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00:00I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out
00:10of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
00:16In the 1960s, an impossible dream came true when human beings walked on another world.
00:23In all, 24 Americans went to the moon.
00:31But it took an unseen army of over 400,000 engineers and technicians to make it possible.
00:39This is the story of the men and women who built the machines that took us to the moon.
00:531961. Russia is winning the space race.
00:59The only way to get U.S. astronauts into space is on top of a nuclear ballistic missile,
01:05its warhead replaced with a tiny mercury capsule.
01:10There is just enough room inside to squeeze a solitary astronaut in his pressure suit.
01:16Five, three, three, two, one, fire.
01:24NASA astronaut Gus Grissom rode the second mercury capsule into space on the 21st of July, 1961.
01:36But his 15-minute suborbital flight nearly ended in disaster 300 miles off the coast of Florida.
01:44Moments after splashdown, there was an explosion.
01:51The hatch prematurely blew off.
01:54Water poured in and in seconds the capsule was sinking.
02:02Grissom was lucky not to go down with it.
02:07His flight had shown just how vulnerable an astronaut was to the slightest malfunction in his spacecraft.
02:15It was a salutary reminder for the thousands of engineers who were gearing up for a challenge much greater than the Mercury program,
02:23Project Apollo.
02:24I'd started work at NASA here in Houston in June of 1962.
02:31President Kennedy made a speech in the stadium at Rice University in September of 1962.
02:36So after only a few months, here I was sitting in Rice Stadium with the President of the United States when he made the speech where he said we were going to the moon by the end of the decade.
02:47And at that time, young as I was, that was quite a challenge.
02:50We shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall.
03:00I mean, it just was unbelievable.
03:02To go to the moon and back would demand a much bigger spacecraft than Mercury, and one which would allow the Apollo astronauts a much greater degree of control, a spacecraft they could really fly.
03:16In fact, for three years, NASA had been flying to the edge of space in the X-15 rocket plane.
03:28And I think that really impressed NASA.
03:31NASA had been a co-funder of that program with the Air Force.
03:37And the NASA people loved it, and I think they loved the people that worked on it.
03:43The X-15 was built by a company called North American Aviation.
03:48They were very much in the aircraft business, and we felt that the Apollo had to be thought of as a flying machine with men flying it.
03:58And it was on that basis that we'd pick North American.
04:05But the engineers at North American soon realized that the Apollo spacecraft would be far more complex than anything they had built before.
04:13When you break it down by functions, by what you have to do step by step, then you see what you actually have to do.
04:23You needed a propulsion system.
04:25You needed an environmental control system.
04:26Oxygen and water.
04:28The food supply.
04:30You needed a heat shield.
04:31A parachute to bring them back to Earth.
04:33Human-based disposal.
04:35You had shaving supplies.
04:37You had hygiene.
04:38A window to look out of.
04:40We also had to look out for micrometeorites.
04:44Had life preservers.
04:45Had a couple machetes.
04:47The command module was a little tiny house for three people.
04:54North Americans started by building wooden mock-ups to get a feel for the layout of the new three-man spacecraft.
05:01Getting three people to live in that little house for 14 or 15 days became a pretty difficult project.
05:11The engineers were faced with a dilemma.
05:15A spacecraft large enough to sustain three men all the way to the moon would be too big to safely return to Earth.
05:23If you put everything you need inside the command module itself, it becomes quite large and heavy.
05:30And when you plan to re-enter back into the Earth's atmosphere, a large, heavy vehicle is not desirable.
05:36The heavier a spacecraft, the more energy it has when it hits the Earth's atmosphere.
05:42And therefore, the more heat it will generate as it slows down.
05:47A fully laden Apollo spacecraft would simply burn up.
05:51But North American realized that not everything that went to the moon needed to come back to Earth.
05:58The answer was to split the Apollo spacecraft in two.
06:02So the solution to the problem wound up having essentially a two-module concept.
06:05The service module and the command module.
06:10The service module is like a trailer behind the command module.
06:13And it was attached to the command module during launch,
06:15stayed attached all the way through the trip to the moon on the way back.
