When looking back on the history of the Apollo program, everyone naturally harkens back to Apollo 11, the first mission to land a man on the moon. That mission will forever be the greatest achievement in the history of space travel and perhaps human history. However close behind that achievement is the mission of Apollo 8, the first time mankind left the confines of Earth orbit and ventured into deep space and to another world. It’s easy to forget the missions that preceded the iconic moment when Neil Armstrong first stepped out onto the lunar surface and uttered his famous phrase and forever etched it in the history books. However Apollo 8’s had its iconic memento with its Earth Rise image taken by Bill Anders.
Apollo 8 wasn’t supposed to go to the moon, as it was originally planned as a low Earth orbit test mission. But the Soviet Union’s Zond 5 lunar orbiter, launched in September of 1968, containing turtles, wine flies, meal worms, plants, seeds, bacteria, other living matter and a 175 cm tall, 70 kg mannequin, prompted NASA to turn Apollo 8 into a mission to reach lunar orbit and return to the Earth safely. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before, and it was certainly a gutsy move on NASA’s part to try and upstage the Soviets in the Space Race. Now 40 years later, NASA is celebrating this mission with a short documentary film with original footage and current interviews with the three surviving crew members.
People tend to forget how crazy these men were in their work on the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. They were real heros in that they were testing hardware that had never been used before and had only recently been dreamt up by engineers bent on fulfilling the vow given by President Kennedy (2) in 1961 to put a man on the moon before the decade was out. Many men died in this pursuit, their deaths leaving vacancies in a rotation where other men eagerly hoped to fill their spots in hopes of being selected as the first man to walk on the moon. During these missions, many of them were not aware of the meaning of what they were attempting to do. But in recent years, the 12 men who were lucky enough to walk on the moon, and the additional men who flew into space to prepare for those landings, have become much more philosophical in their views on what they did and have been more willing to give interviews and share their thoughts and memories of those historic flights.
I strongly recommend Andrew Chaikin’s book “A Man On the Moon“, a history of the moon program and interviews with the 12 men who walked on the moon. And by the way, Neil Armstrong did not utter the phrase, “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky!“
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