Word: lunar
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ABOVE IT ALL, floats the moon. In Bertolucci's cosmos, there is neither night nor day, nor lunar cycles. Rather, there swims above us at all times, a huge flaccid orb, symbolizing-what? Bertolucci obviously doesn't know since this moon appears at any given moment, even in the early afternoon. This absurd use of the moon to symbolize essentially everything and nothing gives a hint of Luna's incoherency...
...still in Florida, months behind launch schedule. Meanwhile, high above the earth, two orbiting Soviet cosmonauts headed toward a new record (140 days) for living in space. Normally, all this would have cast a pall over this week's celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the first lunar landing. But beleaguered space agency officials could take pride in one spectacular performance: that of their wide-ranging robots, which are scattered over much of the solar system and are turning 1979 into the year of the planets...
Finding the diversion welcome, most of the world was watching as Neil Armstrong slowly descended the steps of the lunar module (LEM--remember?), hesitated for a moment on the final rung, then placed the first human bootprint on another world. ("The surface appears to be very, very fine-grained," Armstrong observed while his friend "Buzz" waited to join him, "it's almost sort of a powder.") It was bona fide Big Stuff. CBS and provided 31 hours of continued coverage; ABC naturally stopped after 30. "Save us a copy," the astronauts radioed back, when informed that the New York Times...
...MOON STILL WAITS. There are no plans to go back. Some day, though, assuming we don't destroy ourselves first, humans will probably quicken the pace of what one writer has called "our hesitation waltz into space," and return to the lunar surface...
When Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the Sea of Tranquility, the science-fiction writers had already been there for 2,000 years. But history is always more imaginative than any prophet. No one had ever dreamed that the first chapter of lunar exploration would end after only a dozen men had walked upon the moon...