo astronauts themselves. (All told, there were a dozen moonwalkers; with the death of Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad last week, nine of them survive.) Before his death in 1982, Jack Swigert, command-module pilot of Apollo 13 (a mission that taught NASA a thing or two about adventure), noted that the very thing that qualified lunar astronauts to fly the missions they were flying disqualified them from experiencing them fully. Can you fathom the utter, hostile emptiness...