06:18And just before re-entry, the service module would be jettisoned.
06:23The service module would carry almost everything the crew would need
06:27to keep them alive for the duration of the mission.
06:30It has the propulsion system.
06:32It has the fuel cells for the power.
06:33It has the oxygen and hydrogen tanks that are the reactants for the fuel cells.
06:37And it's got, of course, the engine.
06:40With much of the weight of the spacecraft in the service module,
06:43the Apollo capsule would now be small and light enough to survive re-entry.
06:47But there wouldn't be much space for the three-man crew to live for ten days.
06:51If you look at it, very simply, it's about a six-by-six-by-six cube.
06:56That's what you're living in.
06:57During training, getting into and out of the command module
07:02was always a slow and difficult business.
07:05It didn't seem to matter at the time.
07:08But the consequences of this simple fact
07:10would bring America's race to the moon to a shocking halt.
07:14By 1964, America's astronauts were being introduced to the new spacecraft
07:24that was meant to get them to the moon by the end of the decade.
07:29But as impressive as these prototypes looked,
07:32for the engineers at North American Aviation
07:34who were building the Apollo command module,
07:36there was still a lot that needed to be worked out.
07:39The most fundamental thing the spacecraft would need
07:43to keep three men alive for a ten-day journey to the moon and back
07:47was going to be electrical power.
07:50There are several ways of providing power on a spacecraft.
07:53One is batteries.
07:54But batteries, as you know from your use in a car,
07:56are quite heavy, can be quite large.
07:58Also, you can use something like solar panels,
08:00which some of the unmanned spacecraft use going to the outer planets
08:03that have to operate for a long period of time.
08:05However, they get quite heavy and take quite a large area.
08:08So the solution for the problem was to use fuel cells.
08:12The clever idea behind the fuel cell
08:14was to use the same hydrogen and oxygen gases
08:17which powered the spacecraft's rocket engine.
08:20In the rocket, the gases reacted together,
08:23creating heat and pressure to push the spacecraft forward.
08:27But in the more controlled environment of the fuel cell,
08:29the same reaction could produce electricity.
08:33Fuel cells have a lot of desirable characteristics.
08:35You can take the oxygen gas and the hydrogen gas
08:39that are stored in tanks,
08:40combine those together through the fuel cell,
08:42and you get water as a byproduct
08:43along with the electricity that you want.
08:45The water is desirable.
08:47You can use that for drinking.
08:49You can use it for cooling
08:50through the environmental control system.
08:52So it turns out it's a byproduct,
08:54but it's a very useful byproduct.
08:55In fact, the water that the fuel cells produce
08:59is something like on the order of 50 or 60 gallons during emissions.
09:03So they produce a lot of water.
09:06While one set of engineers were grappling
09:09with what went on inside the command module,
09:12another team at North American were working on the outside.
09:15Would it be tough enough to survive the rigors
09:17of a flight to the moon and the return to Earth?
09:20It was time for the capsule's first flight.
09:23Music playing
09:37The drop tests demonstrated how dangerous a hard landing could be for the astronauts.
10:03A water landing seemed like a better bet.
10:06But a splashdown came with its own problems, as the first test revealed.
10:12Water landings were conducted in a slightly different way.
10:16We had something that would be very similar to a child's swing.
10:21And in place of the child, we would have the Apollo spacecraft.
10:26This was the big tower there in Downey, and we swung the command module, splashed down.
10:33And we were all so happy seeing it there floating.
10:38And suddenly, we saw it's getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
10:43It was sinking.
10:46I remember that was one of the darkest days that we had in the beginning.
10:52The capsule's belly flop had cracked its outer skin, allowing water to flood in.
10:59It was hugely embarrassing for the engineers.
11:02We were devastated.
11:04I was specifically devastated because this could lead to a delay in the total Apollo program.
11:12What terrified everybody was a repeat performance of Gus Grissom's near-drowning when his mercury capsule had sunk after splashdown.
11:22The thought of three men returning safely from the moon, only to drown in front of the world's press, was unbearable.
