Word: apollos
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...thing the astronauts did not observe was Apollo's companion in lunar orbit?the Soviet Union's unmanned Luna 15 moon probe (see p. 17). Arriving in the neighborhood two days before the U.S. spacecraft, Luna went into an orbit as close as ten miles from the moon and eventually landed. The chances that Luna would be visible from Apollo 11?much less collide with it?were estimated by Houston's Christopher Columbus Kraft, director of flight operations, as about "one in a billion...
None of the astronauts slept very long before awakening to the most momentous day of their lives. Collins got six hours, Aldrin and Armstrong five apiece. During Apollo's eleventh revolution of the moon, Aldrin and Armstrong donned their space suits and crawled through a tunnel for a final checkout of the lunar module before its long separation from the command module. They paid particular attention to Eagle's propulsion systems?the tanks containing the hypergolic fuels that fire the descent and ascent engines, and the pressure gauges on the helium that forces the fuels into the combustion chambers, where...
EVEN if their mission is a complete triumph, the Apollo 11 astronauts will face a reception far different from those accorded to previous space heroes on their return to earth. There will be no casual camaraderie with the frogmen after splashdown, no lengthy welcoming rites aboard the recovery carrier, no embraces with their wives in Houston. The moon voyagers will be treated-literally-as if they had the plague...
...guard against the remote possibility that they are harboring unknown lunar organisms that might endanger life on earth, the astronauts will be forced to exchange the isolation of space for a terrestrial variety nearly as lonely. For 21 days after Apollo leaves the moon, they will be in quarantine...
...recovery site in the Pacific, a frogman dressed in an all-enveloping biological insulation garment (BIG) will open the command-module hatch, toss in three similar garments and quickly close it again. Inside the Apollo cabin, the astronauts will don and seal their BIGs before reopening the hatch and stepping into a pool of antiseptic at the bottom of an adjacent rubber raft. Almost immediately, the frogman will again close the hatch, spray antiseptic around its edges, and then give the astronauts themselves a thorough spraying...