Word: spacecrafts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...umbilical cord in the vacuum of space. At one point, the cord wrapped itself around him. "The snake's all over me!" shouted the surprised astronaut. For still unexplained reasons, Cernan-like Ed White before him-had to struggle constantly against a tendency to soar above the spacecraft at the end of his cord...
...Gemini 9's glitch-filled flight, space photography fell short of expectations. Just as he was about to close the hatch, Astronaut Cernan lost the film magazine and a lens from the movie camera that had recorded his space walk. As lens and film floated out of the spacecraft and into orbits of their own, he grabbed for them but missed. Understandably, Cernan did not follow. "I didn't feel like any more extravehicular activity," he explained. In addition, many of the 17 magazines of color film shot from inside Gemini were poorly exposed or taken through fogged...
...film that did survive was remarkable nonetheless. With their ship facing backward during its return into the earth's atmosphere, the astronauts took some vivid color movies of a sheath of gases glowing with purple, blue and green incandescence as it was heated by the friction of the spacecraft's passage. They were the first re-entry photographs ever taken. As Gemini plunged into denser atmosphere, the colors increased in brilliance: a sharply defined blue shock wave expanded, and hot, golden fragments ripped loose from the glowing heat shield to shoot past the window in a dazzling stream...
...rose higher in the lunar sky and temperatures climbed toward 270° F. Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists prepared to shut down their successful Surveyor spacecraft for a two-day siesta. Then they suddenly discovered that the protective shadows of Surveyor's solar panel and rectangular high-gain antenna had fallen over the television camera, keeping it cool enough to shoot pictures for an extra day. Before the camera was again directly exposed to the sun's rays and had to be turned off, Surveyor raised its picture total to an incredible 4,002. After the siesta...
...would have been happy if we had gotten just one picture." In one batch of shots, scientists found some that further emphasized Surveyor's charmed life. About 300 yds. from the craft, the camera picked out a field of boulders up to six feet in diameter. Had the spacecraft landed there, striking any stone at a bad angle, it might have toppled over. Said U.S. Geological Survey's Astrogeologist Eugene Shoemaker: "I think we were damn lucky...