Word: earthness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...adventures in history was, unlike the immortal explorations of the past, infinitely more than a reconnaissance of geography or unknown elements. It was a journey into man's future, a hopeful but urgent summons, in Poet Archibald MacLeish's words, "to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold-brothers who know now they are truly brothers...
Small wonder, then, that those on earth saw it as a beleaguered battlefield -not, as Astronaut Lovell described it from his vantage point nearly a quarter of a million miles away, as "a grand ovation to the vastness of space." Sated with violence, sick of crisis, weary of politics and protest alike, the U.S.-and the rest of the world-needed few excuses to look to the heavens. As the year waned, they shifted their gaze to earth's placid, lifeless satellite-as Sir Richard Burton described it in 1880, "A ruined world, a globe burnt out, a corpse...
...SCANT decade ago, man was making his first tentative probes into near space. Now, his eye fixed on the moon, that cold and lifeless globe with its borrowed light, he was poised to soar beyond earth's atmosphere, beyond the 40,000-mile-deep magnetosphere and into a vast and trackless void. The moon flight was man's first great extraterrestrial venture...
...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, the three astronauts made their historic rendezvous...
Below them, less than 70 miles away, lay a desolate, pock-marked landscape. In the black sky above hung a half-disk -the earth-its blue and brown surface mottled by large patches of white. Thus, incredibly, they were there, precisely where the mission planners had predicted, finally living the dreams of untold generations of their ancestors. In orbit around the moon and 230,000 miles farther away from home than any humans had ever before traveled, the Apollo 8 astronauts conveyed impressions of their pioneering adventure with words that at times were poetic. Their telecasts gave earthbound viewers...