Word: astronaut
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Small wonder, then, that those on earth saw it as a beleaguered battlefield -not, as Astronaut Lovell described it from his vantage point nearly a quarter of a million miles away, as "a grand ovation to the vastness of space." Sated with violence, sick of crisis, weary of politics and protest alike, the U.S.-and the rest of the world-needed few excuses to look to the heavens. As the year waned, they shifted their gaze to earth's placid, lifeless satellite-as Sir Richard Burton described it in 1880, "A ruined world, a globe burnt out, a corpse...
...large patches of white. Thus, incredibly, they were there, precisely where the mission planners had predicted, finally living the dreams of untold generations of their ancestors. In orbit around the moon and 230,000 miles farther away from home than any humans had ever before traveled, the Apollo 8 astronauts conveyed impressions of their pioneering adventure with words that at times were poetic. Their telecasts gave earthbound viewers an unforgettable astronaut's-eye view of the moon...
...time. At 16, he designed and built a rocket that rose 80 ft. on a fuel mixture of gunpowder and airplane glue. And in a term paper at Annapolis, he predicted that rockets would really have their day after man finally penetrated the vacuum of space. Early in his astronaut training, Lovell bubbled over with so much nervous energy that fellow astronauts called him "Shaky"-although he has since proved that he is nerveless in space...
There are basic worries and baroque worries, and a scheme for a robot-astronaut is decidedly baroque. The chief programmer at the Artificial Intelligence Lab, William Henneman, says, "We're still working at things kids have solved by the time they're two years old." What the research on intelligent automata is currently involved in is providing computers with "eyes" and "hands...
...Despite the effortless maneuvering, Apollo's flight was not with out its niggling problems. An oxygen-flow warning light flashed on, but the astronauts quickly determined that a sensor, not the oxygen flow, was at fault Astronaut Cunningham, 36, a civilian physicist on his first flight, reported increasing pressure in a radiator that cools the spacecraft. The trouble was not serious enough to affect the mission. Astronaut Eisele, 38, an Air Force major also making his first space mission, reported radio interference that sounded like a commercial. "I', getting a hot tip on some hostpital-insurance plan from...