Word: spacecrafts
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Apollo 13 itself reached the moon Tuesday night, but it never came closer than 158 miles. As it emerged from behind the far side, the astronauts prepared for the crucial "hurry-home" burn. But there was a hitch. So much debris was still floating outside the spacecraft's windows that a star sighting?to align Apollo properly for the burn?was impossible ("It looks like we're in the middle of the Milky Way," the astronauts had remarked earlier). But the spacemen neatly improvised by taking rougher fixes on the moon and the sun. Then they fired Aquarius' descent engine...
...photograph the damage; because the service module would burn up on reentry, the pictures would be important to scientists investigating the cause of the blast. "It's really a mess," Lovell told Mission Control. "Well, James," Houston answered, "if you can't take any better care of the spacecraft than that, we might not give you another...
...answer came. Responding to a call from one of the rescue planes, Apollo 13 replied: "O.K., Joe." A few seconds later, the descending spaceship hove into view of the TV cameras on the Iwo Jima's decks about four miles away. Under billowing white-and-orange main chutes, the spacecraft drifted slowly downward, headed for a splashdown just off target. At exactly 1:08 p.m., six days after its ill-starred journey began, Odyssey's wanderings had come...
...were civilians and space novices, one a serious-minded parent, the other a swinging bachelor who joined the crew at the last moment to replace an astronaut threatened by German measles. Yet when disaster seemed imminent, the crew became a well-coordinated team, acting in concert to save their spacecraft-and their lives...
...courage of Apollo 13's three astronauts was apparent to all the world. A less conspicuous kind of courage was displayed on the ground. Inside the windowless Building 30 of NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center outside Houston, hundreds of engineers and technicians assembled to guide the crippled spacecraft through its four-day ordeal. Perhaps the coolest and most professional of them were the two young flight director-Glynn Lunney, 33, and Gene Kranz, 36-who were at the helm in Mission Control during the first hours of crisis...