11:28So the command module's new, stronger outer shell was exposed to some of the most rigorous testing of the whole Apollo program.
11:42The instrumentation included cameras, cameras, cameras underwater, cameras external, cameras to record the conditions.
11:58It was a test program that was to truly verify that we would have a successful landing.
12:28The spacecraft would be sitting on top of the Saturn V booster, filled with over 3,000 tons of highly explosive fuel.
12:54So the engineers designed a sort of ejector seat for the whole command module.
12:58The launch escape tower was a rocket at the front of the command module that would pull the command module away from the booster if there were a problem with the booster.
13:09The system would be triggered by three wires that ran down the entire length of the Saturn V booster.
13:16If we would lose power on two out of three wires, that signified that the booster is falling apart, and we would just get off.
13:28In November 1965, the North American engineering team gathered to witness another make-or-break test.
13:40A rocket called Little Joe was to be used to test the launch escape system.
13:48The idea was to launch it up to about 10,000 feet, then fire the escape rocket to pull the command module away from the other device.
13:58One, fire.
14:00This time, they had made a little mistake in how they hooked up the roll gyros.
14:21And the vehicle started to roll.
14:23When it broke, it broke the link on the escape rocket.
14:36The escape rocket fired, pulled the command module right off the top.
14:39It was a perfectly successful flight, very well-instrumented flight, gave us all the data we needed about the launch escape system, but the vehicle had failed in the process.
14:56Ironically, the unanticipated failure of the Little Joe rocket provided the best possible test for the escape system, and it had performed perfectly.
15:05But as the engineers celebrated, events were about to take a tragic turn, one which would throw into question every aspect of their new spacecraft.
15:17January 1967, and the new Apollo spacecraft was going through its final tests before its maiden manned flight into space.
15:35Apollo 1 was going to be our first true Earth orbital test of the vehicle.
15:41It was really to understand the interface with the astronauts and the spacecraft.
15:47So it was really what you would call a shakedown mission prior to leaving the gravitational field of the Earth.
15:56The command module was an early design known as a Block 1.
16:01As with any prototype, it had its teething problems.
16:04But the flaws with this spacecraft were more serious.
16:07The Block 1 vehicle was not lunar-capable, and because of the pressure schedule,
16:15I think there were things that were not done quite perfectly in it.
16:20We didn't really have the kind of focus, I thought, in retrospect, that we should have had.
16:26So we had a lot of problems in the qualification testing of the hardware throughout the system.
16:33And they were not a good foundation of confidence to go to the moon.
16:42Mission commander, Mercury veteran Gus Grissom, and his crew of rookie astronaut Roger Chaffee
16:49and America's first spacewalker Ed White were not happy either,
16:53openly mocking the command module's reliability during a pre-mission photo shoot.
16:58At 1 p.m. on January 27th, 1967,
17:05the crew ascended the launch tower and prepared for a routine pre-flight test in the capsule.
17:12But there was something extremely dangerous inside the spacecraft.
17:17Something that no one had noticed.
17:19The environment in the cabin at the time was 100% oxygen at 16 pounds per square inch.
17:31Such high levels of oxygen had been pumped into the command module
17:36to help seal the inward opening hatch against the outside air pressure.
17:41But no one had considered the possible consequences
17:44of an atmosphere of 16 pounds per square inch of pure oxygen.
17:49The crew was going through their test.
17:53There's a test procedure that you go through.
17:55You activate all the systems.
17:57You basically activate every system you have in the vehicle
18:00down to zero, but you don't ignite the engine.
18:07At 6.30 p.m., with the simulations dragging on into the evening,
18:12a glitch in the capsule's electrical systems was detected by launch control.
18:20Somehow we got a spark.
18:22We don't know how that spark occurred, but there was a spark.
18:26One by one, wherever they were around the country, the engineers heard the news.
18:31Aluminum burns, all the insulation on the wires burn, all the wiring burned.
18:38And with an inward opening hatch, the astronauts could not open the hatch.
18:43And the crew perished because of that.
