Word: liftoff
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Horst Wessel Song sung by ex-rocket scientists of the Third Reich; Vice President Lyndon Johnson furiously cooling his heels outside the Glenn house because Annie Glenn would not let him in during her husband's countdown; Alan Shepard losing a struggle with his full bladder moments before liftoff; the overeager press terrifying Ham the chimp after his proficient flight; the astronauts surrounded by thousands of cheering Texans waving hunks of rare meat during an honorary barbecue in the Houston Coliseum...
...clapped or cheered at liftoff. We climbed steeply into a cloud bank. By the time we were out of it, our speed was nearly that of a conventional jetliner. Aside from a brief sinking feeling shortly after takeoff the flight was remarkably smooth in accelerating. A "mach meter," an aerial speedometer, in view of passengers in the first few rows reached mach 1. There were gasps and cheers. Then came an announcement from the cockpit: "Ladies and gentlemen, you have just become the first 100 passengers in the history of the world to pass the speed of sound...
Hypnotic State. The ultimate liftoff spot of the putative UFO is unknown, but it seems that HIM disciples generally alternate between traveling in caravans and fanning out in smaller groups or alone in order to proselytize. Some of them have got in touch with news organizations or written postcards home to prove they are well and victims of neither fraud nor coercion. "Try to be happy for me," a 25-year-old Denver man named Larry wrote to his parents. "Don't worry, this is not an S.L. A. group or a Charles Manson group. You have...
...many were really turned on by the mission. One woman who had ventured into the big GUM department store near Red Square at launch time to buy a TV set grumbled that the crowds kept her from the sales counter. Asked what he thought of Soyuz's successful liftoff, a stroller along Gorky Street replied: "Oh, has it all started?" A man absorbed in a chess game in a nearby park was just as blasé. "Chess is more difficult," he shrugged and turned back to his board...
...dissident Physicist Andrei Sakharov remained in bed. "My doctor has ordered no excitement," he explained. Elizabeth Taylor and other members of the cast of The Blue Bird, the first joint Soviet-American film production, were too busy to take time off from their filming in Leningrad to watch the liftoff. Instead, they sent a fatuous message to the spacemen: "If you meet in space our small bluebird of happiness, please take it with you and return it to earth...