First Manned Lunar Spaceflight: "Debrief: Apollo 8" 1969 NASA narrated by Burgess Meredith

more at http://quickfound.net/

"The story of man's first journey into orbit around the moon, with comments on the significance of the flight by several prominent Americans. Includes photographs of the lunar surface, Earth seen from the Moon, and activities of the astronauts."

Originally a public domain film from the US National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Apollo 8, the second crewed mission in the United States Apollo space program, was launched on December 21, 1968 and became the first human-crewed space craft to leave Earth orbit, reach the Earth's Moon, orbit it and return safely to Earth. The three-astronaut crew — Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot James Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders — became the first humans to travel beyond low Earth orbit, the first to see Earth as a whole planet, and then the first to directly see the far side of the Moon. The 1968 mission, the first crewed launch of a Saturn V rocket, was also the first crewed launch from the John F. Kennedy Space Center, Florida, located adjacent to Cape Canaveral.

Originally planned as a second Lunar Module/Command Module test in an elliptical medium Earth orbit in early 1969, the mission profile was changed in August 1968 to a more ambitious Command Module-only lunar orbital flight to be flown in December, because the Lunar Module was not yet ready to make its first flight. This meant Borman's crew was scheduled to fly two to three months sooner than originally planned, leaving them a shorter time for training and preparation, thus placing more demands than usual on their time and discipline.

Apollo 8 took three days to travel to the Moon. It orbited ten times over the course of 20 hours, during which the crew made a Christmas Eve television broadcast in which they read the first 10 verses from the Book of Genesis. At the time, the broadcast was the most watched TV program ever. Apollo 8's successful mission paved the way for Apollo 11 to fulfill U.S. President John F. Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s. The Apollo 8 astronauts returned to Earth on December 27, 1968, when their space craft splashed down in the Northern Pacific Ocean...

Apollo 4 and Apollo 6 had been "A" missions, unmanned tests of the Saturn V launch vehicle using an unmanned Block I production model of the Apollo Command and Service Module in Earth Orbit. Apollo 7, scheduled for October 1968, would be a manned Earth Orbit flight of the CSM, completing the objectives for Mission "C".

Further missions depended on the readiness of the Lunar Module (LM). Apollo 8 was planned as the "D" mission, to test the LM in a low Earth orbit in December 1968 by James McDivitt, David Scott and Russell Schweickart, while Borman's crew would fly the "E" mission, a more rigorous LM test in an elliptical medium Earth orbit as Apollo 9, in early 1969.

But production of the LM fell behind schedule, and when Apollo 8's LM arrived at Cape Canaveral in June 1968, significant defects were discovered, leading Grumman, the lead contractor for the LM, to predict that the first mission-ready LM would not be ready until at least February 1969. This would mean delaying the "D" and subsequent missions, endangering the program's goal of a lunar landing before the end of 1969.

George Low, the Manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, proposed a solution in August to keep the program on track despite the LM delay. Since the Command/Service Module (CSM) would be ready three months before the Lunar Module, a CSM-only mission could be flown in December 1968. Instead of just repeating the "C" mission flight of Apollo 7, this CSM could be sent all the way to the Moon, with the possibility of entering a lunar orbit. The new mission would also allow NASA to test lunar landing procedures that would otherwise have to wait until Apollo 10, the scheduled "F" mission. This also meant that the medium Earth orbit "E" mission could be dispensed with. The net result was that only the "D" mission had to be delayed...

The Saturn V rocket used by Apollo 8 was designated SA-503...