Acronyms decoded
Translating space-related, retro jargon
The modern era of text shorthand — LOL, IMHO, TFW, WTF and WHY (What Have You) — has nothing on the golden age of acronyms, initialisms and abbreviations that was the Apollo era. Following are some common ones from the late ’60s.
JFK: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States and the one that committed his country to putting a man on the moon before the decade was out. After Apollo 11 an anonymous citizen put a bouquet on his grave with the note: “Mr. President, the Eagle has landed.”
NACA: The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, it was dissolved in 1958 and became NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. But while NASA is pronounced “nah-saw,” NACA is only ever pronounced “En-Ay-Sea-Ay,” not “Nakka.”
LOR: “Ell-Oh-Arr” stands for lunar-orbit rendezvous, by which a spacecraft would fly to the moon and then separate into a lander and an orbiter. The competing plan, never used, was Earth-orbit rendezvous, where you send components of a lunar mission up from the Earth and they join together before going to the moon.
S-IVB: The “Ess-Four-Bee” was the third and topmost stage of the Saturn rocket that took astronauts to the moon. Unlike the other stages, which fired once and then were discarded, this one had to fire once to get the astronauts into Earth orbit, and again for TLI.
TLI: Trans-lunar injection, the rocket-propelled push away from Earth and toward the moon. TFA: Thanks For Asking!
LM: The Lunar Module was once known as the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), but in May 1966 the middle name was dropped because it sounded too jaunty. But the pronunciation remained “Lem.”
LLRV: The “El-El-Arr-Vee” (not “Lurve”) was a lunar landing research vehicle that begat the LLTV or lunar landing training vehicles. Also known as the belching spider, the flying bedstead or the pipe rack, this unwieldy contraption almost killed Neil Armstrong during a flight in 1967. He ejected with less than a second to spare.
1202: OK, not an acronym, but the 1202 program alarm almost caused the Apollo 11 crew to abort their landing, until flight controller Steve Bales told them to go ahead. Thus when Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Richard Nixon, Bales got one too, on behalf of the mission control team.
PPK: Anything unofficial that astronauts wanted to bring to the moon — golf balls, family photos, jewelry, stamps that would be worth a lot for having gone to the moon — went in the “pee-pee-kay” or Personal Preference Kit. It was the carry-on luggage of the Apollo program.
LOS: “Ell-Oh-Ess” means loss of signal, when ionization around a returning spacecraft cut communications with the ground. In the 1980s a network of communications satellites solved the problem; before that, re-entry meant an exciting, nail-biting period of silence.