this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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The most harrowing fact that I know is that during the Apollo 11 mission, as they began to enter the moon's orbit and headed behind it, they were no longer able to communicate with earth. This is indicated on the flight plan* by the note "Broken trajectory lines indicate loss of earth communications." So here's the crew, impossibly far from everything any human has ever known, for about an hour unable to hear (or most of that time even see) any sign of the only experience humanity has ever known. It's just them sandwiched between an unfamiliar moon and the blackness of space.
All of the Apollo missions, actually, including 13. In fact, Apollo 13 marks the farthest distance human beings have ever been from Earth because of the modified trajectory they had to use in order to get back to Earth faster with their damaged spacecraft.
But Apollo 13 also is the only moon mission where there was never a single individual alone in the ship when it went dark behind the moon. (On all other missions, the Command Module Pilot remained in the ship while the other two landed on the surface, so for the duration of that time, they were doing solo orbits that took them through the silent shadow of the moon.