Earthrise - Part 2
Within two years of the Apollo 1 fire, Apollo 8 became the first manned mission to escape the Earth's gravity and orbit the moon.
In the aftermath of the deadly Apollo 1 fire, Nasa faced harsh scrutiny. The horror of the first casualties at Cape Kennedy led Americans to increasingly question the very premise of landing a man on the moon. Yet again, it was the Cold War that gave Nasa鈥檚 mission new urgency and life.
Amid concerns that the Soviets might exploit the hiatus to overtake the Americans, less than a year after the fatal Apollo 1 fire, the nation gathered on 21 December 1968, to watch as Apollo 8 lifted off and headed for the moon. Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman recalls, 鈥楳y odds for mission success were a hundred percent. If I didn鈥檛 think I was coming back, I wasn鈥檛 going to go.鈥� The rest of America, Borman鈥檚 wife and children included, gathered nervously to watch the televised live broadcast as the Saturn V launched into orbit around the Earth and then took three men out of the gravitational pull of their home planet for the very first time.
As the American crew became the first to orbit the moon, footage and photography from Apollo 8 not only gave us images of the Earth鈥檚 satellite but an entirely new perspective of our world. Americans celebrated this unparalleled accomplishment. The space programme had turned a corner.
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