Word: lunar
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...Apollo 15 clears up only a few of the moon's puzzles, the perilous mission will be worth the enormous risks. On their homeward journey, the astronauts were scheduled to continue their scientific investigations. Shortly before Endeavour, carrying all three crewmen again, fires itself out of lunar orbit, the ship is to leave behind another memento of Apollo 15's visit. With the press of a button, the small, instrument-packed subsatellite will be automatically injected into an orbit around the moon. The tiny package should swing around the moon for more than a year, radioing vital data about...
...stunning telecasts from Apollo 15's landing site involved an army of technicians, a worldwide network of tracking stations and a remarkable new $582,000 color camera developed by RCA. Yet if any single person can be credited with the success of the lunar sound-and-light show, he is a quiet, cherubic-looking NASA engineer named Edward I. Fendell, 39, who clearly ranks as the space agency's own Captain Video...
...Fendell's responsibility to control the moon rover's camera during the astronauts' lunar explorations. Sitting at his large, 15-button console in Houston, Fendell operated the RCA camera from a quarter of a million miles away. With a push of the appropriate button, he could swing it across the mountain-ringed horizon, raise it up to focus on a peak or lower it to peer down Hadley Rille. He could zoom in on the astronauts for a closeup or even adjust the lens opening to compensate for the moon's harsh lighting conditions...
...electronics engineer with no previous TV experience, Fendell faced his toughest challenge at the end of the lunar visit. Left behind on the moon along with the rover, the remotecontrolled camera was scheduled to give the world its first pictures of a lunar lift-off taken from the moon's surface. Because of the nagging time lags, Fendell could not afford to look at the TV monitor himself. He had to go completely by the clock. At exactly T-minus-zero, Fendell had to begin tilting the camera upward. Thus, by the time his command reached the moon...
...Russians meanwhile are moving steadily ahead. Despite the disastrous end of Soyuz 11, they are launching payloads of all kinds at almost three times the U.S. rate. It almost seems, says Norman Mailer, who chronicled the first lunar landing in his book Of a Fire on the Moon, as if Americans no longer find any poetry in the quest to reach the stars...