Word: mooned
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Force Lieut. Colonel Mike Collins, who will orbit the moon in the command module while Armstrong and Aldrin land and return from the surface, is by all accounts the most likable member of the crew. Though he comes from a distinguished military family, he goes out of his way to slop around in jeans and act as unmilitary as possible. He enjoys cooking gourmet dinners and knows his way around French wines. To Collins, everybody is "Babe," and he likes to poke fun at the bloated titles that the simplest pieces of space hardware carry. "What we need...
...would be dangerously low and that they would catch the flu or one of the gastrointestinal disturbances that afflicted three of the previous four Apollo crews. If that happens, says Berry, "I'll have the whole world on my back demanding proof that they are not down with some moon bug." Berry publicly discouraged Richard Nixon from dining with the astronauts on the eve of their flight, lest the President pass on germs. When the crew members made their final pre-launch public appearance at a press briefing in Houston eleven days before liftoff, they entered the room wearing rubber...
WHEN John F.Kennedy committed the U.S. to landing men on the moon before the end of this decade, virtually none of the equipment capable of making the half-million-mile journey existed. Now, eight years later, a great spaceship made of more than 15 million parts is poised for the flight. If Apollo 11 completes its momentous mission, Kennedy's pledge will have been redeemed with five months to spare-a remarkable accomplishment. It is all the more remarkable for the fact that man did not actually enter the space age until twelve years ago, when the Russians launched...
Neither, it seemed, was there anything more difficult. Before Kennedy made his moon-landing announcement, the nation's entire manned space experience totaled 15 min. 20 sec.-the length of Alan Shepard's suborbital fling down the Atlantic test range on May 5, 1961. Rockets had been blowing up on their Cape Canaveral launch pads with humiliating frequency; from 1958 to 1964, the U.S. suffered 13 straight failures in its efforts to send rockets around or onto the moon...
Most discouraging of all was the estimate that more than 10,000 separate tasks would have to be performed before the U.S. could put a man on the moon. James Webb, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration between 1961 and 1968, compared the problem to "having to take a caterpillar and make it into a butterfly when we had never seen a butterfly...