The Astronauts Who Orbited The Moon On Christmas | Apollo 8

if i were to say my fellow citizens that we shall send to the moon 240 000 miles away a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall made of new metal alloys some of which have not yet been invented on an untried mission to an unknown celestial body and then return it safely to earth and do all this and do it right and do it first before this dictate is out then we must be bold a mere seven years after president kennedy shocked amazed and motivated all of america with his moon goal three astronauts frank borman william anders and james lovell actually visited the moon these space pioneers did so on the shoulders of over 400 000 american workers who built and perfected space technology so that all of america and the rest of the world for that matter could vicariously spend christmas 1968 at the moon [Music] kennedy said it well when he decided that we were going to do it he called it the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked and it was all of that you know i mean like i don't think we realized at the time you know how absurd and ridiculous it was i mean it was a crazy goal i mean like it was a lunatic thing to do and i think all the people that were involved with doing it knew it was a lunatic thing to do at the time he made the speech we couldn't do orbit determination from a short arc solution of radar from bermuda we hadn't flown john glenn yet thought he was crazy i thought he'd lost his mind i've said that publicly a number of times it was an almost unimaginable challenge in terms of its scope and his difficulty and i wondered how anybody could make such such a bold decision at the time and it was it was a major piece of work in front of us and the space theater a new one to people was begun to be seen as an area of competition between the major powers that is the united states and soviet union and in that context i think there was a great deal of fear that the the soviet union had a big head start on us the soviet competition i think was a great great motivation for the american space program and although as a part of that program i was not aware of the details of the soviet program and i didn't understand exactly where they were all the time none of us did we all knew they were very competent they were very motivated and that the resources of that country were totally dedicated to uh to accomplishing the goal which which was to beat us to the moon so it was a very exciting kind of rewarding uh energetic i mean we have electricity in the air kind of a time all against the background of this threat from the soviet union the sense of competition the sense of never knowing where they were in their program and when they were going to spring a surprise on us that would leave us in effect behind in this competition that we're engaged in i remember looking at film of launches frankly most of which seemed to end up a disaster rather than a successful launching space so we had an environment where the technology base was beginning to be there but was very tenuous nasa and all of america however were soon dealt a devastating blow in the space race to the moon during a ground test in january 1967 the first apollo capsules apollo 1 exploded in flames killing its three astronauts gus grissom ed white and roger chaffee nasa personnel gutted the remaining apollo capsules and were alarmed to find more than 1 000 critical faults in wiring and hatch construction it was tragic i was sitting there directing the test and to have this happen it took us totally the sense of shock and but our job was to recover the astronauts had always said you're going to lose people don't stop keep moving because it's what we want and that's what we did you know after apollo 1 they lost three people in apollo 1. they still fixed it and they were flying to the moon a year and a half later you know to where like they didn't stop in those days you know i mean they had a problem they said okay fix it get on with it so a redesign of the hatch to be an outward opening hatch and the total elimination of consumables inside that ship were the two big design changes that were made after the fire gorman was the guy that was in the middle of the apollo fire investigation he was the guy that drove the whole thing he was the guy that booted north america and his butt when they needed to be booted and he became the very highly respected astronaut not only by his peers but by us on top of that borman was probably the most trusted most deserving most uh accomplished astronaut of the group as a direct result of frank borman's involvement in the apollo 1 fire investigation he was chosen to command the first manned mission using the huge and complex saturn v rocket a mission that was originally designed to test all of the systems in earth orbit however in the summer of 1968 very disturbing news came regarding the soviet flight of an unmanned zoned space probe which circled the moon western intelligence agencies identified this probe as potentially being refitted to include at least two cosmonauts the soviets soon followed this success with the manned soyuz three mission to earth orbit in october then in november another zond probe made yet another round trip to the moon the world watched and waited for an anticipated soviet attempt to send a cosmonaut to the moon faced with the prospect of the soviets reaching the moon with a manned mission first and scoring a major propaganda coup in the process nasa made the bold decision to send apollo 8 into lunar orbit on christmas eve and beat the russians to the moon at any cost apollo 8 had its mission changed in august when nasa learned that their soviets were planning a lunar flyby before the end of 1968 and so we were abruptly changed from a earth orbital mission which was simply a systems checkout mission and uh after that mission had been changed of course we worked very very diligently to get our adjustment ready and to get our training done