Word: civilianizes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that critical point, Armstrong, a 39-year-old civilian with 23 years of experience at flying everything from Ford tri-motors to experimental X-15 rocket planes, took decisive action. The automatic landing system was taking Eagle down into a football-field-size crater littered with rocks and boulders, Armstrong explained: "It required a manual takeover on the P-66 [a semiautomatic computer program] and flying manually over the rock field to find a reasonably good area." The crisis emphasized the value of manned flight. Had Eagle continued on its computer-guided course, it might well have crashed into...
...Armenian immigrants who fled a Turkish massacre by cattle boat, Kerkorian was reared on a farm in California's San Joaquin Valley. He dropped out of school in the eighth grade to help the family and was signed on as a logger for $25 a month in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Every spare penny that he earned in a variety of odd jobs went for flying lessons, and he qualified as a civilian flying instructor with the Army Air Corps at the beginning of World War II. Later, as a civilian pilot for Britain's Royal Air Force...
...fraction of that sum was at issue right now: $759.1 million for the first steps in deployment of the Nixon Administration's Safeguard anti-ballistic-missile defense system. After months of inconclusive hearings and angry debate, and publication of a spate of weighty books on ABM by civilian defense scholars,* the Senate settled in for its toughest fight over a military bill in memory...
Command Pilot Neil Armstrong, 38, could have missed his destiny as the result of half a dozen close shaves. He crashed his Panther jet behind enemy lines in Korea, but escaped a day later. As a civilian test pilot in 1962, he plummeted uncontrollably toward earth when the rocket engine in his X-15 failed to start, but it caught on just in time. As commander of Gemini 8 in 1966, he had to abort the scheduled three-day flight after ten hours when a short circuit threw the spacecraft's thrusters out of control. Last summer...
Armstrong went to work for NASA as a civilian test pilot for the X-15 rocket plane, which he flew at 3,989 m.p.h. and an altitude of 207,500 ft.?both records at the time. In the early days of the space program, Armstrong had no desire to become an astronaut. Says a close acquaintance: "He thought those guys were playing around with a lot of marbles." After the "marbles" began lifting other pilots into space, he changed his mind and in 1962 became one of the second group of astronauts to be chosen. As a civilian...