Video shot by Joshua Ballinger, edited and produced by Jing Niu and David Minick. Click here for transcript. (video link)
For the first episode in “The Greatest Leap,” we focused on the Apollo 1 fire and NASA’s return to flight after that tragic accident. Without that turnaround, the United States might never have landed on the Moon during the 1960s, or at all. Now, we offer a teaser for the second part of the series, which will publish on Tuesday, December 12.
After the successful Apollo 7 mission, NASA had a choice. It could play it safe, or the agency could push its chips into the middle of the table and go all-in on the Moon. This led to perhaps the gutsiest call in spaceflight history: a mission profile that took humans beyond low-Earth orbit and deep into the gravity well of another world—the Moon. Our video and story includes interviews with the flight controllers and engineers who helped make these critical decisions and delivered a key victory in the Space Race.