Читать книгу Human Universe онлайн | страница 12

To set Apollo 8 in context, Apollo 7, the first manned test flight of the Apollo programme, was flown by Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham in October 1968. Apollo 8 was supposed to be a December test flight for the Lunar Lander, conducted in the familiar surroundings of Earth orbit, but delivery delays meant that it was not ready for flight and the aim of meeting Kennedy’s deadline looked to be dead. But this wasn’t the twenty-first century, it was the 1960s and NASA was run by engineers. The programme manager was George Low, an army veteran and aeronautical engineer who knew the spacecraft inside out and had the strength of character to make decisions. Why not send Apollo 8 directly to the Moon without the Lunar Lander, proposed Low, allowing Apollo 9 to test-fly the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) in Earth orbit in early 1969 when it became available and pave the way for a landing before the decade was out? Virtually every engineer at NASA is said to have agreed, and so it was that only the second manned flight of the Apollo spacecraft lifted off from Kennedy on 21 December, ten short weeks after Apollo 7, bound for the Moon. The crew later said that they estimated their chance of succeeding to be fifty-fifty.

Borman: Oh my God!

Look at that picture over there.

Here’s the Earth coming up.

Wow, is that pretty.

Anders: Hey, don’t take that,

it’s not scheduled.

Borman: (laughing) You got a color film, Jim?

Anders: Hand me that roll of color quick, will you …?

Lovell: Oh, man, that’s great!

Precisely 69 hours, 8 minutes and 16 seconds after launch, the Command Module’s engine fired to slow the spacecraft down and allow it to be captured by the Moon’s gravity, putting the three astronauts into lunar orbit. Newton’s almost 300-year-old equations were used to calculate the trajectory. This was a spectacular, practically unbelievable engineering triumph. Less than a decade after Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth, three astronauts travelled all the way to the Moon. But the mission’s powerful and enduring cultural legacy rests largely on two very human actions by the crew. One was the famous and moving Christmas broadcast, the most-watched television event in history at that time, when distant explorers read the first lines from the Book of Genesis: ‘We are now approaching lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you,’ began Anders. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’ Borman concluded with a sentence clearly spoken by a lonely man 400,000 kilometres from home. ‘And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with goodnight, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.’