Word: spacecrafts
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...probability, U.S. astronauts will not be returning from the moon before 1970, but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is getting ready to welcome them back all the same. As the spacecraft is hoisted aboard the recovery carrier, bands will strike up, sailors will cheer, and a worldwide television audience will watch. But the viewing public will see precious little of the heroes of the occasion, the astronauts themselves. They will be whisked into isolation at an $8,100,000 Lunar Receiving Laboratory that NASA is just completing in Houston. There they will remain under strict quarantine for weeks...
...nagging fear behind this cautious treatment is that alien organisms might hitch a ride aboard the spacecraft, in the bodies of the astronauts or in moon rocks that they will carry back. Such bugs, against which man has developed no immunity or medicines, could conceivably cause a catastrophic plague on earth. "We know that we're dealing with a low-probability risk and that no one really expects life to be found on the moon," says NASA's Dr. Walter W. Kemmerer Jr. "Yet the best way to preserve life is to freeze...
Died. Robert Helberg, 61, Boeing aircraft scientist, builder of the immensely successful Lunar Orbiter spacecraft; of a heart attack; in Seattle. As the prime contractor's man in charge of the venture since inception in 1963, Helberg gets much credit for the five camera-bearing vehicles that whizzed around the moon and snapped some of the most dramatic pictures in all science...
Relativistic Implosion. Eventually, as the spacecraft approached the velocity of light, some of the stars ahead of it began to blink out; their light had been shifted into higher, ultraviolet frequencies that are invisible to the human eye. Others, like Betelgeuse and Aldebaran, which look red to observers on earth, actually became brighter: their substantial lower frequency infrared output, normally invisible to the human eye, had been shifted into the visible range...
...celestial navigator on the flight had not already become lost in space, there was a more puzzling effect to confound him: relativistic aberration, the apparent shift of visible stars toward the direction of the spacecraft's motion. Thus, the computer showed, as the craft approached 45 Eridani at ever increasing velocities, other stars in the sky began to converge toward the target star. At 90% of the speed of light, only a few stars remained visible through the rear window. In a nightmarish finale to Moskowitz's flight, the remainder of the visible universe-stars, galaxies, nebulas-seemed...