Word: mooning
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Only a year after its triumphant conquest of the moon, NASA can barely coax enough money out of Congress to continue existing programs. Its budget has been slashed to $3.3 billion for fiscal 1971 compared with peak spending of $5.2 billion in 1965. Total employment by NASA and its private contractors has dwindled from 420,000 in the heyday of the Apollo program to fewer than 145,000 today. Nor has NASA gotten significant support from the White House. "With the entire future and the entire universe before us," said President Nixon, outlining the Administration's cautious new approach...
Planetary Probes. That is not likely to happen. NASA has already scrubbed one of the seven remaining moon missions, and it may well cancel three more. Some of the Apollo's big Saturn 5 boosters will be used to establish small earth-orbiting space stations such as the three-man Sky lab scheduled for launching in 1972. But even these schemes-not to mention more ambitious space stations-could be set back by a balky Congress. Certainly, a decision to send Americans to Mars will not be made for years to come. The only phase of the space program...
...mission-control centers has been put in mothballs, and astronauts have been asked to cut back their pilot training flights in T-38 jets. Apollo 14 Commander Alan Shepard has publicly worried whether his ship will be properly prepared for next January's tentatively scheduled moon shot...
...point where three men died in a dreadful fire during a ground test. Space became business for corporations and convenience for the housewife. After political interferences, the men in the program had changed as well. They could not manage to get their pre-rehearsed first words from the moon straight. No one dared anymore to put a sign in the capsule window reading, "Deke Slayton is a turtle." The entire enterprise seemed fanciful and wasteful...
...pseudo-myth Science Fiction epic "This Island Earth" concerns the second category of fear, fear of Alien Invasion. It Jeans very heavily on its 1956 milieu for inspiration, yet despite, or perhaps because of inanity, it reveals other immediate aspects of the mentality behind the race to the moon. While the flick is apparently a cartoon show of sheer escapism, the political situation somehow manages to insinuate it self...