Word: earthness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Mission Control advised. The President has been eager all along to associate himself with the mission. Now, as both astronauts stood stiffly at attention near the flag, Nixon told them: "This certainly has to be the most historic phone call ever made. . . . All the people on this earth are truly one in their pride of what you have done, and one in their prayers that you will return safely...
...remaining time, Armstrong and Aldrin scooped up about 60 Ibs. (earth weight) of rocks for one of the lunar sample boxes. Using a core sampler, Aldrin was to have dug some 13 in. into the moon's surface, but he had to hammer the tool vigorously to drive it no more than 9 in. deep. "The material was quite well packed," he said. "The way it adhered to the core tube, it gave me the impression of being moist." The astronauts managed to collect 20 Ibs. of rocks for the sample box that was supposed to hold sorted and identified...
...addition to the flag, the astronauts left behind a number of mementos from the earth. There was a 1½-in. silicon disk bearing statements (reduced in size 200 times) by Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, and words of good will from leaders of 72 different countries. The disk also bore a message from Pope Paul VI quoting from the Eighth Psalm, a hymn to the Creator...
...Columbia would have been unable to reach it. As it turned out, departure from the moon was triumphantly smooth. Of course, even after lift-off and redocking, there were still the dangers of the homeward trip. Control failures could cause the spacecraft to re-enter the earth's atmosphere at too steep an angle and burn to a cinder, or at so flat an angle that it would bounce off the outer fringes of the atmosphere far into space. There its oxygen would be exhausted before it could loop back to the earth...
...m.p.h. Over the Pacific for the second time, just 2½ hrs. after launch, the spacecraft was cleared by Houston for "translunar insertion" (TLI). Firing for five minutes, the reliable S-4B engine accelerated the ship to 24,245 m.p.h., fast enough to tear it loose from the earth's gravitational embrace and send it toward the moon. At a point 43,495 miles from the moon, lunar gravity exerted a force equal to the gravity of the earth, then some 200,000 miles distant. Beyond that crest, lunar gravity predominated, and Apollo was on the "downhill" leg of its journey...