Soaring Madly Through the Mysteries That Come

Michael Collins musing on his way to the Moon:

What do we call this strange region between earth and moon? Cislunar space is the most common term, but that doesn’t say much. Is it day or night? Since we humans generally define night as that time when our planet is between our eyes and the sun, I suppose this must be considered constant daytime, but it sure looks like night out of several of my windows. 

My body ignores all these considerations and stubbornly clings to the twenty-four-hour cycle it has known for thirty-eight years. This circadian rhythm will make me drowsy at the same time my family in Houston becomes drowsy, in the late evening, and alert again as the sun rises above the Houston horizon. My wristwatch knows best, or at least better than my eyes do.
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[D]uring the flight of Apollo 8, my five-year-old son had one, and only one, specific question: who was driving? Was it his friend Mr. Borman? One night when it was quiet in Mission Control I relayed this concern of his to the spacecraft, and Bill Anders promptly replied that no, not Borman, but Isaac Newton was driving. 

A truer or more concise description of flying between earth and moon is not possible. The sun is pulling us, the earth is pulling us, the moon is pulling us, just as Newton predicted they would. Our path bends from its initial direction and velocity after TLI in response to these three magnets. Up until now the earth’s influence has been dominant, but by late tomorrow the moon will take over and our speed will begin to increase again. 

In the meantime, we have to correct our course slightly, as we have slowly been drifting off since TLI. For the three brief seconds of service module engine firing, Mike Collins will be driving instead of Sir Isaac Newton. Three seconds’ worth! I wonder at the precision of this journey, which people keep comparing with Columbus’s. 

I recall that as his crew grew more and more restless, with no land in sight, and as the pressure to turn back increased, Columbus is supposed to have doctored the daily log to show that the Niña really hadn’t traveled all that far, and therefore it was reasonable still to be out of sight of land. Imagine my trying to doctor our flight plan, in case the moon proved to be more than a three-day journey. What would I say to the Houston computers?

Too bad he didn't have an iPhone - with compute power a few orders of magnitude greater than Apollo's guidance systems - to play games and take pictures along the way.