Apollo 50: Apollo VIII, part 1

"There's no question that it was a coffin, and I'd have flown it gladly."
-Frank Borman to Congress, after the Apollo 1 fire

In spaceflight, there are "good" missions and "bad" missions. "Good" missions are the milestones: first man in space, first orbit, first spacewalk, first flight of a new vehicle, first lunar landing, first use of a lunar rover. "Bad" missions are the dull, routine ones: a two-week endurance test, for example, or a repeat flight of the previous mission.

Frank Borman began his NASA career getting bumped from a "good" mission to a "bad" one, and ended it getting bumped from a "bad" mission to a "good" one.

Apollo 7, part 3

"You've added two burns to this flight schedule, and you've added a urine water dump; and we have a new vehicle up here, and I can tell you at this point TV will be delayed without any further discussion until after the rendezvous. [...] We do not have the equipment out; we have not had an opportunity to follow setting; we have not eaten at this point. At this point, I have a cold. I refuse to foul up our time lines this way."
-CDR Wally Schirra to CAPCOMs Jack Swigert and Deke Slayton, 23 hours into Apollo 7's 11-day mission

"It was like having a ringside seat at the Wally Schirra B[****] Circus. [...] I told Deke [Slayton] straight out that this crew shouldn't fly again."
-Director of Flight Operations Chris Kraft, in his 2001 memoir Flight: My Life in Mission Control

"I hope that the recognition you received today will restore some of your faith in your fellow travelers. We gave you a hard time once but you certainly survived that and have done extremely well since. You've done well by yourself, you've done well for NASA and I am frankly, very proud to call you a friend."
-Chris Kraft to Walter Cunningham, 2008

Apollo 7, part 2

"Deke [Slayton] said that we of the original seven are done, there's a whole new crew now. That I even got that Apollo flight was unusual. The second group was brought in to go to the Moon. We were supposed to be out of there by then. It just turned out they needed me, so I stayed for the Apollo 7 flight. That was unique."
-Wally Schirra

"By 1968, I saw a bureaucracy developing - the fun days were over."
-Wally Schirra

On February 26, 1966, six months to the day before a Command Module dubbed CM-012 arrived at the Kennedy Space Center and with five Gemini missions still to go, NASA launched its very first Apollo mission. Dubbed AS-201 (A for Apollo, S for Saturn), this launch consisted of the first flight of a Saturn IB and unmanned Apollo Command and Service Modules (CM and SM, respectively; CSM together).

Apollo 50: Apollo VII, part 1

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."
-John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961

"All of us in the flights that followed were dependent on the Apollo 7 crew doing their job, so thanks Walt and Wally and Donn."
-Neil Armstrong, October 20, 2008

"23:58:03   (Music - JINGLE BELLS - from Spacecraft VI)"
-official Gemini 6 radio transcript

Righto. We've hit the fiftieth anniversary of the first manned Apollo mission, so it's time for me to nerd out at you.

Apollo 7 launched on October 11, 1968, but to tell the full story, you have to go back six years and start on October 3, 1962. That was the day that Wally Schirra, who would later command Apollo 7, orbited the Earth six times as the fifth American in space.