Word: moons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...review their flight plan, talk through the sequence of actions that they must take to carry out normal maneuvers, the emergency measures that they must follow to correct equipment failures. For at critical points during their trip, a balky rocket could leave them stranded in orbit around the moon or drive them into collision with the lunar surface. By-the time they are fired from Cape Kennedy's launch pad 39A by the world's most powerful rocket, Saturn 5, Borman, Lovell and Anders will be the most thoroughly prepared adventurers ever to have dared the unknown...
...problems have arisen, the Apollo crew will reignite the S-4B rocket engine over the Pacific near Hawaii. In a 5-min. 11-sec. burning period, the S-4B will accelerate to an "escape" velocity of 24,200 m.p.h., pushing Apollo out of earth orbit and off toward the moon...
...module (LM) carried in its nose. The astronauts will then simulate docking with the LM-an operation that will be particularly important on the lunar-landing mission next year, when an Apollo spacecraft will dock nose-to-nose with a real LM before taking it into orbit around the moon. Finally, after the astronauts have jockeyed their craft some 8,000 ft. away, the S-4B will dump its remaining fuel into space. That action will generate just enough thrust to shove the S-4B out of the way and into orbit around the sun. Alone in space, the Apollo...
Some 30,000 miles from the lunar surface, Apollo will have slowed to a space-age snail's pace-2,170 m.p.h. At this point, lunar gravity will overcome the earth's diminishing pull, and the spacecraft will begin accelerating once more. Ahead, the moon will loom ever larger in the spacecraft windows. By the time Apollo curves around the western edge of the moon, its speed will have risen to 5,720 m.p.h...
Without any additional thrust, Apollo's own momentum and the weak lunar gravity would combine to carry it around the moon and fling it back toward earth in a spatial version of crack-the-whip. Indeed, if a recheck of systems and equipment convinces ground controllers and the astronauts that serious problems have developed, the crew will merely continue in this new course and travel back to earth. But if everything seems all right, Apollo's powerful SPS (service propulsion system) engine will be fired for 246 sec. to slow the spacecraft and allow it to be pulled...