to so that we could apply the the mission when we decided to do apollo or start to plan paulo 8 we only allowed three or four guys in our whole organization to know what we were doing because we did not want the russians to know what we were doing i mean we were all running man seven days a week all our waking hours and and and i'm hiring people [ __ ] i'm hiring people like crazy into my organization everybody else is doing the same thing the original apollo 8 crew was bill anders mike collins and myself and then mike had a bone spur in his neck and he had to have it operated on and so jim lovell moved up to take to take mike's position the apollo 8 commander frank bormann was a veteran astronaut who had previously spent 14 days as commander of gemini 7 with james lovell lovell named apollo 8 pilot had not only flown with borman on gemini 7 but also flew on board gemini 12. the only rookie on board was co-pilot william anders we were in training in the initial parts of training but the jim was a was the backup crew and he was familiar with the apollo so it really wasn't that big a deal mike was pretty upset about it but it wasn't i mean from a technical standpoint that we all could do the job i remember one of the questions i got asked by the press uh over and over again they'd always say well are these the best astronauts you've ever had flying how do they compare with the guys that went before and i would always answer that saying they're the best we've ever flown because they've learned from all of the mistakes of everybody else they've learned from the experiences from everybody else and therefore they are bound to be the best trained the best we've ever flown and i think that is a true statement they had an amazing capability of learning from each other i thought that was fabulous in the process of training we crashed many times into the moon other times we'd get very nervous about what was happening with the guidance system and we'd abort unnecessarily uh to the point where we really started losing confidence in our own abilities controllers and our ability as a team the crew on some occasions would want to go off and train by themselves we'd want to go off and train by themselves so so for about a month period right in the middle of the training it got really dicey down here everybody gooped the first time he did it and he started giving us all his [ __ ] about i didn't know this was going to happen so i did this and i said i stopped the whole goddamn thing i went in got him offline i said look i want any [ __ ] from you anymore well if you make a mistake you say you made a mistake if you didn't that's fine you listen to what we're saying we're going to listen to what you're saying after this thing is over you tell us what you did right and you tell us what you did wrong and you tell us what you didn't like about what we did and we're going to tell you what we didn't like about what you did chris was very tough on us when we screwed something up and yet it was always done in a way where it was fatherly in the sense that he was trying to get us to grow up and and uh and learn something from whatever it is we had quite done right in a simulation or whatever and it was a very tough set of standards i mean if people didn't make it they didn't play they weren't in the control center and then i think we did our homework we came back together we convinced ourselves individually that we could do it and collectively that we could do it all of a sudden about one month prior to the time that we went for it uh things started coming together the team started sounding good we started winning more of the training cases we'd start beating our instructors at this process of training these people really had to work like crazy you know around the clock day after day it was very destructive to family relationships you know i mean it was hard on on parent-child relationships i mean like i know some astronaut kids that you know really didn't see much of their dads back in those days so uh yeah i mean like it was hard on marriages it was hard on family but i did make a point of meeting with the crew chief crew leader frank borman once or twice while we're preparing the bird to make sure there was nothing he was worried about the way we conducted the business the tests were all in the open we'd have briefings after the tests where the crew was involved to make sure there was everything was understood everything that had gone wrong was going to be corrected so in that way we developed you might say a confidence which we knew we were doing what we had to do and the crew was satisfied that it was being done i think all the people in the program were aware that there was a a danger involved but i think we also you know had spent so much time in the factories and we had so much confidence of people that were involved in the program that uh we i honestly felt that the odds were very good that the fights would be successful so i i really just this i think the thing that probably i felt was the most dangerous was the launch because of the uncertainties of rockets the huge saturn v rocket was over 350 feet tall and 33 feet in diameter at its base with over three and a half million parts it was by far the greatest piece of man-made machinery ever built in human history the saturn v was the only rocket powerful enough to make it to the moon well i must confess when i first saw the saturn v in a sort of a mock-up i wondered is this thing going to fly but i must confess the thing we're going to harness this thing it's going to do what we want it to do we knew we had our job cut out for us we're using liquid hydrogen as a propellant along with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen is just much harder to handle than liquid oxygen it's uh of course it's it'll burn it'll explode on you it'll you don't turn your back on it the rocket itself was almost like 40 stories tall you know and and that's more than the statue of liberty i think it's