Word: moone
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...space station continues to hemmorhage money and return not a whit of good science. So space watchers had good reason to be dubious yesterday when NASA at last pulled back the curtain on its plans for the next generation of spacecraft intended to return human beings back to the moon. As it turned out, the plan is an awfully good one-sort...
...Saturn rockets that launched them had an extraordinary safety and success record, relying on the old concept of throwaway parts: When one stage of a rocket is spent, dump it in the ocean; when you're through with your lunar lander, leave most of it on the moon...
...stage rocket into Earth orbit. A smaller booster, made of a single solid rocket and a single liquid-fueled engine, would then launch the four-person crew in the command module. The astronauts would dock with the lunar lander, light the upper-stage engine, and head out to the moon. Once there, all four of them would be able to descend to the surface, leaving the command module to fly robotically above-unlike the old Apollos, in which two astronauts performed the moonwalk and one waited in the car 60 miles above...
...Just as important, there's a whiff of dithering around that 13-year time frame. It was in 1961 that President Kennedy challenged the U.S. to go to the moon; eight years later we were leaving footprints there-and that was before we'd even put a man in orbit. It shouldn't take so long to go back. A contemporary program with a 13-year deadline is precisely the kind of undertaking that can be frittered into nothing if future administrations lose the interest or the revenue to keep pursuing...
...only historical liberties Hanks and Cowen took in their 40-min. moon ride were small ones. The curators of the lunar vehicles wanted to keep the machines free of dust, so the interior of the module stays clean--far different from the gunpowder-scented, soil-covered surfaces the astronauts describe. Hanks also had the actor astronauts lift their gold-colored visors more often than their real-life counterparts did, revealing the clear faceplates--and faces--underneath. "We wanted to remind audiences that those were human beings up there," he says...