Word: groundful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...moments of the flight, when Cernan cried, "What a ride! What a ride!," the astronauts bubbled with excitement. They repeatedly used the word fantastic. They talked so much that one capsule commentator in Houston complained half-seriously: "I couldn't get a word in edgewise." They joked with ground controllers and serenaded them with such pretaped tunes as Up, Up and Away and Fly Me to the Moon...
Early in the flight, however, a few minor problems developed. Expecting to take his first drink of water, Stafford instead got a mouthful of highly chlorinated water; because of ierroneous instructions from the ground the crew had failed to open a valve to the water tank, leaving only the evil tasting liquid in the drinking tube. As on on previous Apollo missions, there were troublesome hydrogen bubbles in the drinking water, which is produced by the fuel cells in the same oxygen-hydrogen reaction that supplies the spacecraft's electricity. The astronauts were forced to take Lomotil, a medicine...
...tunnel interior. During Apollo's eleventh revolution, as Stafford and Cernan prepared to undock Snoopy for its descent toward the moon, the astronauts found that they could not depressurize the connecting tunnel. The drifting fiber glass had clogged a ¼in. tunnel vent. If something was not done, ground controllers feared, the unvented pressure might impart too much velocity to Snoopy as it undocked...
...squadron's 60-ton, $2.3 million airplanes, revved up the engines and started taxiing around. As crew chief, he was authorized to do so. Keeping the plane in proper operating condition was his responsibility, and crew chiefs generally have a free hand with aircraft while on the ground. But suddenly he pointed the plane's nose down the runway and took off. Though the plane normally requires a flight crew of four, Meyer seemed to know what he was doing. He had some experience piloting light planes, and worked some 500 hours on C-130s. Before takeoff...
...North Vietnamese on it. My mission was to destroy enemy forces and installations. We found the enemy on Hill 937, and that is where we fought him." Bypassing the hill would have made no military sense, he explained, because it would have given the Communists control of the high ground. "It's a myth that if we don't do anything, nothing will happen to us. It's not true. If we did pull back and were quiet, they'd kill us in the night." Zais said that he had received no orders to keep casualties...