Apollo 7 splashed down this morning in the Atlantic after eleven days in orbit. Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walt Cunningham are safely aboard the recovery ship. The mission is complete.

The redesigned spacecraft works. I want to say that plainly before anything else. Every major system — the environmental control, the fuel cells, the guidance and navigation, the engine — was tested and worked. Eleven days in space. Three men alive. Mission objectives accomplished.

There will be time for the detailed technical debrief. For now let me say two things that stood out to me during the mission.

First: Schirra has a cold. He has had a cold since the early days of the mission, which in the weightless environment of the spacecraft means the mucus has nowhere to drain — it just fills his sinuses. This is apparently extremely unpleasant. Schirra has been in a legendarily foul mood for most of the mission, which expresses itself in terse radio exchanges with Mission Control and pushback on nearly everything they’ve asked him to do. At one point they asked him to do a TV broadcast without helmets on, which Schirra refused because of the pressure changes in his sinuses — he needed the helmets available for reentry, and with his stuffed sinuses, he was worried about what the pressure change during reentry would do to his eardrums without a helmet to equalize the pressure. Mission Control pushed. Schirra pushed back. Schirra won. He will be taking off his helmet for reentry and he will be fine and his ears will not explode. He was right. He is often right.

Second, and this is the thing that I think will matter to history: for the first time, Americans watched live television from inside an American spacecraft. The crew did several broadcasts, holding up a hand-lettered sign that read “KEEP THOSE CARDS AND LETTERS COMING IN FOLKS” — a joke, a light moment, astronauts being human and funny from orbit. The picture was shaky and black and white and the resolution was not wonderful. But it was real. Those were real men, in a real spacecraft, 225 miles above the Earth, looking at a camera and talking to us.

I’m not going to dismiss how much that matters. The space program has always been something that happens in our newspapers and on our radios — descriptions of things we can’t see, confirmation of events we can only imagine. But when they pointed that camera at Schirra and he looked directly into it and waved, something changed. It wasn’t abstract anymore. He was right there. He was in space and he was right there and he was waving.

The mission is done. The spacecraft works. The crew is home. Schirra is apparently very happy to have his sinuses draining normally again.

What comes next: Apollo 8. They haven’t announced exactly what it will be — there’s been talk of flying the Lunar Module in Earth orbit, testing the LM for the first time with people aboard. But there are also rumors of something bolder. Something I can barely let myself think about yet.

Let me just sit with the success of Apollo 7 for today. One crewed Apollo mission, complete. The spacecraft works. The crew is home. Twenty-one months after the fire, we are back in space.

Grissom would recognize this spacecraft, I think. He complained about the old one. He was right to complain. This new one works.

I believe we’re going to the Moon.