9 replies on “Half A Century Ago We Dared To Make Dreams Come True”

  1. I remember well watching the flight on TV and seeing science fiction become science fact. It was a magical moment when the TLI occurred and humans were on their way to the Moon.

    NASA’s PR film on the Apollo 8 mission.
    https://www.youtube.com/wat…

    1. In the book “Apollo: Race To The Moon” has a mention when they put the earth-moon transit map up on the MOCR big board, one of the controllers said, “finally we get to go someplace!”

      1. The celebration that they show at Misson Control at the end of the mission would support that! Of course the flood of flags and lighting of cigars would be politically incorrect these days… But for that generation the sky was no longer the limit.

        1. Actually, champagne isn’t approved of anymore. In the case of one Mars landing, the program’s staff were very firmly reminded of official policies about alcohol on campus.

  2. Apollo 8 was the watershed moment, more so than the landing even with its additional serious challenges. I gleaned this (I was 5 when the landing happened) from how my aunts, uncles, and parents spoke of things.

    Before Apollo 8, going to the Moon was pie-in-the-sky fantasy, a marker of the difference between the possible & the impossible. All of us who grew up after that reading of Genesis on Christmas Eve 1968 no longer viewed the Moon in that way.

    Which makes our long delay in returning that much more painful to endure. Will is one of humankind’s singular & perhaps greatest capacities. Dark are the shadows in which linger the skeletons of unrealized—and worse yet abandoned—free choices for the good.

  3. Back in 2015 (maybe perhaps when there was enough time to pull it off) two young engineers wrote a letter to space news recommending that a Christmas Eve flight around the moon in 2018 would be the best way to commemorate the past, the Apollo 8 mission, and to begin the reach into the future. This would have been an opportunity to bring the generations together on a new path forward. Imagine, a first manned flight of SLS/ORION, young astronauts, new eyes taking in that sight for the first time (their first time) speaking in their young voices (no script, let the excitement of that sight come through real time). As is mentioned in a couple of the comments here, there is magic in all this. A moment for some magic missed. Always the optimist, more magic awaits.

    1. True, but SLS has experienced significant delays and corresponding cost overruns between 2015 and today. It will be years before SLS/Orion flies with a crew. And when it does fly, it really won’t get us any closer to the moon. Lunar Gateway is in a bad location to support crewed lunar landers.

    2. [Belatedly]

      I pushed something similar back before 2010 as a compromise between the Ares/Constellation “moon” faction in Congress, and NASA’s need to be rid of the albatross. A fixed prize of $2.7b for the first privately funded mission to land a person on the moon, by the end of the decade, and return them safely to Earth.

      The amount would be 10% of the original dollar funding of Apollo-Gemini (about $27b, hence $2.7b), and would also work out to be roughly 1% of the constant-dollar value of the Apollo program (about $270b in 2010-dollars.) It also seemed to fit very neatly.

      I also suggested smaller, but substantial, secondary prizes for things Apollo didn’t do. For eg: To stay for a full 29 day “lunar day”. To visit the Luna farside. More than 2 people in a single landing. More than 12 people in a single mission. Combined together, taken individually, or taken with the “first” prize, as the competitors see fit. Can’t recall if I suggested a smaller prize for an Apollo 8 stepping stone.

      Too late now. The 50th anniversary could potentially pass without a single human so much as leaving LEO. Yay, progress.

Comments are closed.