Word: clippers
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Lonely Day. If the flight goes according to plan, the all-Navy crew will ride the nautically named Yankee Clipper into moon orbit after 83 hours in space. Then Skipper Charles ("Pete") Conrad, 39, and Space Rookie Alan Bean, 37, will board the module Intrepid for their trip to the moon's surface. While his fellow astronauts explore the Sea of Storms 69 miles below, Gemini Veteran Richard F. Gordon Jr., 40, will spend a lonely day and a half in orbit...
Riding atop a thundering Saturn 5 booster, the Apollo 12 astronauts will use a rocketry system virtually identical to the one that propelled Apollo 11. Yet their nautically named command ship, Yankee Clipper, will blaze its own distinctive path. Halfway to the moon, Apollo 12 Skipper Charles ("Pete") Conrad, 39, a veteran of two earth-girdling Gemini flights, will fire the spacecraft's service propulsion engine, jolting the ship out of its "free-return" trajectory. No longer able to loop the moon automatically and return to earth, should its engine falter, Apollo 12 could be lost forever...
Even the.departure from the moon will be somewhat different. Once they rejoin Yankee Clipper 69 miles overhead, Conrad and Bean will send Intrepid's ascent stage crashing into the moon rather than into a lunar orbit. This will eliminate a potential hazard to future lunar navigation as well as cause enough of a thud to give earthbound seismologists a good calibration test of the new lunar seismometer. Next, the astronauts will shoot a series of closeup photographs of the moon, using both ordinary and infra-red film to help NASA planners pick out landing sites for the remaining eight...
Such small gains are not nearly enough to reverse cotton's decline, which has all but wiped out the once bustling exchanges of the South. The exchange in New Orleans, from which clipper ships braved Northern blockades during the Civil War, closed in 1964 and is now a dusty, rotting building. The Galveston and Charleston exchanges shut down last year. Next to go, most likely, will be Houston's, which sold only 100,000 bales in 1968. There is little left for its score of traders to speculate upon -except the question of how long the exchange will...
...Andromeda Strain is more than just a biological tug-of-war, though. To judge by Crichton's example, the role that the clipper ship used to play in 19th century fiction now is handled by the space program (both novelistically and cinematically, for Kubrick's 2001 held much the same appeal). Where Melville and Dana used to fascinate their readers with descriptions of rigging and trade routes, Crichton delivers mini-lectures on space research, micro-biology, and biochemistry. Meanwhile, names like Wald and DeBakey weave in and out of the narrative. Most of this material is, of course, quite elementary...