Word: apollos
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...first it was only a tiny speck in the sky. Then, as Astronaut David Scott peered through the window of Apollo 9's orbiting command module, the speck grew into the most ungainly manned craft ever sent into orbit. Said Scott: "You're the biggest, friendliest, funniest-looking spider I've ever seen." He was talking to the lunar module, known as Spider, and it bore two other astronauts who had earlier left Scott to guide it through space. By flying their ship through orbital maneuvers designed to simulate those to be used by astronauts returning from...
Although an onslaught of astronaut sniffles and sore throats at Cape Kennedy last week delayed the orbital flight of Apollo 9, an unmanned spacecraft named Mariner 6 was successfully launched from a nearby pad. Its ambitious mission: to search for evidence that life can exist on Mars...
...triumphant tour of Europe last month, Apollo 8 Astronaut Frank Borman amused his audiences by insisting that he, James Lovell and William Anders were older than they would have been had they not flown to the moon. "I think we should get overtime for that," he complained. Borman was joking about his pay, but he was quite serious about his aging. During their moon mission, the astronauts aged about 300 microseconds (300 millionths of a second) more than the people they left behind on earth...
...While Apollo 8 was within 4,000 miles of the earth, Alley found, the spacecraft's speed was the predominant factor; time slowed up and the astronauts actually aged more slowly than mere earthlings. But beyond that distance, as the effects of earth's gravity lessened, Apollo's time began running fast. Over the entire journey, Alley says, Apollo's time passed more quickly than earth time by the 300 microseconds...
Despite Alley's calculations, Borman's tongue-in-cheek overtime demand is valid only for Astronaut Anders, who made his first space flight in Apollo 8. When Borman and Lovell were crewmates on the two-week orbital mission of Gemini 7, the time dilation effect was dominant for the entire period; the two astronauts thus aged less than those on earth by approximately 400 microseconds. Lovell's time also slowed down by about 100 microseconds during the four-day flight of Gemini...