Word: apollos
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...first hint of more serious trouble occurred after Apollo 10 had slipped into its nearly circular 69-mile orbit around the moon. Crawling through the tunnel connecting Charlie Brown to Snoopy, Stafford discovered that the padding on Charlie Brown's hatch had been ripped during the pressurization of the lunar module early in the flight, allowing snowlike fiber-glass insulation to escape and drift around the tunnel interior. During Apollo's eleventh revolution, as Stafford and Cernan prepared to undock Snoopy for its descent toward the moon, the astronauts found that they could not depressurize the connecting tunnel...
...When Apollo 10 streaked smoothly on its course toward the moon last week, it did so with a difference. Paul Haney, for six years the cool and detached "voice" of Gemini and Apollo, was gone. His replacement on the air was Jack Riley, another laconic, low-key newsman, who sees his job not so much "as an announcer but as a supplier of information to the news media...
Riley sat at a blinking console in Mission Control, listening in on the space talk and efficiently translating the alphabet soup of acronyms and numbers to newsmen for nine or ten hours at a time. Getting ready before blastoff, he waded through the documents generated by Apollo 10 (a stack of paper more than a foot high) and interviewed the key men involved. For a month before the mission, he spent 30 hours a week watching flight simulations...
Riley's performance, backed by eight previous flight assignments with Haney, proved to be as smooth as the Apollo liftoff. His visible calm, however, belied the subsurface disputes that have been shaking NASA for the past few months. Until his angry departure last month, Haney, in his role as NASA's public affairs officer, was the man caught in the middle. On one side were the engineers and astronauts, who were determined to maintain as much privacy as possible during the flights. On the other was the press, equally determined to know all about the space shots...
...battle rose to the surface during the flight of Apollo 9, specifically when Commander Jim McDivitt asked to speak to the ground in private to report that Rusty Schweikart was vomiting. When Robert Gilruth, director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, granted permission, reporters protested. As the battle continued, Haney pondered-and then took the position that the right of the press and the public to know was more important than the astronauts' desire for privacy...