Word: earths
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...TODAY the earth, speeding along at the present clip of 66,000 miles per hour, will have circled the sun exactly ten times since two men inside a spidery little space craft wrapped in gold tin foil hit the dust of the Sea of Tranquility...
...Save us a copy," the astronauts radioed back, when informed that the New York Times had used the largest headline--"MEN WALK ON MOON"--in its history. Nine more moon landings were planned to follow Apollo XI, and NASA officials glibly predicted that a permanent space station in earth orbit as well as a lunar base would be established by the mid-seventies...
Opposition had been growing long before Apollo XI left the pad at Cape Kennedy. The $25 billion price tag for the manned space program, spread out over ten years, provided a nice target for those who thought we should "solve our problems on earth before we worry about space." The public image of NASA and space exploration evolved into one of tremendous waste, of massive expenditures for little or no return...
Nevertheless, the solar system we knew ten years ago pales in comparison to the picture we have of it now. Back then, there were very few definable worlds: the Earth, the moon, fuzzy pictures of Jupiter and Saturn, and a few cryptic shots of Mars...
Alvarez and his team from the University of California at Berkeley were sampling the strata because they provide a rare, undisturbed record of reversals in the earth's magnetic field. Such fluctuations can influence climate, and possibly allow more cosmic radiation to assail the earth's atmosphere. One layer, only a centimeter thick and tracing back 65 million years, showed a sharp excess of iridium, an element 1,000 times more plentiful in otherworldly matter than in the earth's crust. The "spike" in the readings made a sobering point. "It's the first experimental evidence...