Word: astronautics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Astronaut. By next day, editors around the world had showered Moscow correspondents with their own rockets (correspondents' term for inquiries about competitors' stories). France-Soir and London's Daily Mail both ran Page One drawings of the compleat astronaut in space suit, breathing gear and seat belt. Said one query: "Like interview and first-person impressions." Demanded another: "Competition says it's woman, not man. Confirm...
...identity"-but volunteered no hints as to the identity of its mysterious news informants. Turning to such tried-and-true sources as Estes Kefauver and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Fred Whipple (who, said A.P., "expressed no surprise"), the A.P.-in common with big-city newspapers-kept the astronaut aloft with scientific and political punditry...
...aspiring astronaut almost overplayed the gag. After a London tabloid splashed a picture of the "passport" across half a page, hundreds of people asked for passports and announced their readiness to trade this world for another. Plaintively the society announced that it was all a fake-they were not prepared to sell any round-trip tickets from Liverpool Airport to Mars. They had never even bought any shares in "British Milky Way Space Ships, Inc." Then the scientists went back to what they know how to handle: their telescopes, their rocket motors, and the antiseptic world of interstellar mathematics...