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She’d seen the endless television coverage of race riots, Vietnam protests, and assassinations, and asked herself, Where is our turning point? Where are we going to find hope?
1968, man.
Doing this would not, as many believed, cause the spacecraft to leave Earth orbit; rather, it would simply change the shape of Apollo 8’s orbit around Earth from a near circle into a highly elongated ellipse, one that would stretch all the way from Earth to the Moon and back.
They didn’t require the velocity needed to escape earth gravity to get to the moon. This is a common misconception.
Earthrise was the most beautiful sight Borman had ever seen, the only color visible in all the cosmos. The planet just hung there, a jewel on black velvet, and it struck him that everything he loved—Susan, the boys, his parents, his friends, his country—was on that tiny sphere, a brilliant blue and white interruption in a never-ending darkness, the only place he or anyone else had to call home. Lovell was overwhelmed by
As Apollo 8 came around the limb of the Moon and readied to reconnect with home, it seemed to Anders so strange—the astronauts had come all this way to discover the Moon, and yet here they had discovered the Earth.
“You know,” Anders remarked, “it really isn’t all that…anywhere near as interesting as I thought it was going to be. It’s all beat up.”
NASA made four more manned trips to the Moon after Apollo 13, all of which successfully landed crews on the surface. Collectively, the astronauts on the Apollo missions returned almost 842 pounds of lunar soil and rock, samples that continue to form the bedrock upon which our understanding of the solar system’s origins is based. In all, twelve Americans walked on the Moon between 1969 and 1972. And that was it. Since Apollo 17, humankind has never returned.
For Chris Kraft, it was simple: “It took more courage to make the decision to do Apollo 8 than anything we ever did in the space program.”
