Word: apollos
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Held in Thrall. The flight of Apollo 10 was an elaborate preparation for a manned landing on the moon, now scheduled for July 20, but it was also vastly more than that. This close approach to a planet's familiar satellite was, in a more remote sense, a step toward the planets themselves. Through the first color telecast from space and massive coverage by TV, radio and the press, a worldwide audience vicariously shared the astronauts' excitement and exuberance, the tension and terror, the close-up views of the stark and rugged moonscape. Yet there was a lighthearted...
...toward earth at week's end, Flight Director Milton Windier summed up the immediate import of the flight, which was designed to test out Snoopy's performance before an actual moon landing: "It's all downhill from here. I see nothing to constrain the launch of Apollo...
Hint of Trouble. Some of the minor annoyances of earlier flights were missing aboard Apollo 10. None of the crew caught cold, probably because of a less tiring preflight schedule. None suffered nausea caused by weightlessness, possibly because of in-flight head-movement exercises prescribed by the astronauts' physician, Dr. Charles Berry. For the first time since John Young smuggled a corned-beef sandwich aboard the Gemini 3 flight in 1965 and littered the spacecraft interior with crumbs, the astronauts were allowed a supply of bread. To withstand the pure-oxygen atmosphere, which quickly dries bread and makes...
...take his first drink of water, Stafford instead got a mouthful of highly chlorinated water; because of ierroneous instructions from the ground the crew had failed to open a valve to the water tank, leaving only the evil tasting liquid in the drinking tube. As on on previous Apollo missions, there were troublesome hydrogen bubbles in the drinking water, which is produced by the fuel cells in the same oxygen-hydrogen reaction that supplies the spacecraft's electricity. The astronauts were forced to take Lomotil, a medicine for taking the butterflies out of unsettled stomachs...
Constant Vigil. This time lag has enabled NASA to set up a reasonably reliable Solar Particle Alert Network (SPAN) to protect astronauts from the vagaries of the sun. SPAN consists of six observatories that monitor the sun 24 hours a day. During this week's Apollo flight, they will feed information into a space environment console in Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center, where physicists and medical men will keep a constant vigil. In addition, Pioneer, Vela and other patrolling satellites will report any changes in solar radiation. Should SPAN report a suspicious-looking flare during the Apollo mission...