Word: mooned
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...pushing them into reality, Low has earned a reputation of being reserved and distant. He is not a humorous man, nor one given to poetic fantasies. Yet last week he was as thrilled as any of his five children by the feat of Apollo 8. "I looked at the moon after Apollo 8 went into orbit," he says. "It looked different...
...little engine seemed puny indeed. But the importance of the Apollo spacecraft's 20,500-lb.-thrust Service Propulsion System (SPS) engine was far out of proportion to its 31-ft. length. The engine's faultless operation made the difference not only between a relatively simple moon shot and last week's sophisticated mission, but also between life and death for the astronauts...
...engine failed to ignite, or burned too briefly during the attempt to place Apollo into lunar orbit, the spacecraft would have looped around the back of the moon and headed directly back toward earth. If the engine had cut off during one crucial 30-second interval of the scheduled burn, Apollo would have been left in an unstable orbit and crashed into the surface of the moon. And, if the astronauts had not succeeded in restarting the engine after orbiting the moon, they would have been left stranded in space without hope of rescue. This point was not lost...
...beginning of reforms-although reform was not their stated aim. Predictably, they also provoked resistance and reaction, only entrenching the forces under attack. As the year ended, a different sort of revolution suddenly forced itself into the world's imagination. It was represented by the flight around the moon-perhaps the only event of the year to which, in the devalued coinage of the language, the word revolutionary might still be properly applied...
...face of it, the space flight had little pertinence to the problems, the agonies of earth. It was possible to look at the moon over a Harlem or Watts rooftop and feel only bitterness at the money spent, the vast effort made, in a cause that would not alter a single life, a single dwelling in the ghetto. And yet the event was really incalculable in its consequences. Nothing comparable has happened in man's history, except possibly the great ocean voyages that led to the discovery of the New World -and to the transformation of Western...