Apollo 13
April 14, 1970
The crew of Apollo 13 has moved into the Lunar Module Aquarius. It's a lifeboat. Designed for two men, two days. Three men, four days. Mission Control is rewriting every procedure in real time. I called in sick to work. I cannot leave the radio.
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Apollo 13
April 13, 1970
Something went very wrong on Apollo 13 tonight. An oxygen tank exploded 200,000 miles from Earth. Two of the three fuel cells are dead. The service module is venting into space. Three men are in a crippled spacecraft on the way to the Moon and nobody knows yet if they…
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Apollo 13
April 11, 1970
Apollo 13 launched today and the newspapers barely mentioned it. "Routine Moon mission," one headline said. Routine! I watched from home and felt obscurely offended on behalf of the crew. Three men are riding a Saturn V to another world. Nothing about this is routine. We've forgotten how hard this…
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Space Race
February 10, 1970
The Apollo program has cost roughly $25 billion so far. I've been reading about the political sustainability of this, and I'm not sure the program is as secure as I'd like.
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January 10, 1970
The 1960s are over. I've been keeping this notebook since 1957. Let me look at what the decade was and what the 1970s might be.
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December 31, 1969
The decade Kennedy said we would go to the Moon ends today. We went. I want to write about that on the last day of the decade that did it.
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December 15, 1969
Apollo 12 proved something beyond the fact that we can go to the Moon: we can aim.
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Apollo 12
November 24, 1969
Apollo 12 splashed down safely yesterday. Pete Conrad and Alan Bean walked the Moon twice, visited Surveyor 3, and brought home 75 pounds of samples. Dick Gordon flew solo in orbit. Six men have now walked on the Moon. I keep saying this to myself: six men have walked on…
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Apollo 12
November 20, 1969
I promised earlier that I'd revisit Pete Conrad's first words on the Moon. He won a bet. His exact words deserve to be in this notebook.
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Apollo 12
November 19, 1969
Pete Conrad landed the LM within 200 meters of Surveyor 3 — a precision landing NASA could barely believe. Then he stepped onto the Moon and said exactly what he'd bet a journalist he would say. "Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but it's a…
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