Word: moone
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Obviously it takes brave men to climb into that capsule and undergo the immense risks that lie between the earth and the moon and the earth again. Yet, to thoughtful skeptics, the superorganized voyage of Apollo 11 suggests that lone, individual courage belongs to the past. The astronauts often seem to be interchangeable parts of a vast mechanism. They are buffered by a thousand protective devices, encased in layers of metal and wires and transistors, their very heartbeats monitored for deviation. Most of their decisions are made by computers. Hundreds of ships, planes, doctors and technicians stand by to rescue...
...would resemble that of fearful children in the dark. What the explorer does by courage, the settler does by habit. What the father does by taking a deep breath, the son will do with a yawn. If Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin succeed in leaving their footsteps on the moon, the steps may soon become a path-and the path a highway...
Despite the moon shot's vast supportive forces, the astronauts themselves are essentially loners. Before they take off, they have no guarantees of success, let alone survival. Airborne, they can be aided only so far. After that, like the very earliest adventurers, they are on their own. Out in space, the future confronts the past. If they are stranded, no Navy will light their way home, no friendly tribes will take them...
...past, there were more imagined terrors to be dispelled. Today, the known dangers of failure, mechanical and human, are more numerous and harder to dismiss. The astronauts knew that if, on landing, the lunar module tilted more than 35°, they would be marooned on the moon. Each could remember that, with the best life insurance science could provide, three colleagues burned to death in a spaceship...
...parallel Apollo 11 's trip to the moon, the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria would have had to be accompanied by a fleet of dispatch boats filled with scientists, singers and scribes. Each day, one of the boats would have returned to Spain to report on the voyage, and the court would have been entertained by a new ballad about Columbus' exploits...