Word: spacing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...broad seas. It seemed a cruel paradox of the times that man could conquer alien space but could not master...
Small wonder, then, that those on earth saw it as a beleaguered battlefield -not, as Astronaut Lovell described it from his vantage point nearly a quarter of a million miles away, as "a grand ovation to the vastness of space." Sated with violence, sick of crisis, weary of politics and protest alike, the U.S.-and the rest of the world-needed few excuses to look to the heavens. As the year waned, they shifted their gaze to earth's placid, lifeless satellite-as Sir Richard Burton described it in 1880, "A ruined world, a globe burnt out, a corpse...
Many students and intellectuals, inveighing against the "power structure" and the "Establishment," have been loud in their condemnation of America's commitment to space. It has been ridiculed by such authorities as Science Editor Philip Abelson as a "moondoggle," by a congressional critic as a "garish spectacular." Indeed, considering the proliferation of terrestrial problems-poverty, ignorance, racism, the decay of the cities, the rape of the environment, the deepening chasm between affluent and backward nations-it is easy to question the wisdom of spending billions to escape the troubled planet...
...SCANT decade ago, man was making his first tentative probes into near space. Now, his eye fixed on the moon, that cold and lifeless globe with its borrowed light, he was poised to soar beyond earth's atmosphere, beyond the 40,000-mile-deep magnetosphere and into a vast and trackless void. The moon flight was man's first great extraterrestrial venture...
...thoughts are very similar," agreed Lovell. "The vast loneliness up here is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on earth. The earth from here is a grand ovation to the big vastness of space...