Originally Posted by
Kiltrash
Given the flight management and computational power has improved so much in the 'old' days the craft would splash down somewhere in the Pacific,.......
In the early days the recovery force pretty much parked on the aim point on the basis that the spacecraft must miss.
So Apollo 8 came as a shock and frightened a few when during the final.stages of descent it directly overflew the carrier and ended up splashing down maybe 3 miles away....all in the dark.
This promptly led to a memo to those concerned from one of the senior operations managers at NASA (Bill Tindall) entitled:
"Let's move the recovery force a little"
They did.