Our volunteers are key in helping bring the ships and aircraft of Patriots Point to life. Our first volunteer profile is on former World War 2, Marine Corps Dauntless and Corsair pilot Bill Cart. Born and raised in Charleston, he attended the Citadel from 1940-42, when he was accepted into the Navy V-7 program for [...]
Nine hundred miles southwest of Hawaii at 9:31 AM (Houston time), the USS Yorktown (CV-10) awaited the splashdown of Apollo 8 just off Kingman Reef and Palmyra Atoll. Unlike previous missions, the Apollo missions would return to earth at the speed of 25,000 miles per hour. They would need a nominal reentry angle of 6.4 [...]
The TransEarth Injection, TEI, was planned for just after midnight on Christmas Day. A successful burn would put Apollo 8 on its way back home and Houston control listened carefully for the astronauts to come around from the back side of the moon out of LOS, Loss of Signal. At 19 minutes after midnight Houston [...]
At 2:55 AM (Houston time) Apollo 8 was go for LOI (Lunar Orbit Insertion) burn. After travelling 234,000 miles the crew of Apollo 8 were about to go into a 69 mile orbit of the moon which called for amazing navigational precison only possible with help from Houston control. The simulator joke back home was [...]
Apollo 8 began to speed up as it entered the moon’s gravitational field today. Capcom Jerry Carr asked the astronauts what they could see and Bill Anders responded, “Nothing. It’s like being on the inside of a submarine.” Interestingly, the astronauts would not see the moon until they began to orbit the moon. Their angle [...]
At 7:51 AM on 21 December 1968, a vehicle over 363 feet high leapt into the sky. The beast burnt 20 tons of fuel per second. More in one second by ten times what Charles Lindberg used in the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic from New York to Paris in 1927. Onboard Apollo 8 [...]
Yesterday one hundred and five years ago, Wilbur and Orville Wright, showed the world what dreams were made of when they flew four flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Today, post WB day, thirteen C-17′s from Charleston Air Force Base made a mass formation flyby of Patriots Point. It was quite a sight on Yorktown [...]
The first week of December 1941 changed our nation forever. On 01 December the keel of USS Yorktown (then USS Bon Homme Richard) was laid at Newport News shipbuilding in Newport News, VA. Six days later the Japanese imperial navy attacked Pearl Harbor and the nation was at war.
