History
The first space probe to successfully perform TLI was the Soviet Union's Luna 1 on January 2, 1959. The first human-crewed mission to successfully perform this procedure, and thus becoming the first humans to leave the Earth's influence, was Apollo 8 on December 21, 1968.
For the Apollo lunar missions, the restartable J-2 engine in the third (S-IVB) stage of the Saturn V rocket performed TLI. This particular TLI burn lasted approximately 350 seconds, providing 3.05 to 3.25 km/s (10,000 to 10,600 ft/s) of delta-v, at which point the spacecraft was traveling at approximately 10.4 km/s (34150 ft/s) relative to the Earth. The Apollo 8 TLI was spectacularly observed from the Hawaiian Islands in the pre-dawn sky south of Waikiki, photographed and reported in the papers the next day. In 1969, the Apollo 10 pre-dawn TLI was visible from Cloncurry, Australia. It was described as resembling car headlights coming over a hill in fog, with the spacecraft appearing as a bright comet with a greenish tinge.
Read more about this topic: Trans-lunar Injection
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)