Word: earths
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...small opening. Toting the bulky life-support pack that kept him alive on the airless surface of the moon, he cautiously, hesitantly climbed down the ship's ladder. By now a TV camera was monitoring his descent, flashing his image a quarter of a million miles back to earth. There was a moment's pause. Then Armstrong took the final step, planting his left boot on the finely powdered lunar surface. "That's one small step for a man," he said, "one giant leap for mankind...
...manned exploration is also about to take a new turn. At Florida's John F. Kennedy Space Center, next to the giant assembly building used for Apollo 11, workers are struggling to prepare Columbia, the nation's first operational space shuttle, for launch into earth orbit some time next year. Though plagued by financial crises and technical problems, the ship should be worth waiting for. The Apollo/Saturn system, towering some 360 ft. on the pad, was discarded or destroyed in each mission. By contrast, the shuttle is designed to make repeated journeys between earth and space...
...space for long periods, conquering both isolation and the physical effects of weightlessness, such as weakening of the muscles, loss of height, reduction in red blood cell production and slowing of the heartbeat. Largely because of diet and exercise, these conditions disappeared soon after the astronauts returned to earth...
...module emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes to hitch up briefly with a Soviet Soyuz displaying the Hammer and Sickle. This celestial handclasp between old adversaries involved more politicking than space exploration, but it did set an important precedent for future cooperation in the cosmos as well as on earth. Indeed, although the U.S. and the Soviet Union have jousted over many other issues, they have appeared united at international parleys on space...
Circling the earth with as many as seven people aboard, the ship should be able to do everything from parking and repairing satellites to conducting zero-g experiments and space manufacturing. One early project: the orbiting of a giant remote-controlled telescope. High above the obscuring atmosphere, it will give astronomers sharper views of the heavens than any mirror on earth. Europeans, for their part, are contributing a space lab that will be carried up by the shuttle and act as a scientific workshop...