ARCHIVE: CBS news:
We interrupt this programme for a special CBS news report. Astronauts Virgil I Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee were killed tonight in a flash fire during tests of the Apollo Saturn 204 vehicle at Cape Kennedy Air Force base.

MUSIC: Russian Funeral

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
1967 was a bad year for both sides in the Space Race. Shortly after the Apollo disaster Vladimir Komarov died when the landing chute on the Soviet's new Soyuz craft failed to open properly. For more than a year neither side dared to put another man in Space, but the lack of public activity masked feverish work out of sight. By that stage NASA had an extended workforce of some 400,000.And that didn't include the spies.

READING
"Top Secret:- controlled dissemination. “National Intelligence Estimate - 2nd March 1967. The Soviet Space Programme. ...Considering the Soviet technical capabilities...we estimate that the earliest the Soviets could attempt a manned lunar landing would be mid-to-late 1969."

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
It went on…

READING
“The Soviets will probably attempt a manned circumlunar flight during the next few years. ...it is conceivable that they would accept the high risks involved in making the attempt as an anniversary spectacular in late 1967.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
Komarov’s death in April had put paid to that - and a year earlier the Soviets had been dealt another severe blow when their great rocket designer Sergei Koralyev had died during a surgical procedure. But the construction of his massive N1 rocket, which was to power their own lunar landing craft, had gone on apace. It was dragged out onto the launch pad in May 1968. A provocation? Meanwhile the Americans were increasingly confident about their own moon rocket, the Saturn Five. David Harland.

DAVID HARLAND:
They tested the first Saturn Five with all of the pieces live and it worked perfectly. No one was on it, it was an unmanned test. They tested it again in April 1968 and again it, it worked, so they cancelled further unmanned tests and decided to launch a crew on the next one, which they scheduled for December. At that point in early 1968 it was intended that the entire Apollo spacecraft would be on top of this rocket, it would go into earth orbit, er they would test two parts of the spacecraft, the mother ship and the lunar lander, test them in earth orbit.

JIM LOVELL:
But of course things always change, the best laid plans sometimes don’t work.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
And few people were affected more by the changes than Captain Jim Lovell.

JIM LOVELL:
What happened was aircraft came to NASA and said there was no way that we could get this vehicle completed for a flight in 1968 to test it out around the Moon. And the second piece of information we had was from the er CIA that the Soviets were going to put a man around the Moon in the late Fall of 1968, and we know now of course years later that they were very serious about this, using the proton rocket and the Zond spacecraft.

YURI KARASH:
Zond 5 was actually the first spacecraft to deliver living species to Moon orbit and to return them safely to Earth. These were turtles and they survived the flight.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
Yuri Karash with yet another Soviet first. But Zond 6 had crash-landed. The cosmonaut Alexei Leonov begged the Soviet authorities for permission to try a circumlunar flight ahead of the Americans, but he was refused.

YURI KARASH:
Imagine if any of the Soviet cosmonauts did die on the way to the Moon. This could deliver a really serious blow to the Soviet prestige as the world’s first space power.

JIM LOVELL:
In this country bold leadership said that since the lunar module was not ready for an Earth orbital testing why not send just the command module to the moon to test its navigation system and to look for suitable landing sites prior to actually sending people to land on the moon.

DAVID HARLAND:
They decided that in August, er tenth of August, and they made a contingent upon a successful first flight, but the Apollo mother ship had not actually flown with a crew. That was done in October of 1968. When they came back it was decided yes we will go to the Moon.

SLAVA GEROVITCH:
It was a very risky mission as you know, the Soviets never dreamed of sending a manned mission with a profile that had not been tried before in the unmanned mode.

DAVID HARLAND:
To say that there was trepidation before Apollo 8 is only half of the story, there was tremendous excitement and a great desire to do this. NASA was a young, lean, very enthusiastic organization with a very well defined mandate. It took enormous risks, and they were enormous, but they were calculated risks. NASA today wouldn’t do this kind of thing. It’s a very risk averse culture now.

DAVID SCOTT:
The only question was whether the large rocket engine on the command and service module would actually fire at the proper time. Again it had been tested so thoroughly, the reliability was close to a hundred percent, and that’s why the decision was made to go into lunar orbit and come back out, because the community, all four hundred thousand people, had confidence that they had done the proper design, engineering test, check out, all the preparations were so thorough.

ARCHIVE: (from Horizon: 25 Years in Space): Apollo 8 lift-off
The engines are on, four, three, two, one, zero. We have commenced, we have lift off.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
At 07.51 on the 21st of December 1968 Apollo 8, commanded by Frank Boorman with William Anders and Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, rose into the air.I’d just entered the sixth form of my school, but that Christmas my thoughts weren’t on A Levels. With millions of others I was gazing at the moon struggling to believe that three men were circling it, over-flying the moon’s far side that we could never see from earth.

ARCHIVE: (from Horizon: 25 Years in Space): Apollo 8 lift-off
And the thrust looks good, all engines all started to show the second stage is burning perfectly, two minutes fifty-one seconds into the mission.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
Jim Lovell was piloting the craft now flying at 25,000 miles an hour.

JIM LOVELL:
The planning prior to the first flight was fantastic. We intercepted the moon much like, you know, shooting a duck. You, you fire ahead of it and we got just within sixty miles of the lunar surface and then when we fired our engine to slow down and the moon then captured us to become a satellite of the moon, quite an amazing feat and we were very, very happy that everything worked successfully.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
And you were doing that I think when you were out of contact with earth because the moon was between you and the earth?

JIM LOVELL:
That’s right, round the far side of the moon we’d lose communication and so the critical manoeuvres using the engine were always done on the far side, the one of course to slow down and be captured by the moon and then the very critical one of letting the engine to get enough velocity to leave the confines of the moon, all had to be done on the, on the far side.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
And this really was a first. Never before in human history had three men been unable to see planet earth. Astronauts are a stoic breed, but even David Scott back on earth appreciated that this was a tense moment.

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