In the year 1960, John F. Kennedy won the presidential seat after he campaigned for space exploration and missile defense in order for America to gain superiority over the Soviet Union. And so with that came the funding and realization of an American spaceflight called Apollo (named after the mythological Greek of intellectual pursuits) that landed the first man on the moon. It was by far the most famous program in the history of America, if not the history of [...]

Originally named Apollo 204, the Apollo 1 was to be the first manned spacecraft in the history of mankind. Its creation was to investigate the design of its control facilities and to examine the effectiveness of its launch assembly and operations. If all went well with the spacecraft’s performance, engineers estimated that it should have lasted 14 days in orbit to achieve its mission goals.

Apollo-Saturn 203 (AS-203) is sometimes referred to as Apollo 2. It was an unmanned mission that was launched on July 5, 1966 and was destroyed about six hours into the flight though it managed to orbit four times. The main purpose of its flight was to investigate the effects of “weightlessness” on the fuel in the S-IVB tank. It was this particular tank that the Apollo astronauts planned to use to boost them up from the earth’s orbit and towards [...]

Space mission Apollo-Saturn 202 (AS-202) or informally known as the Apollo 3 was launched on August 25, 1966. It was a sub-orbital test flight that lasted for only an hour and a half. The mission was to test the rocket for its capacity to stay longer in orbit than Apollo 2 did. The plan was to launch it higher by firing the engine four times during the flight while testing the functionality of its command and service module. In addition, [...]

Space mission Apollo 4, also known as Apollo-Saturn 501 (AS-501) was an unmanned flight which orbited three times and lasted for about eight and a half hours. It was launched on November 9, 1967 from the John F. Kennedy Space Center. The mission was to test the complete Apollo command and service module which stages are all functional. It tested for the capacity of the module’s heat shield by reproducing the lunar return speed of 25,000 miles per hour. Apollo [...]

Launched on January 22, 1968, Apollo 5 was the first spacecraft in the Apollo Space Program that contains the Lunar Module. Similar to Apollos 2, 3, and 4, Apollo 5 had no astronauts manning it. The mission lasted 11 hours and the spacecraft managed to orbit seven times. The goal of this mission was to test in space the functionality of the first ever Lunar Module to be created. The other goal was to test the engine systems that are [...]

Launched on April 4, 1968, Apollo 6 was the last unmanned test flight in the Apollo Space Program. The mission lasted for about 10 hours and despite the malfunctions, it proved to NASA that a manned spaceflight is a possibility.

Launched on October 11, 1968, Apollo 7 became the first successful manned space mission in the history of the United States. It orbited 163 times around the earth which lasted for eleven days. It had a crew consisted of Walter Schirra as mission commander, Donn Eisele as command module pilot, and R. Walter Cunningham as lunar module pilot.

On December 21, 1968, just a few months after the launching of Apollo 7, space mission Apollo 8 followed and became the first manned spaceflight that reached the moon’s orbit and landed back to earth successfully. Its crew consisted of Frank Borman as the commander, James Lovell as the navigator, and William Anders as the flight engineer. They were the first people to witness the far side of the moon with their naked eyes while onboard the spacecraft. Since they [...]

Launched on March 3, 1969, Apollo 9 was the first space flight with a crew and has both a lunar module (LM) and a command and service module (CSM). Its three-person crew consisted of Mission Commander Jim McDivitt, Command Module Pilot David Scott, and Lunar Module Pilot Rusty Schweickart. The objective of the mission was to test the several aspects of landing on the moon. This includes testing the functionality of the lunar module engines, the life support systems, the [...]