Word: apollos
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RETURNING home to Houston early one morning last week, the Apollo 8 astronauts, who had seen some astonishing sights on their journey through space, seemed even more astonished to find a tumultuous welcome awaiting them. They had already undergone hours of preliminary debriefing sessions aboard the recovery carrier Yorktown, where their spaceship, blackened by its fiery re-entry into the earth's atmosphere, also got a scientific onceover. Flown from the Yorktown to Hawaii, the astronauts boarded an Air Force C-141 jet transport for a 10-hr, flight to Ellington Air Force Base, just five miles from Houston...
...excellent completion of this important experiment. We are confident that the exploration of outer space will greatly benefit earthmen. We congratulate you on a successful step toward this noble goal." In contrast to the terse and often dour notices that have frequently followed U.S. space accomplishments, Tass hailed the Apollo 8 voyage as an "outstanding" success that "opens a new stage in the history of space research." Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny sent a cable to President Johnson calling the flight "a new accomplishment in conquering the outer space...
...indeed one world." There were similar messages from U.N. Secretary General U Thant, French President Charles de Gaulle, Premier Eisaku Sato of Japan, King Hassan of Morocco and a host of other world leaders. Even Havana radio contributed to worldwide reaction by presenting lengthy and approving appraisals of Apollo 8's moon mission...
...views of the earth from deep space. They show views of the moon never before seen by man and some lunar features previously undetected by the cameras aboard unmanned vehicles. They reveal the distant earth as a globe of ethereal beauty that understandably evoked feelings of nostalgia in the Apollo astronauts...
Soon after they had left earth orbit and headed toward the moon, the astronauts pointed Apollo back toward earth and aimed a 16-mm. Maurer movie camera at the third-stage S-4B rocket, which had just been separated from the spacecraft. The resulting pictures show the receding rocket gleaming in the sunlight against a black sky as the blue, cloud-mottled earth hovers below. (Minutes earlier, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory scientists atop a mountain in the Hawaiian Islands had used a Baker-Nunn telescopic camera to shoot a spectacular picture of the S-4B, about 120 miles high, blasting Apollo...