Settle a family argument: Which went to the moon first, Apollo 8 or Apollo 11?

[markdash]

@Mach Tuck

Agree. Another way to look at it is in terms of the amount of risk assumed. Apollo 11 was certainly risky because of all the firsts, and a few instances for the possibility of single-point failures.

But Apollo 8 was in some ways more risky because most of the flight was subject to a single-point failure: they flew without a lunar module. Had they suffered an Apollo 13 type of problem they would have been SOL.

Borman, Lovell and Anders were most definitely out on a rather fragile limb. To say they didn’t go to the moon is a slander.

I think it was rather miraculous that NASA was able to use the LEM in the capacity they did on Apollo 13. There were any number of other vital, non-redundant systems in the service/command modules that could have been damaged by the explosion, yet were not.

What I’m trying to say is that every mission to the moon has a ton of risks and non-redundancies (heat shield, service module engine, etc.). It’s only vaguely correct to give Apollo 8 special credit for that.

Of course, this is tangential to the point of the thread and it really just boils down to a semantic issue.

[Sakuma_Drops]

@AlsoNamedBort

And this has gone way beyond the game. I think we would’ve accepted Apollo 8, 11, Eagle, etc. as correct answers. There’s been a couple times where the game has the outright wrong answer, and we always accept the actual right answer. We’ll also accept the wrong answer if that’s what the card had.

My family has accepted that sometimes with “casual” trivia games, there might be either a question that is poorly worded (thus making multiple answers “correct” in some fashion), or may become outdated depending on how old the game itself is. Thus we tend to give some leeway in situations like those.

A game that we used to play occasionally was a Trivial Pursuit edition from 1980. One of the questions was “What is the least populous state in the United States?” The answer on the card was Alaska, which was true in 1980, but the current correct answer to the question is Wyoming. So in that case we decided that either Wyoming OR Alaska were acceptable answers.

The way that the Apollo question was worded just left too much room for argument. I suspect that if this question had been posed on, say, Jeopardy, it would have been “This was the first mission to land on the Moon”, or “This mission was the first to orbit the Moon.”

[Llama_Llogophile]

@markdash

I think it was rather miraculous that NASA was able to use the LEM in the capacity they did on Apollo 13. There were any number of other vital, non-redundant systems in the service/command modules that could have been damaged by the explosion, yet were not.

What I’m trying to say is that every mission to the moon has a ton of risks and non-redundancies (heat shield, service module engine, etc.). It’s only vaguely correct to give Apollo 8 special credit for that.

It’s true that they were lucky on Apollo 13. But it’s also true that using the LM in that manner was a long planned for contingency. Even the square pegs / round hole problem and fix was known in advance, despite the dramatization in the movie.

Also correct to say that every Apollo mission - particularly those that left earth orbit - were quite risky despite the redundancies. But Apollo 8’s extra risk was definitely not vague or theoretical. They were the only mission to leave earth orbit without a LM. That’s one hell of a lot of redundancy to leave behind. Frankly, I’m amazed they approved it. That level of risk would never be accepted today.

[Sakuma_Drops]

@Mach Tuck

Also correct to say that every Apollo mission - particularly those that left earth orbit - were quite risky despite the redundancies. But Apollo 8’s extra risk was definitely not vague or theoretical. They were the only mission to leave earth orbit without a LM. That’s one hell of a lot of redundancy to leave behind. Frankly, I’m amazed they approved it. That level of risk would never be accepted today.

Amazing, indeed. From what I’ve read it was mostly a combination of “the LM isn’t ready for an LEO test mission/a lunar orbit mission now means that the Apollo 10 crew will have less to test for the first time/we need to stay on track for a 1969 landing and this is the best way to do it” that got Apollo 8 approved. Anxiety over the Soviet Luna probe program may have also played a role.