Apollo 8 Mission, Part 3

Video from the channel Ugazzovision about Apollo 8, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 2:01:02. Language: English. Video type: Archive footage.

Third part of CBS News's special color coverage of the Apollo 8 flight, presented by Walter Cronkite from the network's space center in New York. It covers the mission's final fifty minutes (service module separation, reentry, communications blackout, parachute deployment and splashdown) and the subsequent recovery of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders. There are links with the carrier Yorktown, with commentary from Houston mission control by Paul Haney, and with a mock-up of the capsule at the North American Rockwell plant in Downey, California, where the entry indicator that monitors the trajectory is explained. The broadcast retains the ads from Western Electric, the program's sponsor.

This is the live broadcast of the morning of splashdown. Reentry was scheduled for 10:37 a.m. Eastern time, and the capsule touched the water at around 4:51 a.m. local time, still in darkness, in the central Pacific, about a thousand miles southwest of Hawaii. The images from the Yorktown arrived via the ATS-1 satellite, with frequent cutouts due to interference from the ship's radar.

The commentators point out that it was the fastest reentry ever attempted by a crew, around 25,000 mph, with the heat shield at about 5,000 degrees and an entry corridor of only a couple of degrees. They also note that it was the first nighttime splashdown. After a radio blackout of about three minutes, the crew reported being in good condition. The capsule remained floating upright about 5,000 yards from the carrier. The swimmers waited for first light to attach the sea anchor and flotation collar, and the astronauts were lifted one by one into a helicopter in a rescue basket. The broadcast closes by reviewing the program's next steps: Apollo 9 in Earth orbit to test the lunar module, Apollo 10 around the Moon, and the attempted Moon landing around mid-July.