Word: swigert
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...taken aback by Jack Swigert's opinion: "The very things that qualified the men to go to the moon ... disqualified them to describe their journey with any lyricism." Perhaps Swigert has never heard of Antoine de St. Exupéry, the French aviator, explorer and writer, whose internationally loved fictional creation, the Little Prince is from the planet B612. Somehow I believe St. Exupéry would have fulfilled NASA's requirement "for pilots who were made of tough physical stuff" in spite of his many other talents. NASA should broaden its scope. Jeanette F. Huber, KINSALE, IRELAND...
Hanks isn't the first to discover that there's a difference between rapture and rigor. The late Jack Swigert, command-module pilot of Apollo 13, said that the very thing that qualified astronauts to fly to the moon--a certain engineer's detachment from the outrageousness of the undertaking--disqualified them to speak about it terribly lyrically. Hanks, with lyricism to burn, decided to make the most of his astronomical talents...
...group that was not fully able to appreciate this victory of adventure over science, it was the Apollo astronauts themselves. (All told, there were a dozen moonwalkers; with the death of Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad last week, nine of them survive.) Before his death in 1982, Jack Swigert, command-module pilot of Apollo 13 (a mission that taught NASA a thing or two about adventure), noted that the very thing that qualified lunar astronauts to fly the missions they were flying disqualified them from experiencing them fully. Can you fathom the utter, hostile emptiness of translunar space and still...
...Swigert believed, you can either go to the moon or you can appreciate the significance of going, but you can't do both. If that's the choice, it's possible that the nearly 4 billion people the astronauts left behind when they set off on their journeys--the people who get to look at the pictures and study the rocks and retell the tales the explorers brought home--just might have got the better part of the deal...
...astronaut Dick Swigert won the first election in the brand-new Sixth District, but died before taking office. Schaefer was appointed to finish the term and has never looked back. Denver is home to cable giants like TCI, and he has worked to protect their interests. He's also committed to reduced federal spending--in 1994 he proposed freezing cost-of-living adjustments every other year to help cut costs--and is favored to return to Washington...