Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tanks exploded. Last week, safely back in Houston, Jim Lovell and his crewmates took a far more cheerful view. "I foresee that we can get this incident over with," Lovell said, "and can charge ahead." The space agency shared his optimism. Despite Apollo's close brush with disaster, NASA officials seem more determined than ever to continue exploration of the moon...
Explosive Force. They are counting on help from a high-level review board, chaired by Edgar M. Cortright Jr., director of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. After ordering a schedule of 14-hour work days, Cortright predicted that an explanation for the mysterious blast in Apollo's service module would soon be found-perhaps within three or four weeks. The investigators-including Astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon -will be extremely busy. During the six-day voyage, Apollo 13 radioed back more than 7,000,000 feet of taped data...
Cortright's investigators are looking into all conceivable causes of the explosion. But most top NASA officials already think that the blast was probably the result of a defect in one of the two double-walled oxygen tanks. Under the extremes of pressure (920 lbs. per sq. in.) and temperature (-297° F.) inside the tanks, they say, a fragment of metal-perhaps a rivet or a piece from an internal cooling fan-could have flaked off. As this chip sheared away, there may have been a spark or another kind of combustion, Dr. Rocco Petrone, director...
Martian Microbe. Though the effort to reduce the likelihood of such failures could delay next October's flight of Apollo 14, NASA Administrator Thomas Paine thinks that the moon program can be kept on schedule. Indeed, the space agency got some rare encouragement to press ahead with Apollo from an often critical scientific community. Reporting puzzling age differences in lunar dust gathered at the Ocean of Storms and at the Sea of Tranquillity, Caltech Geologist Gerald Wasserburg made a strong plea at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union for continued manned lunar exploration. "The moon," he told...
Still, most Congressmen continue to favor the space effort. Overriding a White House recommendation, the House last week tentatively tacked an extra $265 million onto NASA's 1971 budget, bringing it to a total of $3.6 billion...