Word: perfected
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...early part of Apollo 11 's epic journey had been as uneventful as the later part was suspenseful. Lift-off was nearly perfect. Rising Phoenix-like above its own exhaust flames, a scant 724 milliseconds behind schedule, the giant rocket shook loose some 1,300 Ibs. of ice that had frozen on its white sides. Although it was the heaviest space vehicle ever fired aloft?6,484,289 Ibs. at ignition?it cleared the launch tower in twelve seconds...
Despite the near-perfect record of Apollo space flights, many feared the perils of the journey. In houses of worship around the U.S., clerics and laymen prayed for the astronauts' success. At St. Ann's Roman Catholic Church in Boston, the four brothers of Patricia Finnegan Collins, wife of Astronaut Mike Collins, heard Father John Schatzel read from Genesis: "I will be with you and protect you wherever you go. I will bring you back to this land." In Neil Armstrong's home town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, the Rev. Herman J. Weber prayed at St. Paul...
...sought a sense of sharing and involvement in the great adventure. Italians pointed proudly to Astronaut Collins' Roman birth. Frenchmen recalled that Jules Verne had charted the voyage more than 100 years ago. Germans noted that it was Wernher von Braun who had labored a quarter-century to perfect a rocket that could carry men to the moon. Russians were gratified that the American astronauts carried to the moon medals awarded posthumously to two Soviet cosmonauts, Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov. Color television sets were virtually sold out in Japan...
Chunky, 5 ft. 9 in. and dark, Heikal displays a thorough but careful command of English, flashing his near-perfect white teeth and waving his omnipresent Havana cigar. He was born 45 years ago in a small village near Cairo, and made his reputation as a war correspondent in 1948 in Palestine, where he first met Captain Gamal Abdel Nasser. By 1952 they had become fast friends. Just before the revolution, Nasser pointedly asked him what he thought should be done about the Farouk regime. "I knew then," Heikal says, "that something was afoot and that they had confidence...
...wistful boozer. But in his first major role, Jack Nicholson proves that he knows far more about acting than either of his costars. His elegies for a vanished life are melancholy without being bathetic; his marijuana-flavored description of a UFO takeover of the U.S. is a perfect comedy within a flawed tragedy...