Word: lunar
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What then remains for Astronauts Shepard, Roosa and Mitchell this week? What emotional frontier can Apollo 14 assault? However scientifically rewarding the mission might prove to be, if all goes well, it will after all follow footprints already made in the lunar dust. But the world's fascination has not disappeared with the diminution of magic...
...Saturday, at an unmercifully early hour for most Americans (5:50 a.m. E.S.T.), Shepard and Mitchell are scheduled to emerge for their second EVA and load up their new collapsible two-wheeled lunar handcart with cameras, hand tools, shovel and sampling cores. Then they will begin their major geological traverse: a rock-collecting hike up the side of 400-ft.-high Cone Crater, nearly a mile away. Although the two lunar mountaineers will not descend into the crater itself, they will conduct a kind of rock festival on its rim: they will chip stone from large boulders and roll some...
Zero Gravity. As he circles above in the command ship, Roosa will also have his hands full with scientific chores -taking closeup photos of the moon, aiming his cameras at more distant astronomical targets, including interstellar dust clouds, and bouncing radar beams off the lunar surface to further determine its characteristics. On their voyage home, the astronauts will subject a number of terrestrial substances to the effects of zero gravity, including organic chemicals that are used in making vaccines. Such tests, scientists hope, may eventually lead to the production of vaccines in earth-orbiting labs; weightless conditions should facilitate...
Apollo 14 is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific south of American Samoa nine days after its liftoff. If its mission is successful, NASA hopes it will rekindle dwindling interest in manned lunar exploration. Space officials feel that if it is a failure, it may well be the last such moon mission of the decade...
...command seat. His ear now seems in excellent shape. "I still have a muted ringing in it, like a dog whistle," he says, "but I hardly notice it." He has also apparently mastered, in spite of initial difficulties, the split-second control techniques of the tricky lunar lander. Indeed, his confidence should help bolster all of NASA at a critical moment in its history. "I suppose," muses Shepard, "if we don't make it back to earth, somebody will say the poor son of a bitch wasn't ready. But I am ready...