Word: mooned
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Other, less perilous problems could turn Apollo 8 from a space spectacular into a humdrum engineering flight. Allowing for such contingencies as the failure of a backup system, an inadvertent early cutoff of the S-4B rocket while it is blasting Apollo toward the moon or unusually intense radiation from the sun, NASA has devised a number of alternative flight plans. Thus, Apollo 8 might merely remain in earth orbit, duplicating Apollo 7's eleven-day flight. It could also loop out as far as 25,000 miles from the earth and then descend into a low earth orbit...
...Moon...
...their most inspired moments, visionary authors of the past never imagined a mission so complex. Still, they dreamed endlessly of Apollo-like moon flights. Then, as now, some men yearned for a military base from which terrible new weapons could dominate earth. Some speculated on vast new reserves of mineral wealth. Others yearned for, no more than the challenge of the trip. For whatever reason, the moon, as it still does, beckoned to all. Its lure seems irresistible...
...True History, written in the 2nd century A.D., a Syrian named Lucian told how a ship and its crew were caught in a whirlwind while sailing beyond the Pillars of Hercules and were lofted all the way to the moon. There the sailors witnessed a war between moonmen and invaders from the sun. It was all so alluring that, in a second book, another Lucian character went there on purpose: he simply donned wings and flew...
Galileo's 17th century use of the telescope to study the heavens spawned a host of moon stories. The Man in the Moone, written by Francis Godwin, Bishop of Llandoff, and published in 1638, offered a hero who was carried to his destination on a frail raft pulled by swans. Unaware of the vacuum in space, the traveler had no difficulty breathing on the trip, but he did find that his weight lessened as he left the earth. That remarkable scientific insight by Godwin preceded Newton's discovery of the laws of gravity by many years...