Comment by avmich
6 years ago
> Apollo 8... went to the Moon...
Early on in the Apollo program there was the plan to build a series of spacecrafts which would progressively solve intermediate problems on the path to the Moon landing. For that, a series of Apollo spacecrafts were planned, and production was running for years - Apollos flew also to Skylab and to 1975 docking with Soyuz.
Specific Apollo 8 was chosen to fly to the Moon because LEM wasn't ready - it was later tested on Earth orbit with Apollo 9 and flew to the Moon with Apollo 10 first time. So, Apollo 8 flying to the Moon isn't a separate decision, but change of existing plans - with a couple of missions swapped in time; fast, but not nearly as fast as creation from scratch of a spaceship or a program would assume.
True, but still a dizzying feat by any standard. World's in-a-class-of-its-own largest rocket, so far only tested in two unmanned launches, one of them a near disaster, stability problems now theoretically fixed, but fixes never tested in actual flight. Sure, let's improvise a new kind of missio in four months time, strap people on top of that thing, and shoot them to the Moon for the first time ever.
I don't believe that's quite how things are done these days. Wildly successful things, mind you.
I went back and looked at the significant failures that happened. They were really really lucky.