Word: mooning
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...Apollo 8 did go. On the morning of Saturday, Dec. 21, 1968, the crew blasted off aboard the 36-story, seven-million-pound Saturn V rocket into Earth orbit. Five hours later, the crew fired the Saturn's upper stage engine and Apollo 8 peeled out for the moon...
...three-day translunar trip was unremarkable - as unremarkable as man's first journey to the moon could be. There were two broadcasts back to Earth - the usual all-is-well waving-to-the-camera fare. News reports were read to the crew by Houston: Eleven GI's were released in Cambodia; Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower were married in New York; the Cleveland Browns beat the Dallas Cowboys 31 to 20 on Sunday and the Minnesota Vikings would be playing the Baltimore Colts on Monday. Lovell picked Baltimore...
...Christmas Eve the crew got busy. Settling Apollo 8 into orbit around the moon was a high-wire maneuver that involved turning the ship backward and firing its powerful service propulsion engine for precisely four and a half minutes - an eternity in a business in which barely a breath from a thruster is enough to set a ship spinning off course. The engine burn was designed to slow the spacecraft down just enough to ease it into a lunar orbit without losing so much altitude that it crashed into the moon instead. Orbital mechanics also demanded that the maneuver occur...
...Proceed button. The engine lit and the burn worked exactly as scripted, inserting Apollo 8 into an initial lunar orbit 169.1 miles high at its peak and just 60.5 miles above the lunar craters at its nadir. Even before the crew re-emerged around the other side of the moon and back into radio contact with Houston, Anders snapped what is surely the most iconic photo of the space age and one of the most iconic of any age: Earthrise over the lunar surface...
...crew circled the moon 10 times over the next 20 hours. On their final orbit, once again alone behind the moon, the crew re-lit the engine that was their only ticket home. If it had failed to burn, they would have been stranded forever in lunar orbit. The flight controllers - to say nothing of the families - waited anxiously for the astronauts to emerge from radio blackout. When they did, it was Lovell's voice that broke the silence...