Word: spacecrafts
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They were treated to selections from Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass, weekend football scores and lengthy newscasts. The diversion was especially welcome on the return trip, which turned out to be the least eventful part of the journey. Two more live telecasts were presented from the spacecraft, and more star navigation checks were made, but the last two mid-course corrections were canceled: Apollo 8 was dead on target...
Accelerated by the earth's own gravity, the spacecraft hurtled at increasing speeds toward its last great challenge-re-entry of earth's atmosphere. Jettisoning the service module and its trusty SPS engine, the astronauts yawed their cone-shaped command module until its blunt end was forward and then plunged into the outer atmosphere at a speed of 24,629 m.p.h.-some 7,000 m.p.h. faster than re-entry speeds of orbital missions. Roaring down into the thickening atmosphere within a sliver of the planned angle of 6.43°, Apollo passed over Peking and Tokyo, the temperature...
Flying over the Pacific, the pilot of a Pan American jet liner reported seeing the spacecraft's fiery track; it was an astonishing five miles wide and 100 miles long...
...built up, it ionized the surrounding atmosphere, which formed a sheath around Apollo and temporarily blacked out its radio communications. But after a tense three-minute silence, there was a reassuring message from Jim Lovell: "We are looking good." Apollo had stood the stresses of reentry. On schedule, the spacecraft's drogue parachutes deployed, followed closely by the three main chutes...
Still aboard the spacecraft, Borman engaged in small talk by radio with the pilot of a helicopter, reporting that the moon was not made of green cheese after all: "It's made out of American cheese." Standing happily on the deck of the Yorktown, Borman posed a quickly solved mystery: although Lovell and Anders had full growths of beards, the Apollo 8 commander was clean-shaven, On the short flight from Apollo to the carrier, he had used an electric razor provided by the helicopter pilot...