Word: hornets
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ABOARD the U.S.S. Hornet, 950 miles southwest of Hawaii, hundreds of crewmen, reporters, cameramen and VIP guests anxiously scanned the pre-dawn skies. At 5:41 a.m., shouts of "There it is! There it is!" rose from the aircraft carrier's huge flight deck. For a split second, a tiny orange speck, no brighter than a faint shooting star, shone against the thick, purplish clouds. Apollo 11 had come home; now it was streaking through the earth's familiar atmosphere after completing the most momentous journey in man's history. Two of the three human beings aboard...
...ship more lift. That maneuver, a departure from the original flight plan, carried the craft 205 miles farther downrange to avoid a Pacific storm. A few moments later, swaying gently under its three bright orange and white chutes, Apollo 11 dropped into the Pacific nine miles away from the Hornet and only 1.7 miles off target...
...Astronauts Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, the journey concluded as flawlessly as it had begun 195 hours, 18 minutes and 21 seconds earlier. President Nixon, waiting aboard the Hornet to greet the astronauts, hailed their achievement with buoyant enthusiasm. At the same time, over 4,000 miles away in Houston's Mission Control, nerve center of the flight, John F. Kennedy's 1961 pledge that the U.S. would land a man on the moon "before this decade is out" flashed on a display board. Near by, a smaller screen carried Apollo 11 's Eagle emblem along...
...recovery team opened the hatch, tossed in the bulky Biological Isolation Garments (BIGs) and then helped the astronauts out of their spacecraft. On a rubber life raft the astronauts scrubbed down with Betadine, an iodine-based disinfectant. Hoisted by helicopter aboard the Hornet, the astronauts were soon settled in comfortable isolation inside a biologically "clean" van to begin 18 days of quarantine...
...When the Hornet arrived at Pearl Harbor, the van was hauled by helicopter to nearby Hickam Air Force Base, flown by an Air Force C-141 transport to Houston, then trundled on the flatbed of a diesel truck to the Space Center. There the astronauts were transferred to the $15 million Lunar Receiving Laboratory (LRL) that was built especially for men returning from the moon. Its provisions for recreation include a lounge for cards, a game room with pool table and exercising equipment, and a film library (Goodbye, Columbus, Romeo and Juliet). But until their quarantine ends, the astronauts...