on a par with the washington monument i'm not sure and it's free and every inch of it is full of exploding fuel you know i mean it's equivalent to sitting on top of an h-bomb or an a-bomber i mean or enough of a bomb to to do where you don't care what kind of bomb it is i mean you're gone if it doesn't work right it would take normally three months to check out the spacecraft from the time it arrived in florida until we were ready to launch with about a three month interval and in that period of time our procedure called for us to check every switch every wire every component we had to make certain it would work when it was supposed to work make certain there was no crosstalk between wires and that is what gave us the confidence to finally say yes it's ready to fly i really did not believe that nasa would find so few problems in the systems that we would be able to launch that was my overriding concern because you know they were going to be extremely picky about looking at all the systems they all work every part in it was built by the low bidder you know so i mean when you're sitting on top of the thing i mean like you you know better than anybody else how complicated it is how many moving parts there are in it you know i mean the wiring in the thing could wire a small city you know to where it's a very complicated very powerful machine and uh and those guys knew it better than than we could you know i mean and there was nothing they could do about it the consoles in the launch control room were tied to a specific part of the booster spacecraft and each one was monitoring a part there was about 350 people on consoles who were monitoring the activities and if anyone saw something he didn't like it was his responsibility he called no go so you went down that way and that's what gave you the confidence that this whole thing is moving right because there's no way one person could keep all those things in his mind but each one going through a set of checks going through a set of procedures would look at the pressures look at the amounts of oxygen flowing or the amount of hydrogen flowing look at the battery voltage levels look at certain valves that you have to open and close and that's what gave you the confidence that the whole bird the entire activity was going correctly you can call it naivete or what i just never doubted that we were going to make it to the moon the only question that i had was where they were going to get their head of the russians and that was the to me that was the 64 question [Music] the actual launch is the portion of the flight where they have the least control i mean they're basically just passengers i mean two are like here are these guys that have spent all their lives learning how to fly learning to be pilots be at the controls and during launch there's really very little they can do except for just strap in and write it you know so uh it was very nervous making for them i mean like their the heart rates that they monitored in mission control i mean like almost invariably showed higher heart rates during launch than in any other portion of the flight your thoughts we're on the job at hand you weren't thinking broader things you weren't thinking who's looking or anything of that nature that's superfluous you think of the job at hand the counting down of the procedures the counting down of the steps of the test the things that are going on the results that have got to come out and that's the way you you get through it you could be concerned that something would go wrong but if something went wrong you were unprepared to take other steps fear as such was overcome by procedures by knowing what you had to do knowing that if there was something wrong you could take alternate steps and always with the idea in mind that you wanted to keep that crew [Music] seconds safely counting go t minus 20 seconds and counting guidance internal 15 14 13 12 11 10 retro engines go [Music] roger that standby for mode one bravo on the way up on the booster that's when the old red weight started to go down to the bottom of my stomach and i realized that perhaps there was something serious here follow houston you're right smack dab on the trajectory your iu's doing a beautiful job [Music] now we hear you loud and clear okay the first stage was very smooth and this one is smoother [Music] apollo 8 houston your trajectory and guidance are go over thank you michael yeah you're looking real good right [Music] the staging on uh on any of the vehicles that i've do either of the vehicles that i flew was very traumatic you're thrown against the straps and then thrown back again it was a pretty traumatic event on the saturn of course when the first stage shuts off you get the the lack of acceleration and then the bang is the uh there's the pyrotechnics to separate the stages and then the thrust again as the second stage kicks in now during the course of the mission the flight director is the quarterback of the team he's the guy calling the signals so the flight director has a a basic rule in this mission rules the strategy book we call there is one basic rule that talks about the flight director and it says the flight director may take any action he believes necessary for crew safety and mission success that is the principal rule that dictates the flight director's responsibility hollow control houston two hours 25 minutes ground the last time it will be during this past that we will have the uh translator injection burn capcom or gopher rudyard guys i've got the word you wanted to hear you are go for tli your go for the moon [Music] ignition and the thrust is okay booster says and borman says we've got seco cut off was right on the second there were a lot of naysayers as i recall we were told that going through the van allen belt will be fried i think even dr van ellen suggested that the radiation there would be very rare so we wore dosimeters and i don't think they even blipped there just were a lot of people that were supposed