Word: spacecrafts
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...December rendezvous with Jupiter, the unmanned spacecraft Pioneer 10 last week finished the 210-day leg of its journey that took it through the asteroid belt. Pioneer. which was launched in March 1972, thus became the first vehicle from earth to pass safely through the vast ring of rocky debris that circles the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The relatively uneventful, 200 million-mile passage removed a major concern of both science-fiction writers and scientists: that spacecraft in the asteroid belt would be damaged and perhaps destroyed by flying rocks...
...months before the taciturn astronaut was scheduled to become the second American to orbit the earth, NASA doctors abruptly grounded him. Reason: they had discovered an occasional irregularity in the rhythm of his heartbeat. The bitterly disappointed Slayton subsequently became chief of flight-crew operations at the Manned Spacecraft Center and played a key role in picking all future space crews, including the first men to land on the moon. But even as he sent other astronauts to the launch pad, he never stopped dreaming of making the trip into space himself...
Last week, in a classic comeback story, Slayton got his wish. NASA named him to the crew of the Apollo spacecraft that will rendezvous and dock with a Russian Soyuz spaceship in 1975. His crewmates will be Air Force Brigadier General Thomas Stafford, a veteran of one Apollo and two Gemini flights, and Civilian Astronaut Vance Brand, another space rookie. Though obviously elated, the crewcut, 48-year-old Slayton-who will be the oldest American to go into space by the time of the launch -greeted the news in his characteristic gritty style: "I'd rather...
...photographic outpouring also pleased scientists at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, who found the pictures highly useful in initial identification and examination of the freshly arrived lunar rocks last week. Geochemist Paul Cast, the Manned Spacecraft Center's chief lunar scientist, noted, for example, that the closeups of the moon's surface were so clear that the orange soil showed up as a distinct band in the surrounding material. To Cast, those sharp color boundaries were another indication that the orange soil is young by lunar standards and a product of relatively recent volcanism on the moon...
...Apollo's three-day homeward voyage, the astronauts had exceptionally smooth sailing. "America has found some fair winds and following seas," said Cernan after the main engine had successfully lifted the command ship out of lunar orbit. As the spacecraft emerged from behind the moon for the last time, the astronauts aimed their TV camera at the surface below and sent back the first live pictures of features on the backside that are invisible from earth, including the giant Tsiolkovsky Crater (named for the Russian space pioneer). Next day, some 180,000 miles from earth, Command Module Pilot Evans...