Word: apollos
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...parachutes floated Apollo to a splashdown in the Pacific about 7,000 yards away from the carrier Yorktown, where recovery helicopters spotted the capsule's beacon flashing in the predawn darkness. It was 10:51 a.m. (E.S.T.), just eleven seconds earlier than the mission's predicted splashdown time, and precisely 147 hours after Apollo 8's spectacular launch from its Cape Kennedy launching...
...pilot of a helicopter, reporting that the moon was not made of green cheese after all: "It's made out of American cheese." Standing happily on the deck of the Yorktown, Borman posed a quickly solved mystery: although Lovell and Anders had full growths of beards, the Apollo 8 commander was clean-shaven, On the short flight from Apollo to the carrier, he had used an electric razor provided by the helicopter pilot...
...Apollo 8's unblemished success and its safe return prompted Air Force Lieut. General Samuel Phillips, the Apollo program director, to announce that Apollo 9 had been scheduled for a Feb. 28 launch date. On that flight, a three-man team headed by Astronaut James Mc-Divitt will orbit the earth and practice rendezvous and docking with the problem-plagued Lunar Module (LM), which has not yet been tested in manned flight...
...Apollo 9 is successful, Apollo 10 will attempt another moon-orbiting mission in May. On this flight, two astronauts will climb into the LM and fly down to within 50,000 ft. of the lunar surface, while a third astronaut remains in the orbiting Apollo spacecraft. But Phillips spiked rumors that the Apollo 10 LM might go all the way down for a landing; the craft is not equipped to land. Instead, Apollo 11 is now scheduled for the landing mission with a fully equipped LM in July or August...
...Thomas Paine, acting administrator of NASA, took advantage of the Apollo 8 success to remind the U.S. that a manned lunar landing is not the ultimate space goal. "This is not the end but the beginning," he said. "We are at the onset of a program of space flights that will extend through many generations. We're looking forward to the days when we will be manning space stations in the sky, conducting lunar exploration and, in the distant future, blazing a new trail out to the planets...