This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchel. Continuing with Bob Zimmerman, author of Genesis,

the story of Apollo 8, the first man flight to another world at Christmas time. The Saturn 5,

with Apollo 8, autopit, launches on December 21st. It is now Christmas Eve, December 24th. They are approaching the moon. They've been

inside the moon's gravity for some time now. Rank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders. Bob,

thank you for continuing this exciting story, even though I know it's going to come out all right.

This is a moment where everybody worried on Earth paying attention.

Two acronyms that NASA used again and again.

LOS of L-O-I, lunar orbital injection, and then loss of signal, LOS.

Let's deal with both of them because these

are dramatic moments. They're going very fast. They're in the moon's gravity pull. The moon is

pulling them towards it. They're outside of the Earth's gravity. However, they've got to, in

some way, put themselves into lunar orbit how do they do that

well uh it's interesting on the entire three-day journey to the moon the way the capsules oriented

they never saw the moon they were they actually were pointing back to the earth with the

engine behind them pointing at the moon so So their windows always showed the Earth.

It wasn't until just before landing, just before reaching the moon, that they finally turned

the capsule around.

But they did first.

They had to fire the SPS engine.

Now, the SPS engine was on the service module of the lunar capsule.

And it was the only engine they had that could get that into lunar orbit and get that out of lunar orbit. It was the reason Susan Borman thought Frank Bormer would die in lunar orbit because there was no redundancy with that engine.

If it didn't work, they were stuck.

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