Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

It was not quite 4:00 A.M. on December 24, 1968. In the viewing room, a hundred people were packed into a space meant for seventy-four. One of them was Robert Sherrod, a well-known journalist who had been covering the space program after a colorful career as a war and foreign correspondent that had begun before World War II. “I looked up at the big center screen beyond the banks of flight controllers’ consoles,” he wrote later. “Suddenly the familiar map of the earth vanished from the big plastic screen, and in its stead a map of the moon appeared. The effect was overwhelming. I can recall a few similar heart-stoppers in a lifetime of looking and listening—the view of Angkor Wat’s timeless, brooding temples by moonlight, hearing Giulietta Simionato leading the Anvil Chorus at the Met, seeing for the first time the coast of Asia from a bomber after more than three years and many blood-drenched battles across the wide Pacific. None of these equaled the shock of seeing that illuminated map on the screen.”