Word: spacecrafts
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...Apollo 9 is successful, Apollo 10 will attempt another moon-orbiting mission in May. On this flight, two astronauts will climb into the LM and fly down to within 50,000 ft. of the lunar surface, while a third astronaut remains in the orbiting Apollo spacecraft. But Phillips spiked rumors that the Apollo 10 LM might go all the way down for a landing; the craft is not equipped to land. Instead, Apollo 11 is now scheduled for the landing mission with a fully equipped LM in July or August...
AMONG the thousands of groundlings who worked to make Apollo 8 a success, the person most responsible for the flight was a Vienna-born engineer named George Low, who is little known outside the NASA community. Low's title is that of manager of the Apollo spacecraft program, and as such he was in charge of making certain that all the essential hardware, from the spaceship structure down to the smallest switch and relay, was in working order. But Low's role in the Apollo program goes far beyond that: other, higher-ranking officials in NASA agree that...
...moved to Houston as deputy director of the Manned Spacecraft Center. That was his position when, in January 1967, Astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Edward White died during a ground test of an Apollo vehicle...
COMPARED with the mighty Saturn 5, which generated 7,500,000 Ibs. of thrust in its first stage alone, the little engine seemed puny indeed. But the importance of the Apollo spacecraft's 20,500-lb.-thrust Service Propulsion System (SPS) engine was far out of proportion to its 31-ft. length. The engine's faultless operation made the difference not only between a relatively simple moon shot and last week's sophisticated mission, but also between life and death for the astronauts...
...engine failed to ignite, or burned too briefly during the attempt to place Apollo into lunar orbit, the spacecraft would have looped around the back of the moon and headed directly back toward earth. If the engine had cut off 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...