Word: weightlessness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that the crew was about to conduct "scientific experiment Sugar Hotel Alpha Victor Echo"-or SHAVE. NASA had spent $5,000 trying unsuccessfully to perfect a small electric razor with a vacuum attachment that would suck up bristles -which otherwise might float freely and clog up instruments in the weightless environment of the spacecraft. The Apollo 10 astronauts had a simpler solution. They broke out a razor and a tube of brushless shaving cream and attacked their week-old beards in the traditional manner. The bristles were successfully contained in gobs of shaving cream that were scraped from their faces...
...movies show the barren landscape flashing by only 70 miles below, then seemingly reversing in a dizzying maneuver as the capsule rolls into a new attitude. In other color shots, inside the cabin, viewers can see dimly the astronauts shooting pictures out of the window, a flashlight hovering weightless in mid-cabin and finally twirling into place after being nudged by an astronaut's hand...
Every astronaut has to do it to see what it is like to be weightless way up there in space. And what's good for the fly-boys has to be valuable for the rocketeers who send them out of this world. So there was Dr. Wernher von Braun, 56, director of NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, floating around the cabin of a C-135 jet transport while the pilot flew a precise "over-the-hump" curve to produce 30 seconds or so of weightlessness. Von Braun made twelve of the trips and marveled that...
Last stop, but a favorite of many, was Stanley Landsman's Infinity Chamber, in which 6,000 tiny lights on the black, mirrored walls were reflected to create what seemed like an infinity of mirrors. The illusion of airy weightless ness thus engendered permitted viewers, in the words of the show's organizer, Ralph T. Coe, to "leap straight into the fourth dimension, experiencing what the astronauts have described when they walk in space." Still better, as far as the frazzled gallerygoers were concerned, everyone could leap straight out of the fourth dimension without having to worry about...
Psychological Problems. During debriefing sessions last week, Gordon confirmed what the movies make obvious. In his weightless state, he complained, he had difficulty holding his equipment and keeping it in front of him. He found that his legs moved uncontrollably, that every motion required the utmost physical effort. Space experts were convinced that part of Gordon's problems with EVA were psychological. "No matter how many times you've seen EVA films and been told that you'll not fall," said one Air Force officer assigned to the Gemini missions, "the first time...