Word: cernan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After another perfect launch and a three-day journey to the vicinity of the moon, Astronauts Eugene Cernan and Tom Stafford climbed into Snoopy, left Astronaut John Young in Charlie Brown, and streaked off across the lunar sky in their spiderlike module. As they approached the moon's surface at a speed of 3,700 m.p.h., Cernan cried: "We're right there! We're right over it! I'm telling you, we are low, we're close, babe. This is it!" At one point, the astronauts swooped to within 47,000 ft. of the moon...
...most of the world in thrall, it was at least partly because of the infectious enthusiasm of the crew, who are all veterans of earlier space flights but nonetheless "oohed" and "ahed" at each new sight with the wonder of rookies. From the first moments of the flight, when Cernan cried, "What a ride! What a ride!," the astronauts bubbled with excitement. They repeatedly used the word fantastic. They talked so much that one capsule commentator in Houston complained half-seriously: "I couldn't get a word in edgewise." They joked with ground controllers and serenaded them with such...
...Snoopy, Stafford discovered that the padding on Charlie Brown's hatch had been ripped during the pressurization of the lunar module early in the flight, allowing snowlike fiber-glass insulation to escape and drift around the tunnel interior. During Apollo's eleventh revolution, as Stafford and Cernan prepared to undock Snoopy for its descent toward the moon, the astronauts found that they could not depressurize the connecting tunnel. The drifting fiber glass had clogged a ¼in. tunnel vent. If something was not done, ground controllers feared, the unvented pressure might impart too much velocity to Snoopy...
Angle of Twist. To solve this problem, Stafford and Cernan reopened Snoopy's sealed hatch. Much of the oxygen in the tunnel promptly flowed into the lunar module, where the pressure was less. The excess oxygen was then released into space through a vent in Snoopy...
...three astronauts seem voluble and anxious to describe their forthcoming adventure as it unfolds. "We can't show you television from 50,000 ft. above the moon because we don't have it on the LM," says Cernan. "But we certainly hope to share the view through words and tell you what it really looks like." It may be only a dress rehearsal, but Apollo 10 promises to monopolize the attention of a worldwide audience from its liftoff in Florida to its splashdown off Samoa in the Pacific...