Word: deke
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...that Donald K. ("Deke") Slayton would never forget. On March 15, 1962, only two months before the taciturn astronaut was scheduled to become the second American to orbit the earth, NASA doctors abruptly grounded him. Reason: they had discovered an occasional irregularity in the rhythm of his heartbeat. The bitterly disappointed Slayton subsequently became chief of flight-crew operations at the Manned Spacecraft Center and played a key role in picking all future space crews, including the first men to land on the moon. But even as he sent other astronauts to the launch pad, he never stopped dreaming...
Under NASA'S austerity program, the only manned spaceflights still on schedule are Apollo 17 in December, three Skylab missions, and the orbital linkup with the Russians in 1975. Deke Slayton, chief of flight-crew operations who was recently returned to flight status after a long battle with a heart irregularity, bluntly sums up the situation: "We have had a surplus [of astronauts] for the past three or four years. The writing is on the wall...
...Houston and best remembered for his calmly professional performance in Mission Control during the near-disastrous flight of Apollo 13. Neither side has made its final selection of crewmen, but the U.S. front runners include: Tom Stafford, a veteran of Gemini 6 and 9 and Apollo 10; Donald ("Deke") Slayton, the hard-driving 48-year-old chief of flightcrew operations for the Manned Spacecraft Center; and Jack Swigert, a veteran of Apollo...
Their feelings are expressed by former scientist-astronaut Brian O'Leary in his book, The Making of an Ex-Astronaut (Houghton Mifflin). O'Leary denounces what he calls the undisguised "test-pilot dominance" at Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center. Largely at the insistence of Donald K. ("Deke") Slayton, the influential director of flight-crew operations, only experienced military and civilian fliers have been chosen for Apollo crews. Such skilled aviators were surely essential on the first space flights. But now that flight and landing techniques are well developed and scientific experimentation has come to the fore...
...from their schedule. Seeing the boys together, you begin to realize how hard they've worked to get good. Some of their stuff is certainly a product of "that Motown magic," as Motown publicists put it, meaning Motown President Berry Gordy and Songwriters Fonso Mizell, Freddy Perren and Deke Richards, who wrote Love Child for the Supremes. The tunes they are given are good black pop, the rhythms authentic rhythm and blues. But it takes some kind of private and personal magic for a twelve-year-old like Michael to sound convincing in a lyric like this...