Hello from Apollo, high atop everything

The first of the famed Apollo manned missions was also the first to carry a camera on board a ship. Taking off a year after the fire that destroyed Apollo 1 (2 through 6 seem to have been skipped), the Apollo 7 crewmen were to orbit the earth for 11 days checking life-support systems and their new, more spacious — and apparently more motion sickness-inducing — accommodations. The Apollo 1 fire only intensified interest in their mission, and the eyes of the nation were upon their ship; soon to be inside it.

On this day October 14, the black-and-white camera aboard Apollo 7 switched on, bringing television viewers the first live pictures of astronauts in space. The crew prepared a set of one-liners for the folks at home: “Hello from the lovely Apollo room, high atop everything!”

Off camera, in testy exchanges with Mission Control, commander Walter Schirra, suffering a head cold, adamantly refused flipping the switch on. With everything else the astronauts were scheduled to do around that time, including a complex mock rendez-vous of the landing module with the discarded rocket booster, Schirra said they were not prepared for a TV broadcast.