Word: apollos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...most auto races, the competing cars have about as much in common with the family flivver as an Apollo spacecraft has with a Piper Cub. Not in the Trans-American Championship for sports sedans. Commonly known as the Trans-Am, the competition is limited to genuine stock cars; the rules restrict engine size to 305 cu. in. and require that at least 2,500 identical models be in general distribution. The result is what Tracy Bird, executive director of the sponsoring Sports Car Club of America, calls "product identity," a sense of involvement that has drawn more than...
...neither the desire for scientific achievement nor hope of economic gain that mainly propelled America's man-on-the-moon program. Instead, this British trio of Sunday Timesmen argues, the program evolved pragmatically from the cold war. The builders and launchers, the technicians and crews of the Apollo missions have always been "soldiers in an age when technology has become warfare by other means. Americans did not go to the moon for mankind. They went for America...
Though that fact is hardly news, the three authors' detailed, provocative and thoroughly partisan review of the space program should command attention, particularly as the U.S. takes its bearings again in the wake of the near tragedy that befell Apollo 13 and the recent inquiry assigning blame for it to U.S. industry and NASA alike. For its humor and irreverence, Brian O'Leary's tale of what it is like to be an astronaut dropout is also worthy of note...
Curious Drive. According to O'Leary, the Apollo moon harvest has been badly handled scientifically and has produced scandalously meager results. Yet as a scientist, O'Leary still champions a space program. "Space," he asserts, "is as cheap as six weeks' fighting in Viet Nam, cheaper than deploying a useless anti-ballistic missile system, and [it consumes] less than 5% of the present annual defense budget...
...technological byproducts of the space program, but in the long run there is perhaps no entirely rational way in which to assess it. Such a project can only be viewed and approved -if approved at all-in inspirational terms. "The real reason for undertaking the space program," says one Apollo defender, Physicist Harold Urey, who is quoted in Journey to Tranquility, "is an innate characteristic of human beings, namely, some curious drive to try to do what might be thought to be impossible-to try to excel in one way or another." Urey compares such drives to the devotion that...