Word: apollos
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...schedule. If all goes well, on the morning of Dec. 21 a 3,100-ton Saturn 5 will rise slowly from its pad at Cape Kennedy. Three days later, Astronauts Frank Borman, James A. Lovell Jr. and William A. Anders will be spending Christmas Eve in the spaceship Apollo 8, farther from home than any men have ever been: they will be circling the moon...
...Apollc 8 will go into a "parking" orbit 115 miles above the earth. If mission controllers are satisfied that all the ship's systems are working properly, the final stage of the Saturn booster will be reignited during the second or third orbit. The resulting thrust will increase Apollo's speed to 24,000 m.p.h.-enough to free it from the earth's environment and send it on a curving trajectory toward the moon...
...time Apollo approaches within 30,000 miles of its lunar target, its speed will have tapered off to 2,100 m.p.h. Then, as the moon's gravity begins to exert a stronger and stronger tug, Apollo will accelerate once more. To slow the spaceship down and place it in lunar orbit, Apollo's big engine will fire a strong braking blast. Following two circuits of the moon, the engine will be used again to move Apollo's orbit to 70 miles above the cratered lunar landscape, which the astronauts will survey and photograph. Eight revolutions later...
Long Shot. For all the meticulous planning, NASA acknowledges that Apollo 8 involves greater risks than any of the previous manned space flights. Not only will the spacecraft be as many as three days away from a safe landing (v. no more than three hours in earth-orbiting missions), but it will be entirely dependent on its own propulsion system to break out of lunar orbit. If that lone engine should falter, the astronauts would be stranded, circling the moon with absolutely no hope of rescue...
Even as the U.S. proudly hailed Apollo 7 and its crew, the Soviets launched an impressive reminder that they are still running hard in the race to the moon. With no advance fanfare, Russia's tenth manned spacecraft, Soyuz 3, soared into orbit, piloted by fledgling Cosmonaut Colonel Georgy Beregovoy, 47. On the craft's very first pass around the earth, he made a rendezvous with Soyuz 2, an unmanned spacecraft that had been fired aloft the dav before...