This is CBSi on the world. I'm John Batcher 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 autopet 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. Frank 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.

Loss of LOI, 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 a lunar

orbit. How do they do that, Bob?

It's interesting on the entire three-day journey to the moon,

the way the capsule is oriented,

they never saw the moon.

They actually were pointing back to the earth the engine

behind them pointing at the moon. 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

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