Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon

Lovell was able to complete the job in comparatively short order. When he was finished, he reflected that it was a good procedure for any Apollo commander to have in his back pocket. In the event that a future spacecraft ever suffered a catastrophic systems failure, the first thing he’d need to know would be how to get the ship pointed properly aga

“tough and competent.”

Kranz had spent his weekend thinking hard and getting angry, and he wasn’t about to waste an opportunity to drive home a lesson that had come at a tragically high cost. Too often in the previous months, he told the silent controllers, potential problems had been dismissed with a casual “that can’t happen” wave. Maybe the ship had a balky breaker, b

The astronauts had seen the Earth and they had seen the moon, but this was the first time they were seeing them together—the ugly, broken world beneath them and the lovely, breakable one in front of them.