Watched Days

Apollo 7 lifted off on 11 October 1968, the first crewed flight after the fire that killed three men inside Apollo 1 during a launch rehearsal on 27 January 1967.

The commander was Wally Schirra, the only man to fly Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. He wanted to name his ship Phoenix. NASA refused. Naming a spacecraft had been banned since Grissom flew Gemini 3 as Molly Brown in 1965. So the ship that rose from the ashes had no name at all.

The flight was a complete technical success, and it carried the first live television broadcast from an American spacecraft. In part because of the tension between the crew and ground controllers, none of the three men ever flew in space again.

The clean story is that Apollo came back. The real one is that the comeback flight was the last flight for all three of them.

Source: Wikipedia, Apollo 7, checked 11 October 2026.