Word: mooning
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...slept fitfully in the unpowered and chilly command module, the third remained on watch "downstairs" in the lunar module. Ground controllers had at least one bit of cheering news. To the delight of scientists, the Saturn third-stage S-4B rocket (which itself had been aimed toward the moon after giving Apollo its final boost) had hit the lunar surface exactly as planned. Its impact created a reverberation that registered for four hours on the Apollo 12 Ocean of Storms seismometer. "Well, at least something worked on this flight," sighed Lovell...
Apollo 13 itself reached the moon Tuesday night, but it never came closer than 158 miles. As it emerged from behind the far side, the astronauts prepared for the crucial "hurry-home" burn. But there was a hitch. So much debris was still floating outside the spacecraft's windows that a star sighting?to align Apollo properly for the burn?was impossible ("It looks like we're in the middle of the Milky Way," the astronauts had remarked earlier). But the spacemen neatly improvised by taking rougher fixes on the moon and the sun. Then they fired Aquarius' descent engine...
...three men who weathered Apollo 13's crisis-ridden journey formed one of the more oddly matched crews of the space age. Apollo's skipper had a military background and was a veteran of three space flights, including a trip to the moon. His two crewmen were civilians and space novices, one a serious-minded parent, the other a swinging bachelor who joined the crew at the last moment to replace an astronaut threatened by German measles. Yet when disaster seemed imminent, the crew became a well-coordinated team, acting in concert to save their spacecraft-and their...
...skill to read the writings of a little-known scientist, Wernher von Braun. Convinced of the coming importance of rocketry, he accurately predicted many current space-flight advances-much to the amusement of his Naval Academy roommate, who teased him, "Lovell, some day you're going to the moon." A skilled test pilot who helped develop the weapon system for the F-4H Phantom II jet fighter, Lovell suffered the greatest disappointment of his career when NASA failed to name him as one of its original Mercury astronauts in 1959. But he was chosen in the second batch...
Marilyn Lovell, enthusiastic about her husband's first flight to the moon, first resisted but then accepted with nervous stoicism the idea of another lunar trip. Against Jim Lovell's advice, she recently went to see the film Marooned, which deals with a trio of astronauts stranded in space, and came home shaken. She had good reason to be: in the film, the flight commander dies. Nonetheless, she managed to maintain firm control over her emotions throughout Apollo 13's flight. "I'm used to it now," she said of the danger of space flight...