Word: borman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Commander Frank Borman was very clear about the fact that no one aboard his spacecraft would be getting drunk on the way back from the moon. NASA had packed a couple of miniatures of brandy aboard Apollo 8 for the occasion - it wasn't enough for three grown men to get anything close to tipsy, but it was a couple of minis more than any crew had ever taken into space before, and when you're piloting a ship that is screaming to Earth at 25,000 miles per hour and you have to hit a narrow atmospheric corridor just...
...certain that the Zond would carry a man, but if it did, it would be one more black eye to the U.S. - which had lately caught up in the space race with the Soviets - in a year that had been full of them. So that summer, NASA told Borman, Lovell and Anders to cowboy up. Their original Earth orbit flight plan would be changed to a lunar orbit...
That evening, as families finished their Christmas Eve dinners, the astronauts pointed their camera out the window and beamed home a grainy, gray view of the alien world they were circling. Everywhere on the planet, viewers tuned in, making up what was then the largest TV audience in history. Borman, Lovell and Anders had been instructed to do whatever they felt was appropriate to mark the moment. A friend of Borman's had suggested they read from the book of Genesis, and so its first 10 verses had been typed up on a piece of fireproof paper before the crew...
When they finished, Borman, as the skipper, concluded the broadcast: "And from the crew of Apollo 8," he said, "we close with good night, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth...
...intellectual community traditionally had a strong opposition to popular culture? Jean-Baptiste De Borman, BRUSSELS That was a phenomenon of the 1950s and early '60s. Then the landscape changed a lot. My generation was the first to take pop culture into serious consideration. Now I'm sometimes under the impression that intellectuals are too concerned with popular culture. As soon as you learn about low culture, you become so fascinated by it that you become a member of the sect. You discover that comic books have a language of their own, and even though you were an intellectual before...