Workers spruce up Apollo 16 spaceship for 50th anniversary

The Apollo 16 command module on display at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., whose workers are sprucing up the spacecraft for the 50th anniversary of its April 1972 flight. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, photo credit James E. Scarborough, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 1.0 Generic license.
The Apollo 16 command module on display at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala. Workers are sprucing up the spacecraft for the 50th anniversary of its April 1972 flight. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, photo credit James E. Scarborough, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 1.0 Generic license.
The Apollo 16 command module on display at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., whose workers are sprucing up the spacecraft for the 50th anniversary of its April 1972 flight. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, photo credit James E. Scarborough, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 1.0 Generic license.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) – The Apollo 16 capsule is dusty all these decades after it carried three astronauts to the moon. Cobwebs cling to the spacecraft. Business cards, a pencil, money, a spoon and even a tube of lip balm litter the floor of the giant case that protects the space antique in a museum. The COVID-19 pandemic meant a break in the normal routine of cleaning the ship’s display at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, located near NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. But workers are sprucing up the spacecraft for the 50th anniversary of its April 1972 flight.

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