Word: spacecraft
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Commander Frank Borman was very clear about the fact that no one aboard his spacecraft would be getting drunk on the way back from the moon. NASA had packed a couple of miniatures of brandy aboard Apollo 8 for the occasion - it wasn't enough for three grown men to get anything close to tipsy, but it was a couple of minis more than any crew had ever taken into space before, and when you're piloting a ship that is screaming to Earth at 25,000 miles per hour and you have to hit a narrow atmospheric corridor just...
...August, the CIA got word to NASA that the Soviet Union was planning to send a Zond spacecraft around the moon before the end of the year. It was not certain that the Zond would carry a man, but if it did, it would be one more black eye to the U.S. - which had lately caught up in the space race with the Soviets - in a year that had been full of them. So that summer, NASA told Borman, Lovell and Anders to cowboy up. Their original Earth orbit flight plan would be changed to a lunar orbit...
...spacecraft was so good there was nothing to do but hang on and take pictures," Anders jokes today...
Follow-up research will include the launch of Project Kepler, a first-of-its-kind NASA spacecraft mission that will look for Earth-sized planets located at similar distances from their respective stars—planets that might be friendly to life...
...past decade has been something of a Martian era of space exploration. Since 1996, the U.S. alone has launched no fewer than nine spacecraft Marsward, and seven have arrived in one piece--an extraordinary success rate for a planet that historically had been a bit of a graveyard of failed missions. Currently, six ships--five American and one European--are at work on Mars, and a handful of others sleep peacefully on the surface or orbit silently above, their missions completed and their systems exhausted. While a lot of the work the spacecraft do is the quiet business of spelunking...