apollo

Chris Knight's avatar

1968 was perhaps the most turbulent year of the most turbulent decade of modern history.  Assassinations, wars, upheaval – sometimes peaceful and sometimes not – and the looming threat of global annhiliation… it seemed that the whole world had gone mad.

So maybe it took three men a distance of more than two hundred thousand miles from that same world to put things into humbling perspective for the rest of us.
It was fifty years ago tonight, on Christmas Eve in 1968, that the crew of Apollo 8 ended one of the most-watched television broadcasts in history with a special message.  William Anders, James Lovell, and Frank Borman took turns reading from the first chapter of the Book of Genesis.  Half a century later, their glad tidings from orbit above the Moon has lost none of its magnificent potency.
Here it is:
A short while earlier, the crew had become
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Chris Knight's avatar

“…one giant leap for mankind.”

(And before anybody gives me grief over it, in the past few years audio analysis has determined that Armstrong did indeed say “step for a man” 🙂

Forty years ago today, on July 20th, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin, with the assistance of a few hundred thousand of their good friends back on Earth, fulfilled an ages-old dream when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. Armstrong was the first man to stretch his legs on the lunar surface, while Aldrin has the distinction of being the first person to “drain the main vein” on another world.

I didn’t know until this past year that before they began their “extra-vehicular activity” (in layman’s terms: they went outside the spaceship), that Aldrin also took communion on the Moon. At the time he was an elder of Webster Presbyterian Church and asked that ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Walter M. Schirra Jr., better known as “Wally” Schirra, has passed away at the age of 84.

Schirra was one of the original seven NASA astronauts, tapped from hundreds of candidates to be part of the Mercury program. He flew the Sigma 7 craft in 1962 and then a few years later commanded Gemini 6 as it rendezvoused with Gemini 7: the first such encounter between two spacecraft and a technical test for what would later be required during the Apollo series. The third and final time Schirra went into space was in 1968 with Apollo 7, the first manned launch of the Apollo vehicle.

Of the original seven Mercury astronauts, only John Glenn and Scott Carpenter are still with us....

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