On November 4, Mueller sent a letter to Bob Gilruth urging one long last look. “There are grave risks to the program as a whole, not just to the Apollo 8 mission,” he wrote. He was satisfied that the risks “from a purely technical aspect are probably reasonable and acceptable,” and he recognized that “the greatest single advantage” of flying Apollo 8 to the moon was the way it had galvanized people. “Yet,” Mueller pointed out, “you and I know that if failure comes, the reaction will be that anyone should have known better than to undertake such a trip at this point in time.”
