Word: lunare
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Monday sees the arrival of the Chinese lunar New Year and the onset of the Year of the Ox. But Shanghai residents who had been counting on the bovine astrological sign to usher in a bull market are likely to be disappointed. Contrary to its placid and solid reputation, this year's ox is an altogether different beast, say soothsayers in China's financial capital...
...black eye to the U.S. - which had lately caught up in the space race with the Soviets - in a year that had been full of them. So that summer, NASA told Borman, Lovell and Anders to cowboy up. Their original Earth orbit flight plan would be changed to a lunar orbit...
...service propulsion engine for precisely four and a half minutes - an eternity in a business in which barely a breath from a thruster is enough to set a ship spinning off course. The engine burn was designed to slow the spacecraft down just enough to ease it into a lunar orbit without losing so much altitude that it crashed into the moon instead. Orbital mechanics also demanded that the maneuver occur on the dark side of the moon, entirely out of radio contact with Earth. At 68 hours and 58 minutes into their journey, the crew buckled in and vanished...
...later, Lovell typed the instructions for the engine burn into the on-board computer, and the computer flashed back "99:40," which was code for "Are you sure?" Lovell hit the Proceed button. The engine lit and the burn worked exactly as scripted, inserting Apollo 8 into an initial lunar orbit 169.1 miles high at its peak and just 60.5 miles above the lunar craters at its nadir. Even before the crew re-emerged around the other side of the moon and back into radio contact with Houston, Anders snapped what is surely the most iconic photo of the space...
...crew circled the moon 10 times over the next 20 hours. On their final orbit, once again alone behind the moon, the crew re-lit the engine that was their only ticket home. If it had failed to burn, they would have been stranded forever in lunar orbit. The flight controllers - to say nothing of the families - waited anxiously for the astronauts to emerge from radio blackout. When they did, it was Lovell's voice that broke the silence...