1968 - Mark Kurlansky [223]
Then, in late September, people were allowed to slip back to that more innocent time. As though there had been no Soviet invasion, the space race to the moon was back on. The Soviets had sent Zond 5 around the moon, and it seemed they would soon send a cosmonaut there. In October the Americans sent three men on the Apollo 7 mission, in which they orbited the earth for eleven days in a spacecraft designed to eventually go to the moon. The craft had first been tested in January in an unmanned mission. The Apollo 7 mission went so well, “a perfect mission,” according to NASA, that NASA decided to jump ahead. Apollo 8, which had been scheduled to repeat Apollo 7’s flight, would instead blast out of the earth’s orbit and go to the moon. Then, at the end of October the Soviets sent a man in Soyuz 3, the closest anyone had ever gotten to the moon.
Less romantic, but of more immediate impact, on December 18, exactly ten years after the first satellite transmission with Eisenhower’s Christmas greeting, Intelsat 3—the first of a new series of communications satellites that would extend live television transmission to the entire world—was launched. The new satellite more than doubled the capacity for television and telephone transmissions through space. The new age of television was now in place.
In time for Christmas, Apollo 8 was scheduled for December 21. Many predicted that the Soviets would beat the three astronauts to the moon. Sir Bernard Lovell, a leading astronomer and head of the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Britain, said that the mission would not gain scientific information worth enough to justify the risk. NASA was candid that this was a more dangerous mission than usual. The craft was going to orbit the moon, which had not been done before by a manned spacecraft, and if after orbiting the spacecraft engine failed to start, the craft would be stuck in a permanent orbit, like an artificial moon of the moon. NASA also confirmed that the mission was not scientific. Its purpose was to develop and practice the necessary techniques for landing on the moon.
Apollo 8 lifted off on schedule and halfway to the moon broadcast a television program from inside the craft with a clarity that was rare in television. Millions were dazzled. As the craft approached the moon, it turned around and from space sent back to earth the first astonishing photos of our little blue-and-white planet. The pictures ran in black-and-white on the front page of newspapers around the world. The television broadcast and photographs from Apollo 8 gave a sense in this first global year that this, too, like so many other milestones that year, was an event the whole world was watching. On Christmas Day the three astronauts flew around the moon only seventy miles above its surface, which they found to be gray, desolate, and lumpy. Then they fired their rockets and headed back to this planet of blue seas, rich vegetation, and endless strife.
Just before 1968 was over, there was a moment of tremendous excitement about the future. It was an instant when racism, poverty, the wars in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Biafra—all of it was shoved aside and the public felt what astronaut Michael Collins felt the following summer when he orbited the moon while his teammates landed:
I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of, let’s say, 100,000 miles, their outlook could