Word: apollos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...look of the Mercury and Gemini capsules. By comparison, the lunar module (LM) that lifted from Cape Kennedy last week was the ugliest of ducklings. Bulging and misshapen, bristling with squiggles of antennas, the LM seemed more the creation of scientists gone mad than a craft entrusted with Project Apollo's most crucial task: to land astronauts on the moon and lift them off again. But in a seven-hour test flight, LM last week performed like a full-fledged space swan...
Launched by the same Saturn I rocket atop which the fatal Apollo fire occurred last year, the LM was protected on its flight through the atmosphere by a nose cone and a cone-shaped adapter. After the second stage had been inserted into orbit, the nose cone was jettisoned and the adapter's four panels slowly opened like the petals of a flower, exposing LM to its natural environment: the vacuum of space, in which it can fly as efficiently as a streamlined rocket. Then, on command from LM's on-board computer, the craft briefly fired...
...thrust descent engine, which was to begin at 10% of its rated power and gradually throttle up to almost full operational power after 26 seconds. The operation was designed to simulate the burn that would put the LM on a trajectory from the moon-orbiting Apollo command ship to the lunar surface. But after only four seconds of firing, the descent engine was shut down by LM's overcautious computer, which had sensed trouble because thrust was not being built up as rapidly as planned...
Squeezed by rising costs of the Viet Nam war, still troubled by the fatal Apollo fire and influenced by polls reporting slipping public interest in space flight, congressional economizers have been slicing away at NASA's space budget. Their efforts have been so successful that the U.S., while still committed to landing men on the moon by 1970, has virtually scrapped its once ambitious planetary exploration program. Alarmed by the trend, an eminent U.S. space scientist has forcefully spoken out, warning that the U.S. is in effect abandoning the planets to Russia. In a signed editorial in Science, University...
...teams so painstakingly assembled for the U.S. space program. On the day that Saturn 5 made its successful flight (TIME, Nov. 17), 700 NASA employees who had helped build the giant rocket were laid off at the Marshall Space Flight Center. They were victims of budgetary cuts in the Apollo Applications Program, which will use hardware left over from the Apollo flights for a variety of earth-orbital missions...