Comment by alex1138

NASA certainly took many risks back then. People remember Apollo 11 for the landing, but for example on Apollo 8, with a fire roughly 2 years earlier that killed 3 astronauts, they had one manned mission (Apollo 7) and then immediately sent Apollo 8 around the moon with ONE rocket nozzle that had to work (and no LM to escape into, as the Apollo 13 astronauts had to do), basing their faith in trajectory mechanics which hadn't been tested that far out

The ejection seats on Gemini were a joke, and there's an anecdote Gene Kranz tells in his book about Gemini 9 where he thought it was too risky for them to cut away the shroud on the thing they were going to dock with (the Agena having blown up on launch) but NASA was this close to overriding him and doing it anyway (they were saved by the astronauts vetoing it, which was good because the EVA, separately, that Gene Cernan did was incredibly harrowing. he was sweating, way overworked, could barely see)