by Gideon Marcus

Extra!  Extra!

There's been so much news this week, it's hard to limit this headline to just one subject.  So I shan't, as is my privilege as editor/contributor.

Of course, the week started with a literal bang as a terrorist blew up a lavatory at the U.S. Capitol in the early morning of March 1.  Per a phone call 30 minutes prior from "The Weather Underground", it was done in protest of the recent expansion of the Indochina War to Laos.  Remember Laos?  The bill to fix up the old building may reach $300,000.  While I can appreciate the sentiment, I don't think there is ever an excuse to deface the hallowed halls of the seat of government.  I'm sure that's something we can all agree on.

On the same day, the Secretary of the Interior announced that whaling was officially outlawed in the United States.  A once mighty whaling fleet of more than a hundred vessels is now reduced to a single, three-ship flotilla, operating out of California.  Hurrah for Moby Dick!

There's quite a bit of interesting space news.  NASA announced the prime and backup crews for Apollo 16 mission, scheduled for launch in March 1972 (Apollo 15 is happening in July). The prime crewmen are John W. Young (commander, who was on Apollo 10, Gemini 10, and Gemini 3), Thomas K. Mattingly II (CM pilot, aced out of Apollo 13 by German measles), and Charles M. Duke, Jr. (LM pilot—as back-up on Apollo 13, we heard his voice when he ran CAPCOM).

The backups are all familiar faces: Fred W. Haise, Jr. (Apollo 13), Stuart A. Roosa, and Edgar D. Mitchell (both Apollo 14).  Interestingly, unless any of the Apollo 15 crew gets sick, none of these three will fly another Apollo mission to the Moon; the tradition is that flights come the missions later, and there is no Apollo 18 planned.  Would NASA really let an astronaut or two fly two lunar jaunts in a row?  I guess we'll see.

Apollo 16 is supposed to last about 12 days, with a lunar surface stay time of about 67 hrs; this includes three EVA periods totaling about 20 hrs.  The landing site has not yet been selected.

Speaking of the Moon, the Apollo 14 astronauts left an ion gauge among their experiments for the purpose of measuring the thin Lunar atmosphere.  To the scientists' surprise, it has detected a significant increase over what one would expect from the solar wind background.  Is this evidence that gas is bubbling up from the lunar surface, perhaps liberated by a recent moonquake (confirmed by the two seismometers currently operating on the Moon)?  Or is this some kind of spurious result?  Only time will tell.

And Explorer 35, one of the "Interplanetary Monitoring Platforms" (IMPs) and operating from lunar orbit, has found that there are spots on the Moon's Far Side that are magnetized.  What that signifies is not yet known… but it's interesting!

More news as we have it… now on to the main event: the April 1971 issue of Galaxy!

Cover by Jack Gaughan illustrating Liaison Assignment

Continue reading [March 8, 1971] Defender of Death (April 1971 Galaxy) →