experts in their field that cast all kinds of doubt about not just apollo 8 but the lunar landing and everything else going to the moon wasn't the important part that's just the first place you can stop what really matters about apollo is those were the first people to leave the earth to go anywhere you know in the next 500 years if we don't destroy ourselves who knows where we'll go you know i mean there's a whole universe out there waiting for us but that was the first time human beings left the earth give us clues to what it looks like from way up there all right i can see the entire earth now out of the center window i can see florida cuba central america the whole northern half of central america in fact all the way down through argentina and down through chile picked a good day for it they weren't looking at the moon on the way out there they were looking back over their shoulder at home as it got smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and if you go around and you talk to them all they'll talk to you about the earth more than the moon more than anything else i mean they'll talk poetry about what the earth looks like as you're getting ten thousand miles and twenty thousand miles and fifty thousand miles and a hundred thousand miles and it get in and everything you've ever known you know i mean like the whole history of the human race is getting to the point where you can cover it up with your thumb and that's a very powerful psychological force this transmission is coming to you approximately halfway between the moon and the earth we've been 31 hours about 20 minutes into flight we have about less than 40 hours left to go to the bus the earth became a personality and a character and a living thing for all of these men instead just this abstract place where we all live and uh and that was great you know i mean i think that to me validates the adventure or the journey [Music] all 000 right out in space mike what i keep imagining is if i'm a lonely traveler from another planet what do i think about the earth from this altitude whether i think it'd be inhabited or not don't see anybody waving you know what you're saying well i'm just kind of curious whether i would land on the blue or the brown part of the earth you better hope he landed the blue part going to the moon we hardly saw the moon i don't believe we ever saw the moon we fired the service module engine and complete back darkness and at the instant one of the overriding parameters that that would tell you whether you were on course or not was to look down and see the lunar sunrise and at the instant we were supposed to see it there it was you know i sound like a man be pain but i have enormous respect for the people that as i understand the people that programmed that trajectory were the average age was 29 years old i was the fourth flight director that was named uh and i was 27 at the time and all my colleagues in the control center were a year or two less than that i mean most of them were 25 at the time right out of college there were a number of key leaders for us who provided the the officer corps if you will and the rest of us were the grunts uh and loved it i mean we loved our officer car we loved the work that we were doing and uh we just threw ourselves into it we could not imagine not being successful that was what's so wonderful about apollo 8 we were able through an empirical process to fly the exact orbit on apollo 8 draw a straight line through the points of orbit prediction and man we can nail exactly where we want to be jim uh just been looking at your your marks with respect to uh accuracy and they figure they're within a couple thousandths of a degree of the theoretical optimum we've got it we've got it apollo 8 now in in lunar orbit there's a chair in the this room uh this is apollo control houston uh switching now to the voice of jim level by 60.5 good to hear your voice okay uh houston the moon is essentially gray no color looks like plaster of ferris or a sort of a grayish beach sand hit by meteorites or projectiles of some sort one ingredient is quite a huge crater it's got a central cone to it the walls of the crater are terraced uh about six or seven different terraces on the way down bill how would you describe the color of the moon from here [Applause] a lot i think that it did expand our awareness and our understanding of who we are and our role in the universe i mean like what is this beautiful blue-green globe have to do with all the rest of it when you're there and thinking back particularly going around the moon looking back at the earth and everything that you hold dear is back on earth it's a nostalgic moment there's just no question about it it was a spiritual journey you know i mean like that's supposed to be true of every big journey of our life is supposed to be a spiritual journey or there's supposed to be a spiritual component of the physical journey and it was equally true for those men it was true of that journey the biggest journey humans have ever taken also had a powerful spiritual component there was a a sense that uh we were a long way from people that we really loved and cared about and uh i suspect it would have been that way in any event but i i i know that for me the feeling was magnified because it was around christmas on the eve of christmas as the eyes of the world followed apollo 8 across the moonscape the astronauts invoked another older voice reading in turn the first 10 verses of genesis the story of creation we are now approaching lunar sunrise and for all the people back on earth the crew of apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you in the beginning god created the heaven and the earth and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the spirit of god moved upon the face of the waters and god said let there be light and there was light and god saw the light they was good and god divided the light from the darkness [Applause] and god called the light day and the darkness