Apollo 8

During all the years of the Cold War, it was feared the Soviet Union had captured the Glock and would turn its power against the U.S. and its allies.

These spheres weren't laid until 1968 when Apollo 8 published it in the Aristarchus Crater, photographed it in the Aristarchus Crater.

The question became how it was smuggled out of Germany.

It still remains a mystery to this day.

Seventy hours later, they entered lunar orbit, becoming the first humans to visit another world.

The test of the lunar module, originally scheduled for Apollo 8, was pushed to Apollo 9, flown in Earth orbit by James McDivitt, David Scott, and Russell Rusty Schweickart between March 3 and 13, 1969.

All the pieces came together on May 18, 1969, when Thomas Stafford, Gene Cernan, and John Young blasted off the launch pad.

As a full dress rehearsal, Apollo 10 saw the astronauts perform every step of the Apollo mission profile short of actually landing on the moon.

Three and a half hours later, with nearly 20% of the world's population watching live on television, Mission Commander Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder of the Lem descent stage, stepped onto the lunar surface, and spoke the immortal words, "'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.'" He was soon joined by Lunar Module Pilot Edwin Buzz Aldrin, and the two set about the business of collecting geological samples, setting up experiments, planting the American flag, and the dozens of other tasks that they'd been assigned.

Due to the precarious nature of their pioneering mission, Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the lunar surface for only 2 hours 21 minutes and 40 seconds before climbing back onto the ELM, lifting off and rejoining Command Module Pilot Michael Collins back in lunar orbit.

the trio then began their journey back to earth splashing down in the pacific ocean on july the 24th and returning home to a hero's welcome and if for some reason you don't believe we actually landed on the moon or know someone who does why not check out our previous video how do we actually know we landed on the moon so now that nasa had proven it could land men on the moon and return them safely to the earth the apollo program entered a new phase focused on scientific exploration The various Apollo mission profiles were designated by a letter, with the unmanned Apollo 4, 5, and 6 missions being A and B type missions, Apollo 7 was a C mission, Apollo 8 a C Prime mission, Apollo 9 a D mission, Apollo 10 an F mission, and Apollo 11 a G mission.

An E-type mission, in which the Apollo CSM and LEM would be tested in medium Earth orbit, was originally planned but scrapped in favour of the more ambitious F-type mission of Apollo 10.

and it's just the mores and everything else it just crunched there's something about the um the zeitgeist acknowledging that the calendars clicked over

well this is it for me and again there's almost like a what was the 1960s equivalent of millennial anxiety so that the decade is coming to a close and the empire is coming to a close and britain as we understand it is sort of transforming into something lesser whilst the Americans are sending man to the moon in fact it's something like three weeks after this Apollo 8 lands on the moon and takes that photograph of the earth from the moon surf from the lunar surface um and you know obviously six months after that they actually land Apollo 11 on the moon and here's Britain um a very sort of gentile, comic, but also quite ludicrously sinister version of it as well, has been packaged up for an American audience where the British charm is the product, right? And they're kind of trading on those past...

eccentricities as the uh the commodity that they're trading where as i say the americans are kind of the new superpower and there's that sort of sense of transition i spoke about the east of sewers before um but you know this is this is inherent i think into this episode in this episode the way that the ways of the past the old british music hall tradition is coming to a close being you know demolished in favor of a project cupid it is the And these terrible old hams who are losing their homes, losing their livelihoods, losing their culture, they can't accept that.

And they would rather destroy the future than they would accept that the past is passing.

So anyway, I got this catalog from one of our Mars mission members, and in going through it, I noticed something peculiar from Apollo 10.

In these catalogs that have been published on every mission, going back now to Apollo 8, what NASA has done in consonance with the Charter is to publish voluminous amounts of data.

You know, it's almost like one of those old Johnny Carson routines.

Everything you ever wanted to know about an Apollo mission is contained within these covers.

If you go from upper left to lower right, there's about a half a dozen pictures on each page, and you would have overexposed, blank, underexplosed, Okay, underexposed, blank, blank, overexposed.

So-so, underexposed, blank, blank, blank, overexposed.

And I began to compare that mission with the previous catalog from Apollo 8, where, with the exception of a couple three frames, every photograph was perfect.

Then I got an Apollo 12 catalog, which contained the data... from the rendezvous and landing near the Surveyor 3 spacecraft by Alan Bean in the Sea of Storms in November of 69, the second lunar landing mission.

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In the previous video, we talked about the development of the legendary Apollo program.

We discussed some of the innovations that were required to make it possible, reflected on the tragedy of the Apollo 1 fire, and then explored some of the uncrewed missions and test flights that got NASA back on its feet and ready to start sending humans back into space in the year 1968.

The Apollo 1 fire really shook NASA to its core and forced a near-complete redesign of many internal systems aboard the Apollo command module.

NASA and the main spacecraft contractor, North American Aviation, decided not to commit any Block 1 command modules to human flight and accelerated the development of the Block 2.

This saw a whole host of improvements, from the wiring to the now outward opening hatch to the pressurization system that now used a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen on the ground and slowly purged the nitrogen during ascent, ultimately settling on a much lower pressure of pure oxygen atmosphere for the duration of the mission in space.

As we discussed, the Apollo 1 fire was the result of a pure oxygen atmosphere at sea level pressure, resulting in catastrophic damage when a spark jumped from exposed wiring to a flammable material inside the spacecraft.

The Block 2 would still use pure oxygen, but at a much lower internal pressure of 5 to 6 psi.

But with the Soviet flight of Zond 5 in September, which propelled a pressurized spacecraft that contained live animals on a flight around the moon and back, it was time to take another huge gamble and send an Apollo crew of three American astronauts on a mission into lunar orbit.

Less than six weeks before launch, the mission of Apollo 8 was revised and made dramatically more ambitious.

Spacecraft commander Frank Borman and command module pilot Jim Lovell, two spaceflight veterans of the Gemini program, together with rookie Bill Anders, would become the first humans to ride the massive Saturn V moon rocket on only its third ever launch and fly a single Apollo command and service module on a mission to the moon.

The plan was to orbit the moon 10 times and then return home.

The decision by NASA to skip several planned missions and fly an occupied spacecraft to the moon reflected the very real fear and uncertainty that existed over the Soviet Union's capabilities, which often weren't matters of public record until after their successful realization.

The particularly dangerous aspect of Apollo 8 had to do with the fact that the lunar module wasn't yet ready to fly.

The CSM and the LEM are two separate vehicles, each with their own life support and propulsion systems.

If something happened to the command and service module on the way to the moon, the astronauts might have been able to use the lunar module's engines to help return to Earth, and use its life support to keep themselves alive.

But what happened after should really tell the story is the fact that the telemetry data, the data that showed exactly where the spaceship was in the sky, was deleted by NASA.

The fact that 1969 technology, if you actually go and listen to the recordings on Apollo 8, It was after Apollo 7, obviously.

You can see, I forget the astronaut, but he plays music while they're in the lunar lander, when they're blasting off.

You can hear the music perfectly, but you can't hear any of the engine from the 7-ton engine that they're sitting on.