faithkrot.blogg.se - First man on the moon mission

This led to an unfounded belief in a ‘missile gap’, not helped by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s boast that his country was “turning out missiles like sausages”. If the Russians could put a satellite into space, then they could launch rockets with nuclear warheads. The launch of Sputnik in 1957 – around the time they also tested intercontinental ballistic missiles – gave the Soviets a distinct advantage and spread fear in theb US. Both sides strived to demonstrate how they had the superior weapons technology, delivery systems and, ultimately, political ideology. The two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, knew that with the terrifying destructive power of nuclear weapons they could not risk all-out war, but that did not prevent an arms race in a tense competition for supremacy.

The mushroom clouds at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 signalled both the end of WW2 and the dawn of the atomic age, from which emerged the Cold War. Worse, two of the five second-stage engines failed. Its second flight, Apollo 6, was not as smooth: the Saturn V’s first stage chugged in a pogolike manner that would have shaken a crew senseless. The rocket acquitted itself astoundingly well, barely missing a beat as it ascended to space. It began in November 1967 with Apollo 4, the first test of the Saturn V. NASA’s more general approach was to fly a progression of missions that would lead to a lunar landing.

But the Saturn V would have to prove itself twice before carrying humans. NASA instead opted to test the rocket stages exhaustively on the ground, then fly the whole lot in one go, so-called ‘all-up’ testing. It was running out of time to individually test the three rocket stages of the gargantuan Saturn V – the new launch vehicle being built to send men to the Moon. By mid-1967, Kennedy’s deadline of placing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade was approaching, and NASA was in a dark place. There were many difficulties in the Apollo story: some tragic, most technical. Its absence was the reason that Borman and his crew found themselves around the Moon at Christmas. The other was Anders’ missing lunar module. This combined command/service module (CSM) was only one part of the Apollo system. It sat at one end of the service module, a cylinder with a rocket nozzle at the opposite end.

Read more | Yuri Gagarin: 8 things you (probably) didn’t know about the first man in spaceįor six days, they were cooped up inside the command module, a cone of three by four metres.

To some, Anders seemed like a younger Borman, and he took the mission’s propaganda role very seriously. Instead, he was to monitor the spacecraft’s systems and act as photographer. Officially, he was the lunar module pilot, though he had no lunar module – the odd-looking lander of future Apollo missions was not yet ready to fly. He was the ‘rookie’, having never flown in space before. His role on Apollo 8 was as the ship’s navigator, sighting on the stars like a celestial mariner to guide the ship through space.īill Anders brought an academic science background to the trio. An easygoing man, he was the perfect foil to Borman, which helped when they spent two weeks sharing the cramped confines of Gemini 7. As a boy, Lovell had dreamed of spaceflight and had kept faithful to this dream throughout his military and test pilot career. To him, Apollo was a battle in the Cold War against the Soviets and he brought a military mindset to his preparations.īorman’s hard edge was in contrast to friendly and gregarious Jim Lovell, the command module pilot. Borman testified before Congress on NASA’s push to recover from the setback. Just over a year later, in January 1967, he had suffered the loss of his closest friend, astronaut Ed White, when an oxygen-fed fire consumed the Apollo 1 cabin during a test. His first spaceflight was on Gemini 7 in late 1965. Borman was in charge: a straight-talking, hard-driving man. Who were the Apollo 8 astronauts?Īpollo 8’s crew were all high-achieving military pilots. It was a moment that kept managers awake at night, because if it failed they would be stuck orbiting the Moon forever. They would make ten revolutions of this hostile, battered world before relighting their engine to come home. Apollo 8 had taken Borman, Anders and Lovell to where no men had gone before. Earthrise as seen from the Moon, taken during the Apollo 8 mission (Photo by Heritage Space/Heritage Images via Getty Images)Īs it passed midway around the lunar far side, over mountain tops lit by a setting Sun, its main engine had fired, slowing sufficiently to remain in the Moon’s gravitational clutches.