he called night and the evening and the morning was the first day and god said let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters let it divide the waters from the waters and god made the from it and divided the waters which were under the permanent the waters which were both the permanent and it was so and god called the room in heaven in the evening and the morning was the second day [Music] god's dad left the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear and it was so and god called the dry land earth and the gathering together of the waters called saw that it was good and from the crew of apollo 8 we close with good night good luck a merry christmas and god bless all of you all of you on the good earth it's the sort of situation where your mind is naturally going to go off in spiritual directions i mean and if you're a spiritual christian you know i mean they're going to go off in christian direction you know if you'd have put a you know a hindu or a buddhist or a devout muslim up there you know i mean like david would have been inclined to spiritual thoughts too i would think [Music] [Applause] give us the knowledge that we may continue to pray with understanding hearts and show us what each one of us can do to set forth the coming of the day of universal peace amen we flew around the the earth the moon 10 times took pictures of the potential landing sites the most impressive view from the moon when the moon at all but the earth the earth was so remarkable here and then we started home the most tense part of the mission i think was re-lighting the service module engine to get us out of lunar orbit if that hadn't happened i'd still be circling the moon there's nothing anybody could have done for us then though if it didn't work it didn't work hey baby eight seven six five three two one houston [Applause] [Music] [Applause] rogerson which is delicious turkey and gravy cranberry sauce [Music] [Music] i think i must have the feeling that the travelers and the old feelings used to have you're going on a very long void you're away from home now we're headed back this whole concept of whole earth that's a cliche that we all throw around now but i mean that's where it came from these were the first humans to actually see the whole earth they took the first photographs of the whole earth you know i mean like they really did appreciate the whole earth before any of the rest of us and they brought that feeling back with them and i think it is slowly communicated out to the rest of us but that's the the biggest lesson i think i learned from talking to them is how important leaving the earth was to them and then of course coming back to it okay that just leaves uri how about uh anything exciting happened today real quiet down here everybody's smiling everything's pretty pretty calm like it should be on christmas very good as well says we're in a period of relaxed vigilance very good we'll relax you'll be vigilant [Music] the ground called up and said we've been tracking you on radar and you guys are really hauling the mail well you know to make a re-entry here on the earth you have to come into a two degree pie shaped wedge if you come in too shallow you skip out like skipping a stone on water if you come in too steep you're a fire meteor for a few brief seconds over the night sky we were coming in we hoped into that pie shaped wedge this was a first re-entry from uh 25 000 miles an hour or a hyper velocity reentry we didn't have retro rockets to slow us up we depended upon the atmospheric drag and that was an area that i was as a as the mission commander was really more involved than any other part of it and that was the area that i thought could have been the showstopper you hit the atmosphere at a pretty good speed i mean like you know essentially escape velocity coming back too so i mean it's 26 28 000 miles an hour somewhere in there and when you hit it that speed it's just like a meteor and you ionize the gases around you to where you're cut off from radio communication and normally it's about three minutes i mean and they will know as you're coming in based on your trajectory exactly how long it should be ken mattingly just put in a call and just frankly labeled it a radio check he's got no responses yet ken mattingly puts in a another call i don't think that i would be here today if that maneuver wasn't successful it was and of course the landing was successful i was in the mission control center in houston i had flown from florida to houston for that and it was like a dream come true you you saw the ship come in you knew you could catch it long range and you saw the chutes open up and you saw it touched down in the ocean and it was just a dream come true but it took a lot of hard work to do it personally when you look at the amount involved and the complexity involved i also believed that there was a good lord helping us it would be a miracle i think we could have done it without an assist from the good lord my feeling regarding the nasa team is one of enormous respect respect for their technical competence respect for their integrity respect for their management skills and respect for their dedication this was a unique experience and as long as i live i'll always think that the the most uh fortunate thing that ever happened to frank gorman was be able to be a part of that team i think it was a unique time in history we had we had everything going for us including the support of the american people if you look at a lot of the hype you see in tv and movies we they see us celebrating virtually every event in the mission that is not the case we celebrate only when the crew is safely in apollo on board the deck of the carrier so the key thing is this business that we're in is absolutely intolerant of carelessness neglect incapacity there's a lot of surprises there's a high risk there's nothing conservative about the business that we're in basically we hold back until we are absolutely sure that our job