Word: launch
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...like above its own exhaust flames, a scant 724 milliseconds behind schedule, the giant rocket shook loose some 1,300 Ibs. of ice that had frozen on its white sides. Although it was the heaviest space vehicle ever fired aloft?6,484,289 Ibs. at ignition?it cleared the launch tower in twelve seconds...
Less than twelve minutes after liftoff, a brief boost from the S-4B third stage placed Apollo into a circular 119-mile orbit at a velocity of 17,427 m.p.h. Over the Pacific for the second time, just 2½ hrs. after launch, the spacecraft was cleared by Houston for "translunar insertion" (TLI). Firing for five minutes, the reliable S-4B engine accelerated the ship to 24,245 m.p.h., fast enough to tear it loose from the earth's gravitational embrace and send it toward the moon. At a point 43,495 miles from the moon, lunar gravity exerted a force...
...were kin. Whether in stilt-supported houses over the canals of Bangkok or by the azure swimming pools of Beverly Hills, families sat mesmerized before the flickering history unfolding on their television screens. Along London's Piccadilly and Tokyo's Ginza, crowds and traffic thinned as the launch began. In West Berlin, as in South Nyack, N.Y., there was a rare sense of camaraderie. Strangers on the street were united by the universal question: "How are they doing?" It seemed, as Tennyson wrote more than a century ago, "One far-off divine event/To which the whole creation moves...
Most people seemed as awed by the colossal scale of the undertaking as they were baffled by its complexity. To many, the long series of space shots had become routine-until the moment that the mission of Apollo 11 finally struck home. Across the land, at the instant of launch and landing, women dabbed their eyes and men blinked back their emotions. In Alaska, Newspaper Publisher Larry Fanning observed: "Intellectually and emotionally, man is incapable of parsing out the stunning implications of this fantastic voyage...
More than 50,000 South Koreans watched the launch on a giant screen in Seoul. David Threlfall, 26, waited in London to collect his bounty from the bookmaking firm of William Hill Ltd.; he bet $24 in 1964 that men would land on the moon by 1971, and got 1,000-to-l odds. In Beirut on the morning of launch, a woman gave birth to her eleventh child-and promptly named him Apollo Eleven Salim. The Grand Mufti of Egypt, Sheik Ahmed Hereidi; said he approved lunar exploration because "the Koran urges Moslems to look up from their earthly...