Word: apollos
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Shortly before Apollo 11 was launched in July 1969, Russian scientists sent an unmanned spaceship to the moon. Its probable mission was to land on the lunar surface, scoop up some soil and beat the Americans back to earth with the first samples of moon material. Luna 15 never achieved that ambitious goal. Several hours after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first mortals to step onto the moon, the Soviet spaceship dropped out of lunar orbit, apparently crashed and was never heard from again...
Space-Age Principles. Chance is an unabashed advocate of applying space-age principles to the ancient art of boat building. It is no accident that his chief engineer, Eric Hall, used to work for Grumman Corp., the people who built the Apollo lunar module. Experimenting with tensile strengths and thermal coefficients. Chance refitted the old Intrepid with exotic lightweight metals -beryllium on the top of the mast, magnesium for the winches, boron graphite for the boom-to cut the weight of these vital fittings...
...moon every four months or so until the end of 1972. As public interest in the moon program faded and Congress chopped away at NASA's budget, however, the space agency began having second thoughts. Earlier this year, it canceled the last of the scheduled missions, Apollo 20, and spaced out the remaining landings to twice a year. Last week, the space agency reluctantly scrubbed two more missions-Apollo 15 and Apollo 19-leaving only four more scheduled flights to the moon...
...cancellations bitterly disappointed NASA's 49 highly trained active astronauts, 35 of whom are still waiting for a flight. The cutbacks are also a severe blow to lunar scientists, who have only begun to tackle some of the questions raised by the findings of the successful Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 missions. Perhaps the only consolation for NASA is that the money saved from the two canceled shots (at least $350 million) may be applied to its Skylab program, which, beginning in late 1972, will place a crew of three into earth orbit for 28 days to determine...
...Manned Spacecraft Center, the five giant computers are working at a sharply reduced rate (operating cost: about $10,000 per hour), one of the two mission-control centers has been put in mothballs, and astronauts have been asked to cut back their pilot training flights in T-38 jets. Apollo 14 Commander Alan Shepard has publicly worried whether his ship will be properly prepared for next January's tentatively scheduled moon shot...