DAVID SCOTT:
I happened to be at Frank Boorman’s home that night, he was the commander, because I knew Frank quite well, and a number of us gathered with his wife Susan waiting for the call when they came around the other side of the moon at the right time. Everybody had confidence, but again it was one of those things where you don’t know the answer until you get the answer. It’s always a challenge to sit and think well let’s hope that one single engine lights as it’s supposed to light, a lot of hand holding.

ARCHIVE: (from Horizon: 25 Years in Space): Apollo 8 Special
“This is Apollo 8 coming into the light of the Moon. I think that each one of us carries his own impressions of what he’s seen today.”
James Burke: Well, Patrick Moore, what did you think of that?
Patrick Moore: Quite incredible, there have been suggestions I know that this is a mere publicity stunt. This is part of scientific history James, this is a part of our heritage and it would be criminal not to broadcast it as fully as, fully as we can.
James Burke: Yes I see…

ARCHIVE: (from Horizon: 25 Years in Space)
Patrick Moore: This was outstandingly important. Had this failed the entire programme would have been put back, so Apollo 8 was all-important. And I remember you know when they were on the, on the far side of the moon and I was on the air doing a live concept for the BBC, and I said something like this, the men of Apollo 8 are now going on the moon on the far side, we can’t see them obviously, we can’t hear them. I will say no more now, we will wait, in less than a minute you’ll hear the voices of the first men around the Moon and this is one of the great moments in human history. And the BBC changed over to Jackanory!

ARCHIVE: (from Horizon: 25 Years in Space): from Apollo 8
It’s now approaching lunar sunrise and er for all the people back on earth the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void

MUSIC - Creation

…and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and God said let there be light.

JIM LOVELL:
One of the most impressive sights that we saw as we orbited the moon for the very first time and came around on the near side again, we saw the earth rising out of the lunar horizon. The oceans of course are blue, you can see the tans and the pinks, the salmons and the brown colours of the land masses of the earth, you see the clouds, the whites of the clouds, but you don’t see any colour on the moon at all, it’s all shades of grey and it was a very impressive sight.

ARCHIVE: (from Horizon: 25 Years in Space): from Apollo 8
God saw that it was good.

JIM LOVELL:
I think all test pilots, which I was, I was one, are not really emotional, but I mean there was a certain amount of emotion when you, when you go for the very first time and leave the confines of your home planet and be captured by another body.

ARCHIVE: (from Horizon: 25 Years in Space): from Apollo 8
And from the crew of Apollo 8 we close with goodnight, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you, all of you on the good earth.

JIM LOVELL:
When we finally successfully fired the engine to leave the Moon and go back to the Earth and as we got communications again with mission control I said please be informed there is a Santa Claus.

YURI KARASH:
The feeling among the cosmonauts and Soviet Space engineers was that the moon race um had been pretty much lost to Americans.

DAVID HARLAND:
The Soviets continued to test their circumlunar spacecraft, but cancelled all of the ideas of flying a man around the moon because there was no propaganda value in that activity, that mission anymore. They continued their programme to land a man on the Moon in 1969. They tested their very large N1 moon rocket in February. It exploded. They tested it again on the 3rd of July 1969. It exploded, and two weeks later Apollo 11 landed on the Moon.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
So how after so many space firsts had the Soviets allowed themselves to be so comprehensively beaten? Slava Gerovitch again.

SLAVA GEROVITCH:
The planning although the Soviet system was proclaimed to be centrally planned in reality it was managed through personal lobbying, through personal connections. The Soviets wanted to maintain the appearance of being the leaders in the race, so they diverted part of the resources from the lunar race to those spectacular missions. There was the Voskhod mission in 1964 with three cosmonauts packed into a single spacecraft, the space walk in 1965. All those missions, all very important and technologically sophisticated, were in fact diversions from the lunar programme, and although it helped the Soviet leaders maintain the appearance that the Soviets were ahead in the space race it actually threw the Soviets back. So as to sum up one might say that the success of the Apollo programme if anything proved the efficiency of the socialist method of management, of centralised planning over this free market, disorganized, chaotic organisation which we had on the Soviet side.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
So much for capitalism. And only a few years later so much for the Apollo programme.

DAVID HARLAND:
The most unbelievable thing in the last century was that the Americans would go to the Moon and then stop. If the Russians had been still trying and had succeeded by about 1972 the Americans may have continued. They may have given up simply because the Russians didn’t manage to catch them up.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
Ian, at the end of our tour we’re now standing directly under the two hundred and fifty foot dish of the Lovell radio telescope. This enabled you in the 60s to have an unrivalled view of the Space programme. What would your assessment of Apollo 8 be?

IAN MORRISON:
Apollo 8 was probably the point where I think the Americans had in effect won the space race. The Russians were still hoping to get a man to the moon, and they still had some quite major achievements to come. One thing I do remember seeing were the television pictures that came back from Lunar Cod 1, or Lunar 17, that was the first lander with a rover that actually drove ten kilometers across the lunar surface, so the Russians were still in there but I think from Apollo 8 onwards one could say the Americans had won.

MICHAEL PORTILLO:
In the programmes in this series I’m looking at events that already have an established historical imprint that’s often very difficult to amend. There’s no question that Apollo 11 was the most memorable event in space exploration and remains so.

But people like Doug Millard and David Harland think it would be wrong if it were allowed totally to eclipse Apollo 8.

DAVID HARLAND:
It was Apollo 8 that really won the first lap on the race that set the pace.

DOUG MILLARD:
It’s the first time that human beings left planet Earth, left orbit, and actually went to another world.

SLAVA GEROVITCH:
After the success of Apollo 8 the moon race had been pretty much lost to Americans.

JIM LOVELL:
Apollo 8 being the very first flight to the Moon and the first time man had been on the far side of the Moon, to have seen the far side, to see the Earth as it really is and to bring back the memorable impressions which you saw was really the highlight of my space career.

ARCHIVE: (from Horizon: 25 Years in Space): from Apollo 8
This is Apollo 8 coming to you live from the moon. I think that each one of us carries his own impressions of what he’s seen today.

Further Reading
Andrew Chaikin
A Man on the Moon: the Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts (Penguin, 1995)
The Americans reach for the stars

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