Astronauts ready for 10-day mission
Apollo 12 to blast off Friday
CAPE KENNEDY (UPI)—Apollo 12 commander Charles "Pete" Conrad inspected Tuesday the towering Saturn rocket that will hurl him and two companions toward the moon Friday. He said preparations were going "great," and went for a spin in a jet.
Conrad, in jaunty spirits and dressed in blue flight coveralls and a baseball cap bearing the insignia of Apollo 12, took off alone in a T38 jet trainer at 3:30 p.m. EST for 40 minutes of aerobatics.
He said when he returned that his radio had failed, but that this hadn't caused him any problem.
Conrad did his soaring in crystal clear skies. Earlier in the day, the Apollo 12 crew got the all-clear from weatherman for the Friday takeoff for the moon.
"The radio isn't any good in that thing. It pooped out," he told ground crewmen as he climbed from the jet.
In Boulder, Colo., John McKinnon, a spokesman for the government's space disturbance center, said there were indications radiation outbursts might develop around Apollo 12's launch time.
Such a solar flare could endanger spacefliers and force the delay of a launch, but McKinnon
said it was too early to predict its severity and its affect on mission plans.
Conrad, Richard F. Gordon and Alan L. Bean spent much of the day in their spaceport quarters, tapering off from their rigorous training routine and reviewing the flight plan.
Conrad said he passed up a planned helicopter ride to practice moon touchdown techniques and instead went to the launch pad for a close-up look at the Saturn 5 booster.
It looked "fine." he reported.
"You don't get to see it very often with the 'remove-before-flight' tags off it," said the Navy commander.
Conrad later decided on the jet flight to accustom himself to some of the sensations of weightlessness he will experience in space.
"We've been ready to go for a long time." Gordon said recently.
The space fliers were confident they are ready for the risky 10-day mission.
"I think we're well enough trained. If the hardware holds together and we don't have too many problems, I think we'll be able to do the job," he said.
At the oceanside launch pad where the 36-story combination of the Saturn 5 rocket and the
Bombs rock N.Y. City letter explains actions
NEW YORK (UPI)—Three homemade bombs apparently planted by an anticapitalist conspiracy damaged three corporate skyscrapers in Manhattan Tuesday and touched off a rash of bomb scares and building evacuations.
The bombs, described as high explosives, detonated shortly after 1 a.m. EST and no one was injured. An elevator operator in the new General Motors building was shaken up and hospitalized briefly.
It was business as usual in the
Lecture series features Paz
Octavio Paz, Mexican poet and former ambassador to India, spoke Tuesday night in the Humanities Lecture Series.
Paz's speech on "The Body: Ritual and Rebellion" showed the relationship between signs that represented the body and nonbody.
He said contemporary art did not give a picture of the body and each civilization's art represented their image of the human body.
Paz said different religions and societies of the world had varied approaches to the body and its use such as in homosexuality, heterosexuality, free love and sex education of the young.
Sex belongs in the catalog of human rights but sexuality tends to change socially, he said. He added the motives for the use of the body were industry (reproduction), health and social welfare and entertainment.
Paz said the contemporary student rebellions are " not wasted in a succession of outcrys."
The student revolutions today were an "empty fiesta." Passion is the force that brings them together, Paz said. The western world has been waiting for revolution since 1870 and now its coming swiftly, he said.
Decline of revolution signaled a nearness to the end, he said.
The paper he presented is part of a study on "conjunctions and disjunctions."
12 KANSAN Nov. 12 1969
GM, RCA, and Chase Manhattan Bank buildings despite the blasts, except in the devastated areas.
Police and FBI experts tested fragments of the bombs found for some clue to the identity of the bombers.
The most important bit of evidence was a special delivery letter sent to United Press International and the New York Times.
The letter said the bombs had been set off during the week of the Vietnam moratorium as a blow to "the giant corporations of America that have now spread themselves all over the world, forcing entire foreign economies into total dependence on American money and goods."
"Spiro Agnew may be a household word, but it is rarely-seen men like David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan, James Roche of General Motors, and Michael Haider of Standard Oil who run the system behind the scenes," the letter said.
"The empire is breaking down as peoples all over the globe are rising up to challenge its power . . . and finally, from the heart of the empire, white Americans too are striking blow of liberation."
Informed sources said the bombings appeared to be the work of a conspiracy, since one person could hardly have carried out the operation.
Rockefeller is chairman of Chase Manhattan and member of the family who founded Standard Oil. Roche is chairman of GM and Haider retired as chairman of Standard Oil six weeks ago.
There were also telephone calls made to the buildings shortly before the blasts to warn personnel. The caller was described as a young-sounding male with a pleasant, unaccented voice.
spacecraft was poised in its service tower, ground crews had a 16-hour rest period before activating the spacecraft fuel cell batteries early Wednesday in pre-launch preparations.
All the bombs exploded within a span of eight minutes at locations spaced as widely as midtown and the financial area in lower Manhattan.
There were 1,300 nightworkers in the 60-story Chase Manhattan building at the time of the explosion on the 16th floor, just below Rockefeller's office, but none was in the blast area.
Conrad, Bean and Gordon are scheduled to blastoff at 11:22 a.m. EST Friday on America's second moon landing mission.
More than 300 nightclubbers were evacuated from the RCA building's 65th floor Rainbow Room when the explosion ripped through the 20th floor.
The blast in the nearly unoccupied 50-story GM Tower was on the 20th floor.
Conrad calls this "the opener of the next generation."
Weathermen forecast satisfactory conditions at launch time despite a cold front expected to move through central Florida Thursday. The prediction is for partly cloudy skies, moderate northerly winds and a temperature of around 60 degrees.
Mission plans call for the astronauts to orbit the earth once after blastoff, and on their second orbit to fire the Saturn's third stage
engine a second time to put them on course to the moon.
Conrad, the 39-year-old veteran of two Gemini spaceflights, and Bean, the youngest of the trio at 37, should land on the moon at 1:53 a.m. EST Nov. 19, for a 32-hour stay that will include two walks on the lunar surface.
They head home Nov. 21 for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean Nov. 24.
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