is done then we will sit back and we'll celebrate now we brought the flags out in this room and i think that sort of said hey thank god for america and thank god for this country that has let us work in such a marvelous program we were considered a bunch of hot shots we were considered arrogant i used to come back from washington and tell my whole organization at the johnson space center i said people in washington think we're arrogant i said the day i come back from washington they don't think i'm arrogant that's the day i'm leaving well done young man outstanding then we passed around cigars in this thing here and this is one we we could smoke in the controls and people would do this and we'd light up the cigars and that was hey our thanks to the team then we met with the other crews and the program managers we opened the doors to this room and these hundreds of people would come into the room all of whom had one little piece of this mission but without whom we couldn't have done this mission there was a just a feeling of togetherness bond unity accomplishment hollow eight was the most important flight of apollo by far no comparison apollo 8 was a was a major leap forward major leap forward of anything we had planned to do and being able to do that in the time span that we did it with the guts of the management was totally totally decent but the most significant step in apollo those of us on the flight team i think felt like we passed through the threshold of of knowing we were going to get to the moon when we did apollo 8. we were able to support a decision to go to the moon on the second man flight and i think it was the turning point from then on it was downhill for us we had a lot of things to do but it was downhill and we knew we were going to make it as a direct result of the success of the apollo 8 mission the final preparations for an actual moon landing became possible a feat that later became reality on july 20th 1969 when neil armstrong and buzz aldrin of apollo 11 set foot on the lunar [Music] great surface forward drifting to the right a little 30 seconds contact light okay engine stop we copy you down eagle uh tranquility base here the eagle has landed okay neal we can see you coming down the ladder now i'm gonna step off the laminate we brought back a belief in american craftsmanship at this period of time because it was an american flag that was planted in the moon it was american craftsmanship that got there uh we brought back a sense of wonder and mystery it was probably one of the expansionist periods for science and technology kids wanted to become astronauts everybody wanted to see them they brought back this resurgence this interest this vitality that has always been american americans want to be first and when you stop to think about it i i still marvel at the fact that here was the first man saturn v the first time to the moon so many firsts in this thing and uh it didn't work it's a tribute to the fact that this team that put this thing together it's just enormously confident and i i can't tell you anything about the apollo 8 mission it was an anomaly it just always frank borman stayed with nasa up through apollo 11 then retired in 1970 and is currently on the board of directors of several aerospace and scientific corporations william anders also retired from nasa in 1970 and now runs the anders foundation a philanthropic organization james lovell was later assigned as the commander of the ill-fated apollo 13 mission where an explosion on the way to the moon caused an abort of the mission lovell currently writes and lectures on its space experiences and the future of humanity in space we don't want to go back to the moon until it's easy to go back to the moon it was very risky very difficult very expensive to go to the moon the way we did in apollo and i think the next time we go we want it to be not as risky we want it to be not as costly we want it to be the risk to be very very limited in terms of safety we want to be able to stay there a long time to take advantage of the people we send because i'm sure we'll send a bunch of scientists as well as astronauts there [Music] i don't see exploring space as ignoring earthly problems so much as it's a different way to grow you know we have to grow our way out of our problems and that's a very serious way to grow i hope and believe that there should be someday a lunar colony much as we have a scientific colony in antarctica because i think mankind's knowledge will be enhanced and their understanding of of our total environment will be enhanced but uh from the romantic standard you know i think it's going to be tough i think it's going to be a grueling missions i think being up there manning those stations will be hard work and when i look at it i don't look at that romance at all i just i just see something that needs to be done and i think the next few years will be spent in the hopefully in this permanent space station learning really how to use and adapt to the the space environment i then believe that we will uh without question someday put people on mars and when that day comes the mission's success will owe much to the several hundred thousand plus workers laboring behind the scenes to make a mars landing possible standing on the shoulders of those workers these future space explorers will once again be pioneering the new space frontier and beyond just as their predecessors did on apollo 8.

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Keywords: American history, Astronauts reading, Christmas Eve, Christmas messages from space, Christmas spirit, Earth from space, Human exploration, Inspiring space stories, Little Dot Studios, Lunar exploration, Lunar module, Memoirs of Apollo, NASA's golden era, Space communication, Space images, Space mission objectives, Space photography, Space travel memorabilia, Space visuals, Spark, Spark documentaries

Id: d4tGpoY0axU

Length: 49min 32sec (2972 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020