Word: mooning
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most of the Apollo crews, trained in the lone-eagle ethos of the fighter pilot, lunar travel was an unsettlingly bureaucratic exercise. Flying to the moon was not about a solitary Lindbergh climbing inside a hammered-tin airplane and flying, skeeter-like, out over the Atlantic. Rather, it was an idea that was hatched by government, executed by industry and bankrolled by a taxpaying public that knew full well the breathtaking cost of the project and yet year after year kept writing the checks...
...million lawn ornament is--or was--a Saturn V rocket, one that was briefly known by the promising designation Apollo 18. Originally built to carry men to the surface of the moon, Apollo 18 was poised to go until the early 1970s, when the U.S. ran out of both the money and the will to make that kind of journey, and the giant missile was ordered to stand down...
Between 1968 and 1972, however, nine of Apollo 18's brother rockets did fly astronauts to the moon, six of them taking crews straight down into the powdered-sugar soil of the ancient lunar surface. Thirty years ago, Apollo 11, the first of those historic missions, took off from Cape Kennedy carrying space veterans Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin. Four days later, on July 20, 1969, Armstrong and Aldrin actually set their ugly, leggy lunar module down on the plains of the Sea of Tranquillity, becoming the first two men to walk on another world. Over the next...
Once the hatches of the lunar modules were opened, all that changed. Out in the dunes of the moon, the Apollo astronauts behaved like nothing more--and nothing less--than human beings. They toddled around; they fell down; they got dirty; they kept house. They knew the whole world knew they were there, yet they nonetheless made it a point to leave behind small or sweet or poignant things to mark their brief passing. Gene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, wrote his daughter's initials in the soil with his finger; Charlie Duke, lunar-module pilot of Apollo 16, left...
...Neil Armstrong left a tape with one of your songs on the moon. Did he just not want it anymore...