Chasing the Moon episode 2

Chasing the Moon episode 2

Chasing the Moon episode 2: What exactly was it going to take for America to beat the Soviets to the moon? Cold War tensions persisted, as rumours circulated that the Soviets were preparing to send an unmanned spacecraft to the moon. Nasa quickly developed the Gemini program, sending astronauts into orbit around the Earth to practice critical manoeuvres for the eventual trip to the moon. Ed White became the first American to walk in space, an experience so exhilarating that, when Houston ordered him back in the space craft, he replied, ‘Not yet!’.


 

 



 

Nasa’s next-generation spacecraft, Apollo 1, was meant to dramatically launch the new era. Virgil Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were Apollo’s very first crew. On a cool January day in Florida, in 1967, the three men suited up for a pre-launch training run in the new command capsule. Two and a half hours through the training, somewhere in the closed capsule, a fire broke out. The hatch design opened inwards and all three men perished. Mission control was powerless. The disaster shook the nation and left the future of Apollo, Nasa and the entire race to the moon in doubt. The cost perhaps was too high.

 

Chasing the Moon episode 2

 

In the aftermath of the deadly Apollo 1 fire, Nasa faced harsh scrutiny. The horror of the first casualties at Cape Kennedy led Americans to increasingly question the very premise of landing a man on the moon. Yet again, it was the Cold War that gave Nasa’s mission new urgency and life.

Amid concerns that the Soviets might exploit the hiatus to overtake the Americans, less than a year after the fatal Apollo 1 fire, the nation gathered on 21 December 1968, to watch as Apollo 8 lifted off and headed for the moon. Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman recalls, ‘My odds for mission success were a hundred percent. If I didn’t think I was coming back, I wasn’t going to go.’ The rest of America, Borman’s wife and children included, gathered nervously to watch the televised live broadcast as the Saturn V launched into orbit around the Earth and then took three men out of the gravitational pull of their home planet for the very first time.

As the American crew became the first to orbit the moon, footage and photography from Apollo 8 not only gave us images of the Earth’s satellite but an entirely new perspective of our world. Americans celebrated this unparalleled accomplishment. The space programme had turned a corner.

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