Word: missions
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Thieu nipped a real coup in the bud? Or had he perhaps raised the specter of a coup to weed out men potentially dangerous to his regime? The U.S. mission dismissed the crisis as "a case of rumor feeding upon rumor." But the Americans in Saigon were troubled by the events, or nonevents, of the week. All summer, U.S. officials have been reporting home that the Vietnamese army and political climate have been improving. To make those reports stick, they have told the Vietnamese in no uncertain terms that one more coup will be the coup...
...wipe out U S hopes of landing men on the moon before the end of 1969. Thus, as the towering Saturn IB rocket lifted ponderously off the pad after a heart-stopping moment of hesitation, U.S. hopes rose with it. At week's end, the eleven-day mission of Apollo 7 was proceeding as near to perfection as space officials had dared hope...
Simulated Rescue. After firing thrusters on the attached Saturn 4B to maneuver in orbit, the astronauts cut loose the joined Apollo command and service modules while they were passing over Hawaii. "If this were the lunar mission," explained Haney, "that is aproximately the point where we might ignite the Saturn 4B to put us on a lunar trajectory." Instead, Spacecraft Commander Schirra used Apollo's control thrusters to move his craft away from the Saturn 4B and pitched the spacecraft up and around so that it was facing the rocket. He then nudged the craft to within...
...allowed Apollo to drift about 100 miles ahead of the Saturn 4B, the astronauts fired the service module's powerful propulsion engine twice in orbital maneuvers that once more brought them to a rendezvous with the spent second-stage rocket. This operation, too, had implications for the lunar mission; if the LM should become stranded in lunar orbit on the way to or from the Apollo command moduel, the larger craft would have to seek it out and dock with it to rescue the two astonauts aboard...
Thus, on the eve of the final phase of Apollo's lunar mission, there were increasing hopes that the first men to set foot on the moon, and to look up at a moonlike earth in the sky above them, would, after all, be U.S. astronauts...