Mar 11 1973
From The Space Library
The U.S.S.R.'s Lunokhod 2 began its third working day on the moon. The roving vehicle was 400 m (1300 ft) above its landing site at the upper rim of the 3.5-billion-yr-old-crater. Lunokhod 2's primary task during its third working day would be to study the crater thoroughly. (TaSS, FBIS-Sov, 3/13/83, Ll)
The book 13: The Flight That Failed-an account of the aborted Apollo 13 mission (launched April 11, 1970) by Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr. was reviewed by Joseph McElroy in the New York Times Book Review: In a spacecraft so full of safety valves and designed redundancies "it had seemed incredible that two of three fuel cells from the two liquid oxygen tanks in the service module could go dead. . . . But to lose two fuel cells and then eventually two oxygen tanks? Not possible." Command module pilot John L. Swigert, Jr., had said after the mission that if anyone had thrown at the crew a simulation of what actually happened "they'd have thought it unrealistic." To have had less than this confidence, McElroy said, would have been unrealistic. The care and skill with which the many teams of NASA technicians work, plus the computers whose development may be "the main reason NASA could achieve a moon landing so soon" had created "an efficiency as unprecedented as the Apollo 13 disaster was implausible to the engineers at Houston Mission Control." Cooper's "plain, detailed picture of the teams at their consoles and in discussion and over the intercom ‘loop' and under the adroit supervision of Eugene Krantz, a flight director who was unquestionably an executive hero of Apollo 13, gives their work a fascinating muscle and texture that might surprise those inclined to think this side of NASA boring.” (NYT Book Review, 3/11/73, 4-5)
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