Word: space
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...during one crucial 30-second interval of the scheduled burn, Apollo would have been left in an unstable orbit and crashed into the surface of the moon. And, if the astronauts had not succeeded in restarting the engine after orbiting the moon, they would have been left stranded in space without hope of rescue. This point was not lost on Astronaut Borman. Shortly before launch, he said of the SPS engine: "It simply has to work at that point...
Despite its vital importance, the SPS engine was the only major system aboard the spacecraft designed without another complete system to back it. Like other systems, the engine had duplicate parts made to take over if its tanks, valves or propellant lines failed. But space and weight limitations had forced the manufacturer, Aerojet-General Corp., to include only a single combustion chamber, fuel injector and nozzle extension skirt (see illustration). The failure of any of these parts could have meant disaster...
...face of it, the space flight had little pertinence to the problems, the agonies of earth. It was possible to look at the moon over a Harlem or Watts rooftop and feel only bitterness at the money spent, the vast effort made, in a cause that would not alter a single life, a single dwelling in the ghetto. And yet the event was really incalculable in its consequences. Nothing comparable has happened in man's history, except possibly the great ocean voyages that led to the discovery of the New World -and to the transformation of Western...
...comparison, of course, is only approximate. Space, as far as man can now foretell, offers no treasures comparable to those sought and found in the New World, no immediate chance for settlement on a new frontier. But the most important fact about America's discovery was not material, not the wealth and territory that it added to the known world. It was rather the spiritual and intellectual challenge with which it shook that ancient, flat, small, circumscribed, warring village that was the world before Columbus. Thus, the age of space that emerged in the last days...
...hope is conditional and still remote. The triumph of Apollo 8 cannot erase the irony that it is easier for man to go to the moon than to wipe out a ghetto, easier for him to travel through space than to clean up his own polluted atmosphere, easier for him to establish cooperation in a vast technological enterprise than to establish brotherhood on a city block. Yet as man has conquered the seas, the air and other natural obstacles, he has also at each stage, in a small way, conquered part of himself. Therein lies the hope and the ultimate...