Word: commandants
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...flight began flawlessly. On Pad 39A at Cape Kennedy, Fla., Borman, Lovell and Anders lay strapped in the 11-ft. command module that was perched atop a 363-ft. Saturn 5 rocket. With a deafening bellow, the rocket inched upward on a rising pillar of smoke and flame, then spurted off into earth orbit. During its second turn around the planet, it accelerated from 17,400 m.p.h. to 24,200 m.p.h., enough to escape earth's gravitational embrace and send Apollo 8 on the road of night that would lead to the moon. Almost 69 hours after liftoff...
Accelerated by the earth's own gravity, the spacecraft hurtled at increasing speeds toward its last great challenge-re-entry of earth's atmosphere. Jettisoning the service module and its trusty SPS engine, the astronauts yawed their cone-shaped command module until its blunt end was forward and then plunged into the outer atmosphere at a speed of 24,629 m.p.h.-some 7,000 m.p.h. faster than re-entry speeds of orbital missions. Roaring down into the thickening atmosphere within a sliver of the planned angle of 6.43°, Apollo passed over Peking and Tokyo, the temperature...
Ever since, Low has been working six-day weeks of up to 16 hours a day. The Apollo command module, with all its 2,000,000 parts, was torn apart, reexamined, and extensively redesigned at a cost of $75 million, an operation that set back Apollo's timetable by many months...
...could restore order within the program, and Low was the choice. In April 1967, while preparing for takeoff from Washington National Airport in a small NASA Gulfstream turboprop, he was hustled off the airplane and into a nearby office. Recalls Low: "Everybody in the line of command above me in NASA seemed to be there. They asked me to take over management of Apollo. I probably would have liked some time to think about it, but since anyone I might have wanted to consult was already there in the room, there was no point in waiting. I said...
...Pueblo's skipper, Commander Lloyd Bucher, who looked a decade older than his 41 years, they were bundled into three olive-drab U.S Army buses and driven to the United Nations Command's advance camp in the Korean demilitarized zone. They were fed and given field jackets and toilet kits. Eventually pronounced fit to travel to the U.S., they boarded two giant...