Today marks the 42nd anniversary of the recovery of the Apollo 8 crew by the USS Yorktown in 1968, read the story here… Also today, Patriots Point announces a FREE Admission Weekend on 8-9 January 2011 to kickoff the Centennial Anniversary of Naval Aviation (1911-2011), Patriots Point invites the Lowcountry community and the [...]
Forty years ago today at 9:32 AM (EST) Apollo 11 launched from Pad 39A on its way to the moon. The mission commander was former naval aviator Neil Armstrong. Neil had honed his pilot skills by taking off and landing on Essex class carriers from 1950 to 1952. Attached to VF-51 onboard the USS Essex [...]
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 [...]
