Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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DIED. Kurt Debus, 74, German scientist who was director from 1952 to 1974 of NASA'S Cape Canaveral facility (now the Kennedy Space Center), overseeing such landmark projects as the launches of the first U.S. manned spaceflight and Apollo 11 's moon mission; of a heart attack; in Cocoa, Fla. Debus worked closely with Wernher von Braun, the father of modern rocketry, to design the Nazis' V-2 rocket booster, then became a passionately loyal American cit izen after the German surrender. In the 1950s he worked on the Army's first missile capable of carrying and delivering a nuclear...
...would contend that putting the first American woman in space wasn't a big deal not Ride, not NASA, and not the hordes of watchers who wore "Ride, Sally" buttons and wrote letters to Time magazine debating whether she should have taken her lipstick on board. But it wasn't the first time that milestone fever has obscured just what was a big deal about it--and what wasn't. And those questions were amply illuminated by a sedate, tiny and altogether un-fevered wire item in last Wednesday's New York Times--a dry announcement of the appointment...
...coverage. The wild enthusiasm over Sally Ride's flight wasn't sexist; but the most scrupulous editor couldn't avoid addressing the question of whether it was more difficult, somehow, for a woman to orbit the Earth; whether the milestone was womanhood's for evolving to that point, or NASA's for abandoning a benighted state of consciousness. The line between those two types of progress must have been in the back of somebody's mind, because the following week, when NASA sent up its first Black astronaut, things were a trifle more subdued on the publicity side. Certainly...
...more of a Presbyterian prude, a sort of born-again Sky King. While Wolfe poked fun at Glenn the boy policing the language of his school chums, the film focuses only on Glenn the adult. Other digs are neatly skipped over. Wolfe, for example, implies that Glenn sought out NASA officials to discuss replacing Alan Shephard on the first flight, but not a hint of that appears on the screen...
Glenn, who has not yet seen the film, dismissed an early draft of the script given to him by NASA as "Laurel and Hardy in space," but now he studiously refrains from speculating on the movie's impact. "It's out of my control," he says with a shrug. Glenn nonetheless appreciates the value of his image, film or no film. He is absenting himself from the gala opening of The Right Stuff in Washington on Oct. 16, evidently recognizing that it would be unseemly to exploit the movie so blatantly. After all, it would just...