What the Apollo Missions Meant | APOLLO - Missions to the Moon

NARRATOR: The moon is a necessary first step for exploration of the planets. To fly them there and return them safely in this decade is the goal of NASA's project Apollo. The early missions of Mercury and the experience from Gemini have brought this country to the next major milestone, the first Apollo 3-manned spaceflight. These are the men to fly that mission: command pilot Virgil Grissom, Mercury, Gemini, and now Apollo. His third time into space, one of the original seven astronauts. The senior pilot Edward White, he will be remembered for his spacewalk during Gemini 4. White has been specializing in the computers and training for the upcoming mission. Astronaut Roger Chaffee will man the third Apollo seat. He has been concentrating on the flight plan and experiments.

ROGER CHAFFEE: I think everybody in the space program has been asked this 50 times. And it's probably the toughest question to answer and not sound, shall we say, corny with the answer. It's a new phase of exploration. It's—you might say, and sound a little trite, it's there. We'd be neglecting our duties as people, as human beings, if we didn't try to investigate it. We're improving our engineering capability. We're building new equipment that has untold number of uses in fields that we can't even conceive of today. The scientific aspect, I don't think anybody can predict what it's going to be. Things that we'll find there. Some of the basic geologic things that we might find there that have long since been destroyed by weather on Earth might give us more insight into the birth of our universe, the birth of our solar system.

INTERVIEWER: You flew on—on Mercury, flew on Gemini, now you're flying on Apollo. Does the law of averages, so far as the possibility of a catastrophic failure, bother you at all, sir?

VIRGIL GRISSOM: No, you sort of have to put that out of your mind. There's always a possibility that you can have a catastrophic failure, of course. It's going to happen on any flight. It can happen on—the last one as well as the first one. So you'll just plan, as best you can, to take care of all of these eventualities. You get a well-trained crew, and they go fly.