18:45One by one, wherever they were around the country, the engineers heard the news.
18:54By the next day, many of the North American engineers had reached the Cape to see for themselves
19:23what had gone so badly wrong.
19:27They had gotten to the place where they had the hatch open by the time I got there.
19:32And it was a disaster.
19:37We didn't have much to say, neither NASA or us at the time.
19:49That was a very hard time for me.
19:53I almost felt responsible because I was the guy that was associated with the oxygen and the like.
20:01It was a very, very difficult situation.
20:06And I felt responsible in some ways.
20:10All of us, all of us were shocked with how easily things burnt in oxygen, high-pressure oxygen.
20:20While everyone struggled to come to terms with what had gone wrong, all future Apollo missions were halted.
20:44NASA began a detailed investigation, and rather than put an engineer in charge, they appointed
20:51astronaut Frank Borman.
20:53The fate of Apollo was in his hands.
20:57Working with Frank Borman was a pleasure.
20:59He was so intuitive, he was so aggressive, he was so, let's get the job done.
21:05I can't tell you how wonderful, it was one of my highlights of my career, working with
21:10Frank Borman and that activity.
21:12I was really impressed by the determination of the NASA to find the causes and then get
21:25on to correct them.
21:29To their dismay, the investigators found that things had become so rushed in the time before
21:34Apollo 1's test flight, that there weren't even complete paper records of what had been
21:40installed inside the spacecraft.
21:42I think it woke a lot of us up, it did me.
21:49But it also said that this is not just a job, it's a very, very important job, it means people's
21:56lives.
21:57So I, I had a, I ended up being probably rededicated, I felt like a warrior, and I still call myself
22:09Apollo warrior.
22:10I don't mean a sense of killing people, I mean a sense of getting things done, and I think
22:16the team ended up like a lean and mean group of Trojan warriors.
22:22Ironically, the inward opening Apollo hatch, which had trapped the astronauts in the burning
22:29spacecraft, had only been specified as a safety measure after Gus Grissom's mercury hatch incident
22:36five years before.
22:38The investigation also confirmed that the wiring was dangerously exposed and a great deal of
22:44flammable material had crept into the command module's design.
22:48Combined with the high pressure, pure oxygen atmosphere, these materials hadn't just burned,
22:54they'd exploded.
22:56A major redesign of the command module was needed.
23:00From a technical point of view, I think the fire had a very beneficial final effect on the
23:06program.
23:07It enabled the program to stop and re-review exactly where we stood on every element in the
23:14system and to fix every problem that we saw in the system.
23:23We changed to an outward opening hatch.
23:26We put in floorboards that we didn't have previously.
23:30We changed the air system to where it was 60% nitrogen, 40% oxygen when you were on the pad.
23:39All those things were done in about 18 months.
23:44With the redesigned and improved spacecraft, the Apollo program was back on track.
23:50We were dedicated to what we had to do.
23:54We were in a space race with the Russians.
23:56We were in a spotlight.
23:58And we couldn't fault her again, and we couldn't kill people again.
24:04Everyone was determined that the deaths of Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White would
24:09not be in vain.
24:13It was time once more to reach for the moon.
24:25October 1968, an Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission, was on the launch pad at Cape
24:31Kennedy.
24:33The fire had set back the moon program by 18 months.
24:37There was now just over a year left to reach the moon.
24:41Here we were flying in October of 1968, and we had to make it by the end of 1969.
24:50And it was a short time.
24:55All the forces at North American had been working on the spacecraft 24 hours a day, seven days
25:02a week, since that fire, to get the spacecraft in a configuration we had confidence in for
25:09flying.
25:11The mission was very much like Apollo 1.
25:17It was really a shakedown cruise of Earth Orbital mission to really shake the vehicle down and
25:22get the compatibility of the systems with the crew.
25:25You know, you don't get many opportunities on the ground to test at zero-g.
25:30And so it was a really important flight for testing all the equipment.
25:35Five, four, three, two, we have ignition.
25:42Commit liftoff, we have liftoff.
25:52Launch control.
25:53Launch control.
