May 8 1966
From The Space Library
GEMINI VII Astronaut Frank Borman told a British television audience in London that the space vehicle, not man, was limiting the length of manned space flight. “We are finding that man is very adaptable and that if you provide him with the normal comforts he expects on earth, he can function as well at zero gravity as he can on earth.” (AP, Wash. Eve. Star, 5/9/66, A2)
Lockheed Aircraft Corp. chairman Courtland S. Gross described flight in proposed U.S. supersonic transport (SST) in an interview for This Week: “It will make the world a lot smaller. Its near two-thousand-mile-an-hour speed will carry passengers to London and Paris in two and a half hours. With room for 255 to 266 passengers, five abreast, it will be a 222-foot walk from the tail to the pilot’s cabin. “But the biggest thrill will be cruising at 70,000 to 80,000 feet above the earth. At that height you will enjoy the kind of stars and sky seen heretofore only by U-2 pilots and astronauts-pinpoint icicles suspended in the blue-black velvet backdrop of space. Most of the atmosphere is below the supersonic transport’s cruising altitude, so that at night, on the horizon, there will be the bright blue band first reported by the astronauts-light radiating from the other side of the earth. When flying the polar routes around the world, passengers will enjoy spectacular electrical displays from the ionization of gases in the upper atmosphere-great shimmering curtain; of color that flicker through the sky.” (This Week, 5/8/66)
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