Word: apollos
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...Apollo moon missions, from 1967 to 1972, provided cubic tons of melodrama, from the explosion of the Apollo 1 test module that killed three astronauts to Neil Armstrong's buoyant lunar stroll from Apollo 11. The apogee of American know-how and teamwork, the program could, at the flick of a wrong switch, careen from triumph to tragedy. In this job, success meant you forged the ultimate frontier; failure meant you died with the whole world watching...
...Apollo 13 mission--launched at 13:13 military time on an April afternoon in 1970--carried the threat of death in its oxygen tanks. They exploded on April 13, imperiling both the mission and the lives of astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert. Commander Lovell, history's greatest traveler with almost 7 million miles on his Gemini and Apollo odometers, had dreamed of walking on the moon. Now he and his companions would be lucky to walk again on the earth. In an anxious four days, they would learn how to pilot a wounded, runaway craft; they would...
...Apollo 13, based on Lovell's memoir of the mission, chronicles those hairy days and salutes the men who worked to keep a disappointment from becoming a catastrophe. Ron Howard's film pays tribute to the signal and endangered American virtues of individual ingenuity and team spirit. "It gives credit where a great amount of credit has been forgotten," says Tom Hanks, the exemplary Hollywood star and former astro-nut teen who realized a dream of his own by playing Lovell. "Launching men into space is a fantastic undertaking, which very few people today seem to appreciate. It's ironic...
...since the joining of a three-person Apollo capsule with a two-person Soyuz spacecraft 20 years ago next month--with a highly ballyhooed bear hug in space--had there been such a joint effort...
...Russians have requested that we don't hit their space station this time as hard as Apollo hit Soyuz back in 1975," says TIME's veteran aerospace watcher Jerry Hannifin. But that may not be an easy task. As the two spacecraft hurtle toward theirscheduled 9 am docking over Central Asia tomorrow, pilot Hoot Gibson will have to contend with a much more difficult linking than in the Apollo-Soyuz maneuver. "The Apollo and Soyuz capsules approached each other straight on," notes Hannifin. "This time, Mir will be stationary while the shuttle comes from underneath. The inertia...