25:54We have cleared the tower.
25:55Project tower clear.
25:5612 seconds out, and the roll program has commenced.
26:01On the morning of October 11, 1968, the new Apollo command module lifted off the pad.
26:07Four seconds out, and Schirra reports the pitch program has commenced.
26:14On board was Mercury veteran Wally Schirra with rookie astronauts Don Isley and Walter Cunningham.
26:22It was the first time three Americans had flown into space together.
26:29We're having a status check.
26:31Apollo 7 has been given a go for staging.
26:37As the rocket's first stage fell away, the second stage ignited, hurling them the final
26:42few miles into orbit.
26:48In zero gravity, the cramped command module took on a new, more roomy feel, and through
26:54a wide-angle lens, it appeared positively spacious.
27:00It was the first time any humans were able to float around in zero gravity, unencumbered
27:05by space suits.
27:09The crew had 11 days in Earth's orbit to subject the command module to a thorough test.
27:15And the engineers knew Commander Wally Schirra was going to be a hard man to impress.
27:20I remember particularly he was religiously interested in making sure the command module was clean when
27:28it flew because everything that was loose would come floating up into the command module.
27:34And he had had trouble with that in the other two vehicles.
27:37So we really worked over the cleanliness of the command module.
27:41And when he got back, he gave me a little piece of plastic within which was a little piece
27:47of beta cloth that had floated up in front of him during the flight.
27:52I think it was the only piece of floating debris that he had found in the whole flight.
27:58We were pretty pleased about that.
28:03On its maiden manned flight, the Apollo command module had exceeded expectations.
28:09From the fuel cells to the cabin environment and atmosphere, every life support system had
28:14performed to perfection.
28:17Even the infamous space food and the basic restroom facilities had proved bearable.
28:24With every engineering milestone passed, all that was left was re-entry.
28:29Okay, it's been real fine, Walt.
28:33Just a final update on the weather and the recovery area, 2,000 broken, winds 270 at 20, wave
28:40height is 3 feet.
28:44For any capsule re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, three things mattered more than anything else.
28:50Parachutes, parachutes, parachutes.
28:53There's no other part of the command module and service module that I worried more about
28:58than all three of those parachutes getting open during landing.
29:04NASA had been developing parachutes for returning spacecraft since the days of its Mercury flights.
29:13But when it came to developing a parachute system for the new Apollo spacecraft at the North American
29:18factory in Downey, California, there was only one man for the job.
29:24I was the only one in the corporation of North American Aviation that had parachutes written
29:29on his badge.
29:31So I was the logical one to be rounded up and brought into Downey to where the biggest parachute
29:38activity would be.
29:42Apollo parachute testing started with models in a giant vertical wind tunnel.
29:47What we had to achieve with this parachute system was extreme reliability.
29:52And my job was to take it from an idea to an operating system.
30:03We made 137 drop tests throughout a period of six years.
30:08A returning Apollo capsule would deploy its first drogue parachutes while still 25,000 feet up and
30:16traveling at 320 miles an hour.
30:20Then at 10,000 feet and still traveling at over 160 miles an hour, the main chutes would
30:25be opened.
30:29For a safe landing, these giant canopies would need to survive unprecedented speeds without shredding
30:36to slow down the spacecraft to less than 20 miles an hour.
30:41No program before or since has ever had a parachute that was so thoroughly tested.
30:50With the designs perfected, it was time to manufacture them.
30:54It's approximately a half acre of very lightweight nylon fabric.
31:00We call it ripstop.
31:02In each main parachute, there's approximately two million stitches.
31:09The suspension lines are a mile and a half long.
31:15It takes about a week to pack this very, very, very tightly under hydraulic presses.
31:22And when we finished, the density of the fabric was like maple wood.
31:31These ladies took great pride in what they did.
31:36They all seemed to understand, more than many of us, that their sewing was the last important
31:45step in returning these astronauts safely home.
31:51On the 22nd of October 1968, after 11 days in space, the first astronauts to ride the Apollo
31:58command module returned to Earth on the finest parachutes ever made.
