Apollo 7
Apollo 8 was probably the most daring mission (50 years ago this coming Christmas).
Not only did they push for the moon, but they actually went into moon orbit without the safety net of a lunar module with its back-up engine they could use in case of trouble.
That lunar module sure came in handy with Apollo 13.
Not only did they push for the moon, but they actually went into moon orbit without the safety net of a lunar module with its back-up engine they could use in case of trouble.
That lunar module sure came in handy with Apollo 13.
Thread Starter
That lunar module sure came in handy with Apollo 13.
Apollo 8 was probably the most daring mission (50 years ago this coming Christmas).
Not only did they push for the moon, but they actually went into moon orbit without the safety net of a lunar module with its back-up engine they could use in case of trouble.
That lunar module sure came in handy with Apollo 13.
Not only did they push for the moon, but they actually went into moon orbit without the safety net of a lunar module with its back-up engine they could use in case of trouble.
That lunar module sure came in handy with Apollo 13.
Alan Shepard, Frank Borman and Neil Armstrong on the US side are those that will always have my highest respect.
About a month ago, I read a fascinating book — “ROCKET MEN: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon” by Robert Kurson — written to commemorate 50 years since Apollo 8 and published earlier this year. Amazingly, all three of the Apollo 8 astronauts and their wives are still alive, although Frank Borman's wife is suffering from alzheimer's. And even more amazing, two of the astronauts still hold current PPLs.
I was 14 years old (six weeks short of my 15th birthday) when the Apollo 8 mission was launched and I can still vividly remember it. I grew up as a kid following the manned spaceflight missions (I can still remember the first cosmonaut to launch into space) and the Apollo 8 mission was the one which really got everybody's attention. When the mission was publicly announced, only a few short months before it happened, my high school physics teacher devoted an entire lesson to the actual physics of how it was most likely going to happen, including the way the moon's gravity could be used to slingshot the space capsule back towards earth if for some reason they didn't carry out a rocket burn to put themselves into moon orbit. The following year, the same physics teacher devoted another entire lesson to the mission, now that it was common knowlege about the actual details of how they did it. And although most of the moon orbits occured on Christmas Eve, in New Zealand it was Christmas Day and I can still clearly remember the strange feeling of wonderment at the fact that as we were sitting down to our Christmas Dinner, humans were way out there in space orbiting the moon. While the Apollo 11 mission several months later was a huge event it was Apollo 8 which really pushed the boundaries. In Robert Kurson's book, he writes about how the astronauts admitted to him during interviews while researching the book that they knew there was a possibility of not coming back if anything went wrong with the rocket engine, even though they put it to the back of their minds at the time.
I was 14 years old (six weeks short of my 15th birthday) when the Apollo 8 mission was launched and I can still vividly remember it. I grew up as a kid following the manned spaceflight missions (I can still remember the first cosmonaut to launch into space) and the Apollo 8 mission was the one which really got everybody's attention. When the mission was publicly announced, only a few short months before it happened, my high school physics teacher devoted an entire lesson to the actual physics of how it was most likely going to happen, including the way the moon's gravity could be used to slingshot the space capsule back towards earth if for some reason they didn't carry out a rocket burn to put themselves into moon orbit. The following year, the same physics teacher devoted another entire lesson to the mission, now that it was common knowlege about the actual details of how they did it. And although most of the moon orbits occured on Christmas Eve, in New Zealand it was Christmas Day and I can still clearly remember the strange feeling of wonderment at the fact that as we were sitting down to our Christmas Dinner, humans were way out there in space orbiting the moon. While the Apollo 11 mission several months later was a huge event it was Apollo 8 which really pushed the boundaries. In Robert Kurson's book, he writes about how the astronauts admitted to him during interviews while researching the book that they knew there was a possibility of not coming back if anything went wrong with the rocket engine, even though they put it to the back of their minds at the time.
