We are waiting.

It’s been eight months since the fire. The capsule redesign is ongoing. The schedule has been pushed back at least a year from the original plan. The earliest possible crewed Apollo flight is now late 1968 at the optimistic end of projections. The Moon by 1969 requires everything to go right from here, and nothing has been going right.

The Soviet lunar program, meanwhile, appears to be continuing. They’ve launched unmanned Zond spacecraft — circumlunar missions, flying around the Moon without entering orbit — which seems like preparation for something. The question is whether they’re going to attempt a manned lunar flyby before Apollo can get there. A manned flyby is not a landing, but it would be another “first” in the ledger, and the Soviets clearly care about firsts.

I’ve been doing what I always do when there’s nothing active to watch: reading.

I’ve been reading about the astronaut selection process. The third group of astronauts — selected in 1963 — includes Buzz Aldrin, Mike Collins, Pete Conrad, Bill Anders, Charlie Bassett, Al Bean, Gene Cernan, Roger Chaffee (who died in the fire), and several others. The fourth group, selected in 1965, added Ed White (who also died in the fire) and others including Dave Scott, who made the emergency abort during Gemini 8.

The newer groups have different backgrounds than the Mercury Seven. NASA expanded eligibility beyond just military test pilots to include research test pilots with degrees in science or engineering. Buzz Aldrin has a doctorate in orbital mechanics from MIT. He did his dissertation on rendezvous techniques. He went to the Moon specifically because of the research he’d done on how to get there.

I find that extraordinary. A man writes a PhD thesis on orbital mechanics, and then he goes to the Moon.

Betty has been asking me what I’m going to do when the space program is over. I told her it won’t be over — there will always be more to do, further to go, other planets. She pointed out that I’ve been keeping this notebook for ten years now, through Mercury and Gemini and the Apollo preparation, and asked when I thought I’d feel like I’d seen enough.

I said: when we land on the Moon. After that, I can relax.

But first we have to actually do it. And right now we’re waiting.

It’s a long wait. But the alternative — stopping, giving up, letting the deaths of six people in two programs be for nothing — is worse.

Forward. Eventually.