32:03Everybody sees the parachute system.
32:07It puts on a good show.
32:09On Apollo, it occurred at the last moment when all the world was looking.
32:13So it made it very rewarding and very satisfying to be a part of that industry.
32:22Wally Shira and his crew had test flown an almost flawless command module in Earth's orbit.
32:29Before the year was out, a new crew would take it on arguably the most historic flight ever
32:34undertaken by man, from the Earth to the Moon.
32:44It was the autumn of 1968, and at North American Aviation's factory in Downey, California, engineers
32:51were preparing the Apollo spacecraft for a second test flight in Earth's orbit.
32:56But things were about to change.
33:01We were asked the question, did we think the spacecraft was ready to undertake a mission
33:10around the moon?
33:11A figure eight around the moon.
33:14Apollo eight around the moon.
33:16It was going out where we'd never gone before with a manned mission.
33:21Very risky, but could really pay off with a lot of excitement.
33:24Apollo eight coming up on 20 seconds to ignition.
33:30The engineers were confident their spacecraft was ready to go to the moon.
33:35And so the crew of Apollo eight, Jim Lovell, Frank Borman and Bill Anders became the first
33:40men in history to leave Earth's orbit.
33:44Their safety and comfort depended on an environmental control system designed to cope with the most
33:50extreme environment ever encountered by humans, deep space.
33:55You can go from plus 250 degrees Fahrenheit down to minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit, and it
33:59can happen just as you cross the line of a shadow, for example, on a spacecraft.
34:04So you can instantaneously go from one extreme to the other and have like a 500 degree Fahrenheit
34:08change.
34:09For three days, everything went well, but as they neared the moon, something unexpected
34:17happened.
34:18The spacecraft temperatures suddenly started to drop well into the mission.
34:28And everybody in the spacecraft was getting pretty cold, and we thought that perhaps our environmental
34:35control system was not meeting the requirements.
34:43But what had happened was for the first time in our flight experience, we had gotten into
34:50the shadow of the moon.
34:51So suddenly we were in the dark, looking at dark space, and that was the cause of the spacecraft
34:57temperature suddenly dropping.
34:59And I mean dropping at a great rate.
35:02So that was another great experience.
35:05With every second that passed, the command module was making history, carrying its crew farther from earth than ever before.
35:14We were concerned, and of course, when we went in the backside of the moon, we were really concerned because we couldn't hear and communicate with the crew.
35:35We had our fingers crossed all the time.
35:45It was Christmas Eve 1968, and across America, the 40,000 men and women who'd worked on the Apollo
35:51command module stopped and watched in awe.
35:54I personally remember having my Christmas vacation with my parents and my new wife.
36:01My dad set the TV up on the counter where he could watch it during the Christmas dinner.
36:07And the Apollo 8 had pretty good TV coverage compared to previous missions.
36:12So for the first time, we were getting real-time TV that we could watch while the mission was going on.
36:17And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good earth.
36:30And you could see the surface of the moon as they were going around.
36:34You saw these views.
36:35Just unbelievable.
36:37And, you know, the environment I was in with my parents and my wife, it was just amazing.
36:47For the engineering teams at Mission Control, Christmas was a rather hurried affair.
36:58Their Apollo spacecraft and its crew were a quarter of a million miles away from Earth.
37:04To get them home, they knew the service module's rocket motor would have to perform perfectly yet again.
37:11SPS is a service propulsion engine.
37:14It's on the elements of the back end of the service module with a big bell nozzle.
37:19That engine gets you into lunar orbit.
37:23It also gets you out of lunar orbit.
37:26If that engine failed and doesn't get you out of lunar orbit, you can't get the spacecraft back to Earth.
37:32Three minutes.
37:33LOS.
37:34All systems are go.
37:35Over.
37:36Roger.
37:38Houston, Apollo 8.
37:39The crucial engine burn to bring them home would take place on the far side of the moon, when the spacecraft was out of contact with Mission Control for 45 minutes.
37:53The engineers wouldn't know if everything had worked until the spacecraft reappeared.
