Word: geminis
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...Apollo 12 astronauts will use a rocketry system virtually identical to the one that propelled Apollo 11. Yet their nautically named command ship, Yankee Clipper, will blaze its own distinctive path. Halfway to the moon, Apollo 12 Skipper Charles ("Pete") Conrad, 39, a veteran of two earth-girdling Gemini flights, will fire the spacecraft's service propulsion engine, jolting the ship out of its "free-return" trajectory. No longer able to loop the moon automatically and return to earth, should its engine falter, Apollo 12 could be lost forever in an orbit around the sun. But NASA flight planners...
...shaves. He crashed his Panther jet behind enemy lines in Korea, but escaped a day later. As a civilian test pilot in 1962, he plummeted uncontrollably toward earth when the rocket engine in his X-15 failed to start, but it caught on just in time. As commander of Gemini 8 in 1966, he had to abort the scheduled three-day flight after ten hours when a short circuit threw the spacecraft's thrusters out of control. Last summer he had to eject from a lunar-landing research vehicle at an altitude of only 100 ft. when it spun...
...members of Apollo 11's crew are seasoned, imperturbable astronauts. Armstrong, known as an inscrutable loner, flew Gemini 8 to the first successful space docking. Aldrin, a hard-driving perfectionist, set the record for space walking (5 hr., 30 min.) during the four-day flight of Gemini 12 in 1966. Collins, the most relaxed and outgoing of the three, helped steer Gemini 10 through complicated rendezvous and docking maneuvers...
...crew caught cold, probably because of a less tiring preflight schedule. None suffered nausea caused by weightlessness, possibly because of in-flight head-movement exercises prescribed by the astronauts' physician, Dr. Charles Berry. For the first time since John Young smuggled a corned-beef sandwich aboard the Gemini 3 flight in 1965 and littered the spacecraft interior with crumbs, the astronauts were allowed a supply of bread. To withstand the pure-oxygen atmosphere, which quickly dries bread and makes it crumbly, the slices of white and rye bread had been flushed with nitrogen, a process that keeps them fresh...
When Apollo 10 streaked smoothly on its course toward the moon last week, it did so with a difference. Paul Haney, for six years the cool and detached "voice" of Gemini and Apollo, was gone. His replacement on the air was Jack Riley, another laconic, low-key newsman, who sees his job not so much "as an announcer but as a supplier of information to the news media...