Fifty years ago today, the first manned flight of the Apollo program was launched.
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The Apollo 7 crew was commanded by Walter M. Schirra, with senior pilot / navigator Donn F. Eisele, and pilot / systems engineer R. Walter Cunningham.
Official crew titles were made consistent with those that would be used for the manned lunar landing missions: Eisele was Command Module Pilot and Cunningham was Lunar Module Pilot.
Their mission was Apollo's 'C' mission, an 11-day Earth-orbital test flight to check out the redesigned Block II CSM with a crew on board.
It was the first time a Saturn IB vehicle put a crew into space; Apollo 7 was the first three-person American space mission, and the first to include a live TV broadcast from an American spacecraft.
It was launched on October 11, 1968, from what was then known as Cape Kennedy Air Force Station, Florida.
Despite tension between the crew and ground controllers, the mission was a complete technical success, giving NASA the confidence to send Apollo 8 into orbit around the Moon two months later.
The flight would prove to be the final space flight for all of its three crew members—and the only one for both Cunningham and Eisele—when it splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean on October 22, 1968.
It was also the only manned launch from Launch Complex 34, as well as the last launch from the complex.
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It's breathtaking that between October 1968 and July 1969 (Apollo 11) a total of five manned flights in the program were successfully completed.
Has there ever been such a time in the history of exploration?
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