Word: spider
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...only a tiny speck in the sky. Then, as Astronaut David Scott peered through the window of Apollo 9's orbiting command module, the speck grew into the most ungainly manned craft ever sent into orbit. Said Scott: "You're the biggest, friendliest, funniest-looking spider I've ever seen." He was talking to the lunar module, known as Spider, and it bore two other astronauts who had earlier left Scott to guide it through space. By flying their ship through orbital maneuvers designed to simulate those to be used by astronauts returning from the surface...
...hours earlier, McDivitt and Schweickart had crawled from Gumdrop-the Apollo command and service module-and made their way through a narrow tunnel into Spider. Then, after a few uneasy moments when the docking mechanism snagged, Scott worked Gumdrop loose and fired his thrusters briefly to separate the two craft. With McDivitt at the controls, Spider shoved off onto its maiden solo flight. It moved into a different orbit from Gumdrop's and at one point fell more than 100 miles behind. Then McDivitt began maneuvering back toward the suspenseful rendezvous and docking. Had they not been able...
Canceled Space Walk. Spider's return to Gumdrop was the highlight of the mission, which began last week after a three-day delay to allow the astronauts to recover from troublesome colds. Launched by a Saturn 5 rocket into a near-perfect orbit, Gumdrop, in flawless sequence, separated from the third-stage S-4B rocket, pivoted in space, hooked up with Spider and plucked it out of the nose of the orbiting S-4B. On the third day, Astronauts McDivitt and Schweickart got ready to enter Spider through the 47-in.-long, 32-in.-diameter connecting tunnel...
When U.S. astronauts finally reach the surface of the moon, they will land in an ungainly-looking little craft that is officially named the Lunar Module (LM) but is becoming known as "the Spider." Scheduled to be tested in manned flight for the first time next week during the flight of Apollo 9, the Spider is the homely offspring of a concept of Aeronautical Engineer John Houbolt, an unsung hero of the U.S. space program. NASA officials now agree that without Houbolt's lonely campaign early in the 1960s, the U.S. would have been hard pressed to meet John...
...metaphoric potential is splendid. Spiders are often deadly-and creative as well, spinning out of their own innards the structures of their salvation. Their lives, which sometimes hang by a thread, are delicately crosswebbed, like our own. The author tactfully does not press such parallels to extremes. Yet she is clearly an accomplished spider herself, capable of weaving metaphysical webs in fiction and enmeshing a whole gallery of ogres, Freudian and otherwise. Like the wily trapdoor spider, which retires to digest its kill behind a neat disklike door attached to its nest, Iris Murdoch is seldom visible, or visibly partisan...