Word: blastoff
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Some time in 1964 three U.S. astronauts will wriggle into a bell-shaped Apollo capsule, strap themselves into contour couches and await the blast-off into a challenging two-week adventure. Through the capsule's windows, they will see the flash and smoke of blastoff, then the approaching clouds, the indigo sky, and finally the star-speckled blackness of outer space. Later, as they view the looming surface of the moon, they will begin another countdown to launch a smaller detachable capsule for a lunar landing. Before the astronauts see earth again, their skill and nerves will be severely...
Black, Black Sky. Exactly 23 hours and 32 minutes after Nikolaev's blastoff, just as he was breaking Titov's record by completing his 18th orbit, Moscow announced triumphantly that a second cosmonaut, Ukrainian-born Lt. Col. Pavel Romanovich Popovich, 31, had been hurled into space in a capsule called Vostok IV. Within an hour, the two space craft had established radio contact with each other, and Nikolaev reported to control headquarters that he was watching Vostok IV through his porthole. Plotting the radio signals, scientists outside Russia estimated that the two space craft were 74.5 miles apart...
Three minutes after the Thor rocket made its predawn blastoff from Cape Canaveral, a new star flared bright yellow across the dark sky. Tiny by standard star measurements, the man-made balloon of plastic and aluminum was 135 ft. in diameter-tall as a 13-story building, and large enough to be seen by the unaided...
...spoke to Carpenter on the phone just before liftoff, then took her children to the beach to watch the shoot. She said no prayers. "I feel the same way as Scott," she explained, referring to Carpenter's conviction that it is presumptuous to pray for oneself. After blastoff, she turned to watch the rest on television. She later admitted that she felt concerned only when first reports showed that radar contact had been lost with the space capsule after reentry. Beyond that, she had no worries: "I've been thoroughly checked out, and I've watched...
...doubt that they would ever get off the pad with just 15 minutes' warning. In contrast, the Minuteman burns a solid, rubberlike fuel developed by Thiokol Chemical Corp. Once the Minuteman is fueled, it needs little maintenance, can be stored indefinitely and can be fired, from command to blastoff, in just 30 seconds...