Word: nasa
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Commander Frank Borman was very clear about the fact that no one aboard his spacecraft would be getting drunk on the way back from the moon. NASA had packed a couple of miniatures of brandy aboard Apollo 8 for the occasion - it wasn't enough for three grown men to get anything close to tipsy, but it was a couple of minis more than any crew had ever taken into space before, and when you're piloting a ship that is screaming to Earth at 25,000 miles per hour and you have to hit a narrow atmospheric corridor just...
...August, the CIA got word to NASA that the Soviet Union was planning to send a Zond spacecraft around the moon before the end of the year. It was not certain that the Zond would carry a man, but if it did, it would be one more black eye to the U.S. - which had lately caught up in the space race with the Soviets - in a year that had been full of them. So that summer, NASA told Borman, Lovell and Anders to cowboy up. Their original Earth orbit flight plan would be changed to a lunar orbit...
...NASA discovers what could perhaps be traces of fossils fuels on Mars. GM, Ford and Chrysler immediately halt R&D on any fuel-efficient cars...
...think that's bulls---," he says. "I believe that anything he was asked he was very honest in answering because he's a systems engineer. And Lori Garver is not equipped to make technical judgments on the architecture of a space exploration system." The unnamed NASA source concedes that Griffin can be brutally honest and occasionally tactless, but insists that his shouting is simply improbable. The Obama transition office did not return an e-mail seeking comment from Garver...
...says the NASA source, both present and former astronauts as well as some NASA contractors are quietly - and sometimes not so quietly - lobbying for Griffin to stay. But the incoming administration is not saying anything so far. It was President John F. Kennedy who famously committed Americans to reaching the moon. Now it is Obama - who so often invokes the themes and style of JFK - who may decide if we go back...