Word: apollos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Commander Frank Borman was very clear about the fact that no one aboard his spacecraft would be getting drunk on the way back from the moon. NASA had packed a couple of miniatures of brandy aboard Apollo 8 for the occasion - it wasn't enough for three grown men to get anything close to tipsy, but it was a couple of minis more than any crew had ever taken into space before, and when you're piloting a ship that is screaming to Earth at 25,000 miles per hour and you have to hit a narrow atmospheric corridor just...
Certainly, though, the Apollo 8 crew had earned the right to celebrate. It was Christmastime 1968 - the end of a hard year. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered; in June, Bobby Kennedy followed; in August, the Democratic Convention in Chicago dissolved into bloody rioting; and in each month of that exceedingly bloody year, 1,200 Americans had died in Vietnam. So people had bigger things on their minds in October when Apollo 7 - the first of the three-man Apollo ships - had orbited the Earth. And people might have been equally indifferent in December when Apollo 8 went...
Lovell, now 80, for whom Apollo 8 was a third trip to space, didn't even bother to crunch the numbers. "If you worried about whether or not you were coming home," he says, "you wouldn't go in the first place...
...Apollo 8 did go. On the morning of Saturday, Dec. 21, 1968, the crew blasted off aboard the 36-story, seven-million-pound Saturn V rocket into Earth orbit. Five hours later, the crew fired the Saturn's upper stage engine and Apollo 8 peeled out for the moon...
...eventually get them to Mars. Many skeptics saw the hand of political whiz Karl Rove in that, suspecting that the whole idea was just a bag of election year goodies for space-happy states like Florida and Texas, as well as for voters nostalgic for the glory days of Apollo. But Bush, NASA and Congress did mean business, and eventually came up with a plan under which the space station would be completed and the shuttle would be retired by 2010. That would free up about $4 billion per year, which would be used to pay for a new generation...