Word: saturns
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...critical points during their trip, a balky rocket could leave them stranded in orbit around the moon or drive them into collision with the lunar surface. By-the time they are fired from Cape Kennedy's launch pad 39A by the world's most powerful rocket, Saturn 5, Borman, Lovell and Anders will be the most thoroughly prepared adventurers ever to have dared the unknown...
...sent 17 manned missions into space, but none has been as ambitious or adventurous as the next one on NASA's schedule. If all goes well, on the morning of Dec. 21 a 3,100-ton Saturn 5 will rise slowly from its pad at Cape Kennedy. Three days later, Astronauts Frank Borman, James A. Lovell Jr. and William A. Anders will be spending Christmas Eve in the spaceship Apollo 8, farther from home than any men have ever been: they will be circling the moon...
Shortly after liftoff, Apollc 8 will go into a "parking" orbit 115 miles above the earth. If mission controllers are satisfied that all the ship's systems are working properly, the final stage of the Saturn booster will be reignited during the second or third orbit. The resulting thrust will increase Apollo's speed to 24,000 m.p.h.-enough to free it from the earth's environment and send it on a curving trajectory toward the moon...
They conducted scores of experiments, produced the first U.S. live TV shows from space and rendezvoused with their discarded Saturn 4B booster (see color pictures). More important, by checking out Apollo's control, navigation, communications and life-support systems, they confirmed that the craft was completely spaceworthy. If no unexpected difficulties are uncovered as technicians decipher the mountain of data that ac cumulated during the flight, an Apollo 8 crew composed of Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders may be sent into orbit around the moon with in as little as six weeks...
...week, after they had allowed Apollo to drift about 100 miles ahead of the Saturn 4B, the astronauts fired the service module's powerful propulsion engine twice in orbital maneuvers that once more brought them to a rendezvous with the spent second-stage rocket. This operation, too, had implications for the lunar mission; if the LM should become stranded in lunar orbit on the way to or from the Apollo command moduel, the larger craft would have to seek it out and dock with it to rescue the two astonauts aboard...