Word: orbit
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...August, the Democratic Convention in Chicago dissolved into bloody rioting; and in each month of that exceedingly bloody year, 1,200 Americans had died in Vietnam. So people had bigger things on their minds in October when Apollo 7 - the first of the three-man Apollo ships - had orbited the Earth. And people might have been equally indifferent in December when Apollo 8 went aloft - except that Apollo 8 would be traveling a little farther than Earth orbit. (Read TIME's Top 10 Scientific Discoveries...
...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...
...Apollo 8 did go. On the morning of Saturday, Dec. 21, 1968, the crew blasted off aboard the 36-story, seven-million-pound Saturn V rocket into Earth orbit. Five hours later, the crew fired the Saturn's upper stage engine and Apollo 8 peeled out for the moon...
...Christmas Eve the crew got busy. Settling Apollo 8 into orbit around the moon was a high-wire maneuver that involved turning the ship backward and firing its powerful service propulsion engine for precisely four and a half minutes - an eternity in a business in which barely a breath from a thruster is enough to set a ship spinning off course. The engine burn was designed to slow the spacecraft down just enough to ease it into a lunar orbit without losing so much altitude that it crashed into the moon instead. Orbital mechanics also demanded that the maneuver occur...
NASA has moved with uncharacteristic nimbleness in the last five years and is already cutting metal on the new machines in the hope of having crews in Earth orbit by 2015 and on the moon by 2020. Schedules have slipped some - the original plan was to launch the orbital missions in 2014 - and costs have swollen, though so far not dramatically. (See the Top 50 space moments since Sputnik...