Book Title: Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, the First Manned Flight to Another World Author: Bob Zimmerman Segment 6: Trans-Lunar Journey: Primitive Tech and a Shrinking Earth
Update: 2025-09-07
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Book Title: Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, the First Manned Flight to Another World Author: Bob Zimmerman
Segment 6: Trans-Lunar Journey: Primitive Tech and a Shrinking Earth
Apollo 8 launched on December 21, 1968, the first day of its six-day window. After testing systems in Earth orbit, Capcom Mike Collins gave the "go" for Trans Lunar Injection (TLI), firing the upper stage engines to propel them towards the moon. The spacecraft's computer systems were primitive, inferior even to a Casio digital watch calculator; ground control dictated long strings of numbers for manual entry. As they left Earth, Jim Lovell described the view as "like being in a tunnel," with Earth shrinking rapidly from 25,000 miles per hour. Crucially, the SPS engine, essential for lunar orbit and return, had no redundancy, making its firing behind the moon a tense moment of Loss of Signal (LOS) for Earth-bound observers.
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