38:00Somebody asked Frank Borman, what if that engine doesn't work?
38:03He said, it's a bad day.
38:05And that was the longest 45 minutes of my life.
38:08Apollo 8, Apollo 8, this is Houston.
38:13Apollo 8, Apollo 8, this is Houston.
38:21Houston, Apollo 8, over.
38:23Hello, Apollo 8.
38:25Drive clear.
38:29Roger.
38:30Please be informed, there is a Santa Claus.
38:33I felt that's probably one of the highs that I felt during the Apollo program, that we had pretty much pulled it off.
38:43As Apollo 8 pulled away from the moon and began to free fall back towards the Earth, Jack Clemens and his team of re-entry specialists got to work.
38:53My job for re-entry started at the moon with that first burn.
38:56They're now in contact with the Earth again.
38:58Almost immediately then, after that, we take that information, and we start running simulations down on the ground to say,
39:05well, where's that going to bring them?
39:09The returning Apollo 8 command module was effectively free-falling back to Earth from a quarter of a million miles away,
39:16and they would be re-entering the atmosphere much faster than Apollo 7 had done.
39:21There would be no second chance to get it right.
39:24Apollo 8 had a lot of effect on us emotionally in terms of how well have you done your work,
39:30because this is the first time we're coming back from the moon at all, and you want to do it right.
39:35The command module would be traveling at 25,000 miles per hour when it hit the upper atmosphere.
39:41If you travel down the highway, you're traveling at 60 miles per hour, you're traveling at 88 feet per second.
39:49We're coming in at 36,000 feet per second.
39:52It smashes into the atmosphere. It doesn't fly as much as wha-smash.
40:03To protect the capsule, the engineers had built the largest heat shield ever.
40:08It was designed to disintegrate as the heated atmosphere tore into it.
40:13But to safely return the crew, the command module would have to re-enter at exactly the right angle.
40:20If you came in too shallow, coming in and not gathering enough drag from the shallowness of the atmosphere to slow you down,
40:31so you'd keep going right through the atmosphere and out the other side.
40:34If one came in too steep, this was more like a belly flop off a high diving board into a pool,
40:43because the atmosphere for all its fragility when we're walking through it,
40:49when you're coming in at Mach 30 or so, it's very dense.
40:55And if you hit it too deeply, you could break up the command module itself.
41:00So everybody was highly motivated to sort of stay in that boundary.
41:05The command module needed to maneuver in the upper atmosphere,
41:08but it was not easy to steer a blunt capsule traveling so fast.
41:14The way we steer the command module is little reaction jets here that roll this vehicle.
41:20The only thing, it can't turn this way, can't turn this way.
41:23All it can do is roll a little bit about this axis.
41:27It's a very rudimentary control mechanism, but it worked.
41:32For those watching and waiting through the night on Earth,
41:39the tension was made worse by the radio blackout caused by the heat of reentry.
41:46Along with everyone else, the engineers were also left wondering how things had gone.
41:51The big event that happens to a reentry specialist on Apollo
41:55is crewmen on one of the aircraft carriers picking up the chutes in their camera.
42:01Because that means everything.
42:04That's when the pressure's off.
42:05When we see those chutes up and up and it's like,
42:07we got it, we got it, we're there.
42:10The first astronauts to ride the command module all the way to the moon
42:14returned triumphantly three days before the end of 1968.
42:20North American's engineers had proved that their capsule could carry men to another world.
42:26It was really a big jump in getting us ready to go land on the moon.
42:34It was really, to me, the most significant event that we were able to do to get ready to land on the moon.
42:41Over the next four years, eight more Apollo command modules would fly to the moon,
42:53carrying a total of 24 Americans into lunar orbit and safely back to Earth.
42:59They were the only Apollo machines to return and rest today in museums around the world
43:08as a tribute to the 40,000 men and women who built them.
43:12We had a great group of people working at Apollo.
43:22We really got down to work as a team and had a terrific camaraderie, I think, cooperation.
43:31And it was a wonderful experience to live through.
43:38I wish I could thank everyone.
43:44And hug.
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