Word: rocketeers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Inferno. An incredible belch of flames against the night, ominous clouds of steam and smoke, and finally a thunderous, earth-shaking roar that assaulted the senses and numbed the minds of the 500,000 spectators gathered on nearby Florida beaches and highways. As the Apollo 17 Saturn rocket began to lift ponderously from Cape Kennedy's launch pad 39A, the entire sky was filled with an orange-pink glow, a false dawn against which gulls and pelicans wheeled and fluttered in aimless confusion. The awesome spectacle marked a fitting beginning to the mission of Apollo 17, which at week...
...quality to preparations for the last Apollo mission. As the astronauts were driven through the early-evening darkness from their crew quarters to the launch pad, their path was illuminated by a spotlight shining like a guiding star from a helicopter hovering overhead. At the site, the 36-story rocket gleamed starkly white, lit by searchlight beams that radiated from the pad, forming a crown of light. Nature added to the display: flashes of lightning glowed within distant clouds, and an occasional meteor streaked through the stars in the clear skies above the cape...
Shortly before Apollo 17 was to have been launched, many spectators were startled by a burst of flame that seemed to come prematurely from the base of the rocket. The countdown clocks suddenly stopped only 30 seconds before the scheduled liftoff. To the disappointment of the throng at the cape and the millions more watching over television, Launch Control announced curtly: "We have had a cut-off." Never before during the Apollo program had a countdown been halted so close to blast-off time...
...North, the I.R.A. bravado took on a more fatal form, to others. At the sleepy border village of Belleek, a rocket hurtled through a thick steel-encased window of the local police station, killing a 55-year-old police constable, the father of six children. Across Ulster, 17 similar rockets were fired, though they caused no more fatalities. The weapons were identified as RPG-7 rocket launchers, a more sophisticated and modern version of the World War II bazooka; they are commonly manufactured in Communist countries and used by many Russian allies...
This background slowly blends with two creaking plots. One involves a 1964 SS plan to install teleguidance systems for some German rockets based at Helwan in Nasser's Egypt. The second sends a brash young German reporter searching for a former SS captain and war criminal who turns up alive and devilishly deep in West German industry and the rocket caper...