Word: launching
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...night, ominous clouds of steam and smoke, and finally a thunderous, earth-shaking roar that assaulted the senses and numbed the minds of the 500,000 spectators gathered on nearby Florida beaches and highways. As the Apollo 17 Saturn rocket began to lift ponderously from Cape Kennedy's launch pad 39A, the entire sky was filled with an orange-pink glow, a false dawn against which gulls and pelicans wheeled and fluttered in aimless confusion. The awesome spectacle marked a fitting beginning to the mission of Apollo 17, which at week's end was approaching the moon, carrying...
Even before the launch, there seemed to be a mystical, almost religious quality to preparations for the last Apollo mission. As the astronauts were driven through the early-evening darkness from their crew quarters to the launch pad, their path was illuminated by a spotlight shining like a guiding star from a helicopter hovering overhead. At the site, the 36-story rocket gleamed starkly white, lit by searchlight beams that radiated from the pad, forming a crown of light. Nature added to the display: flashes of lightning glowed within distant clouds, and an occasional meteor streaked through the stars...
Shortly before Apollo 17 was to have been launched, many spectators were startled by a burst of flame that seemed to come prematurely from the base of the rocket. The countdown clocks suddenly stopped only 30 seconds before the scheduled liftoff. To the disappointment of the throng at the cape and the millions more watching over television, Launch Control announced curtly: "We have had a cut-off." Never before during the Apollo program had a countdown been halted so close to blast-off time...
...later, the early burst of flame had been a burn-off of excess fuel: the pumps had continued to run briefly after the shutdown. The real problem, it turned out, was a defect in the Terminal Countdown Sequencer, which supervises the complex operations in the last minutes before a launch...
...developed, perhaps the proposed NERVA (for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications). It consists of a small nuclear reactor that heats liquid hydrogen until it is expelled as a jet of white-hot gas. To kick out of earth orbit (which requires much less thrust than an earth launch), the 270-ft.-long ships will fire-and then discard-the two outboard NERVAs strapped to their sides; the main booster, at the center of the engine cluster, will be retained. Then, as the two ships pull away from earth orbit, they will be docked end to end to form...