APOLLO NEARS HALF-WAY MARK

SPACE CENTRE (Houston), May 19 (AP, AFP)—With a seven-second burst of their main engine, the Apollo-10 astronauts today set their final course to the moon—the silvery target they saw for the first time only minutes earlier. “The burn is complete” was the only comment from the spaceship after the burn that increased their speed by 48 feet per second. Apollo-10 was only about an hour short of the half-way point of its quarter million mile trip to the moon. The ground said after the firing: “Beautiful it looked, really good to us from here.” The spaceship, riding nose-to-nose with the lunar landing that will take two of the astronauts within 9.3 miles of the moon surface was in the 27th hour of its flight. It separated from the third stage of the booster rocket, and after turning around docked at 1.36 a.m. (IST-Monday) with the last stage of the carrier rocket. The noses of the space cabin docked with the upper hatch of the lunar excursion module (I.EM), which, in opening up, allowed room to pass from one craft to the other through a tube about one metre wide.