The first mission out of Earth’s gravity well. Reading the history you realize how very perilous these missions were. I remember the Genesis reading very well, will that feeling ever return?
I watched several segments of the old CBS coverage of the flight. Say what we want about Uncle Walter, he was pretty good when it came to covering Apollo.
He made the point about how far they were going to fly. He had a globe and moon about three feet from each other and said “Up until now, humans have flown about this high relative to the earth, and showed a model of the SM a tiny fraction of the height above the globe. We were told of course the moon is ~240,000 miles away. And there was the moon about three feet away. And then he started walking across the studio. And walking. And walking till he was like 30 yards away or something. THAT’s how far away they were. It was a really bold move by NASA, and the astronauts.
If the Apollo 13 type failure had occurred on Apollo 8 they’d have been hosed. There was no LM, if their service module engine failed or didn’t burn long enough, or burned too long, etc, they could have slammed directly into the moon, or ended up orbiting the sun etc. It really was an amazing feat.
It was a high point of my childhood. I was and am still tremendously impressed. Well done, Apollo VIII.