EarthRise

Seems like yesterday.

EarthRise
[Earthrise – Apollo 8 24tth December 1968]

The far side.

69 hours, 8 minutes and 16 seconds after launch, the crew reached the far side of the Moon. They burned their engines for a lunar orbit insertion (LOI), which lasted four minutes. The burn slowed the spacecraft down so it could be captured by the Moon’s gravitational pull, making it the first ever manned satellite of another world.

The Moon is tidally locked to Earth, which means it rotates on its axis at the exact same rate that it orbits Earth. As a result, we only see one side of the Moon from Earth’s surface. Borman, Lovell and Anders were the first to see the far side…

Lovell described it during a live telecast as,

“essentially gray, no color…like Plaster of Paris or some sort of grayish beach sand.”

The Far side
[The far side of the Moon – Apollo 8 – 1968]

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