All We Did Was Fly to the Moon

SUPERANNO A mini-history of America's Manned Moon Program of the 1960s and 70s. Includes all Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab flights in chronological order. Input from twenty-eight of the astronauts that made these historic flights explaining why they named their spacecraft what they did, and what was behind the design of their mission patches. Foreword by James A. Michener.

"The design of the Apollo 8 patch (mankind's first flight out to the Moon) was quite unique. Borman and I were in California working on our Apollo spacecraft when we got the word that our mission had been changed. We were going to take McDivitt's spacecraft and make a circumlunar flight around the Moon.

On the way back to Houston the next evening, Frank was flying the airplane, and since I had nothing to do I sort of sketched out what I thought would be an appropriate patch. The shape of the patch symbolizes the Apollo spacecraft. The figure 8 signifies Apollo 8 and also the flight path we took to the Moon and back. After I returned to Houston I gave my sketches to the NASA artist who made the final drawing.

By the time we started to fly Apollo 8 we wanted to name our spacecraft, but NASA said "no". The tentative name we had chosen was the "Columbiad" which was the name of the cannon in Jules Verne's book "From the Earth to the Moon." This flight and Verne's fictional story almost 100 years earlier had many similar aspects to it.

Both spacecraft carried three Astronauts.
Borman, Lovell and Anders in Apollo 8.
Barbicane, Nicholl and Ardan in Verne's Columbiad.
Both spacecraft were launched in December.
Both were launched in Florida.
Jules Verne's launch pad was only 100 miles west of Apollo 8's Cape Kennedy.
Jim Lovell
Command Module Pilot
Apollo 8"