Word: crews
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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 2.5 degrees wide in order to survive the fireball of reentry, a cautious commander would also consider...
Certainly, though, the Apollo 8 crew had earned the right to celebrate. It was Christmastime 1968 - the end of a hard year. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered; in June, Bobby Kennedy followed; in August, the Democratic Convention in Chicago dissolved into bloody rioting; and in each month of that exceedingly bloody year, 1,200 Americans had died in Vietnam. So people had bigger things on their minds in October when Apollo 7 - the first of the three-man Apollo ships - had orbited the Earth. And people might have been equally indifferent in December when Apollo 8 went...
...Apollo 8 did go. On the morning of Saturday, Dec. 21, 1968, the crew blasted off aboard the 36-story, seven-million-pound Saturn V rocket into Earth orbit. Five hours later, the crew fired the Saturn's upper stage engine and Apollo 8 peeled out for the moon...
...three-day translunar trip was unremarkable - as unremarkable as man's first journey to the moon could be. There were two broadcasts back to Earth - the usual all-is-well waving-to-the-camera fare. News reports were read to the crew by Houston: Eleven GI's were released in Cambodia; Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower were married in New York; the Cleveland Browns beat the Dallas Cowboys 31 to 20 on Sunday and the Minnesota Vikings would be playing the Baltimore Colts on Monday. Lovell picked Baltimore...
...return of piracy to the high seas, however, has. The Somali pirates have attacked more than 100 vessels in the waters leading to and from the Suez Canal this year, and earned tens of millions of dollars in ransom. Today they are holding 17 ships with around 300 crew members off the Somali coast. And at a weekend security conference organized by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Bahrain, headquarters to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, opinion appeared unanimous: to fix the pirates, fix Somalia. "We haven't been as involved in Somalia as we should have been...