It’s Sunday, May 18, 1969 and Apollo 10 rocketed out of Earth’s atmosphere flawlessly. Over the next eight days, the spacecraft will fly the same path around the moon as Apollo 11 is scheduled to fly in July. The lunar module Snoopy is intended to…

the country is just one week away from the launch of Apollo 10 — the final flight before America tries for the moon in July. Apollo 10 — scheduled for launch on May 18 from Cape Kennedy, Fla. — will be the fourth manned Apollo mission in just seven months.

It’s May 4, 1969 and Alex and Andy have a ton of space news to catch you up on, including plans for a space station orbiting earth, the case of Gordo Cooper and the difficulties astronauts will face walking on the moon.

It’s April 27, 1969, and we are just three weeks away from the May launch of Apollo 10 — the last dress rehearsal before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin attempt to land on the moon this summer. Today we’re talking about the magnificent feat of engineering…

It’s April 20, 1969 and KHCN-AM 4747 remembers the three brave Americans who died in the Apollo 1 fire a little more than two years ago. But these heroes – Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee – did not die in vain. Procedures were changed and a newer,…

It’s April 13, 1969 and, if you folks have been following Space Talk Sunday since the beginning, you know what it’s time to talk about: Project Gemini. Gemini was NASA second human spaceflight program and bridged the Mercury and Apollo projects. It…

It’s April 6, 1969: The weeks between Apollo flights gives Alex and Andy time to look back at Project Mercury, America’s first foray into human spaceflight. The goals of the program were: Orbit a manned spacecraft around Earth, investigate a man’s ability…

It’s March 30, 1969 and our beloved president, Dwight Eisenhower, has died. We at KHCN-AM 4747 are deeply saddened by this news, especially since it could be argued that Ike was the father of NASA. Less than a year after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik…

It’s March 23, 1969 and with the incredible success of Apollo 9 secured and Apollo 10 being prepped for a May lift-off, Alex and Andy dig into the story behind how the Manned Spacecraft Center came to be located in a south Texas pasture and why Houston…

It’s March 16, 1969 and the country is one step closer to beating America’s communist enemies, Russia, to the moon. The Apollo 9 mission, flown to ensure the lunar module works properly, splashed down this past week and was a rip-roaring success. The…

It’s March 9, 1969: After a three-day delay, NASA astronauts Rusty Schweickart, Jim McDivitt and David Scott launched out of Earth’s atmosphere on Apollo 9. Their mission? Test the lunar module, which will eventually bring astronauts to the surface of the…

It’s March 2, 1969: the Vietnam War is rages on, campus unrest is at an all-time high and America’s new agency, NASA, is racing to put a man on the moon before the year runs out. But, they’ve had a hiccup. The launch of Apollo 9, the first test of the…

*Cigarettes and Rocket Fuel* is a podcast from the past, a show-within-a-show and *that* show is an as-it-happens radio talk show on (fictional) radio station KHCN-AM 4747 — Houston, Texas — covering the 1969 Apollo missions and the final sprint in the…