Word: lm
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...craft designed to carry men into the space age have had the clean-lined look of the Mercury and Gemini capsules. By comparison, the lunar module (LM) that lifted from Cape Kennedy last week was the ugliest of ducklings. Bulging and misshapen, bristling with squiggles of antennas, the LM seemed more the creation of scientists gone mad than a craft entrusted with Project Apollo's most crucial task: to land astronauts on the moon and lift them off again. But in a seven-hour test flight, LM last week performed like a full-fledged space swan...
Launched by the same Saturn I rocket atop which the fatal Apollo fire occurred last year, the LM was protected on its flight through the atmosphere by a nose cone and a cone-shaped adapter. After the second stage had been inserted into orbit, the nose cone was jettisoned and the adapter's four panels slowly opened like the petals of a flower, exposing LM to its natural environment: the vacuum of space, in which it can fly as efficiently as a streamlined rocket. Then, on command from LM's on-board computer, the craft briefly fired...
Cautious Computer. Nearly five hours later, when the cold of space had stabilized the craft's temperature to the point it would be in the vicinity of the moon, LM began a scheduled twelve-minute burn of its 10,000-lb.-thrust descent engine, which was to begin at 10% of its rated power and gradually throttle up to almost full operational power after 26 seconds. The operation was designed to simulate the burn that would put the LM on a trajectory from the moon-orbiting Apollo command ship to the lunar surface. But after only four seconds...
Undismayed, ground controllers under the direction of Flight Director Eugene Kranz, 34, quickly determined that nothing was basically wrong with the descent engine. Bypassing LM's computer, they ordered the descent engine to fire again. This time, and on a subsequent test, it performed perfectly, burning for the entire 26-second period. Had astronauts been aboard the LM, said George Mueller, NASA's director of manned flight, they would have almost certainly recognized the problem and immediately refired the engine before they crashed onto the moon...
Happily, RCA Victor has issued a studio recording of two of the Beethoven sonatas--the "Funeral March" and the "Appassionata" (LM 2545). Not so happily, Richter's studio performance is but a flabby facsimile of his live...