Grainy black-and-white pictures, live, beamed down from orbit — the first an American spacecraft ever sent, and that was 1968. Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham spent eleven days up there, circling at about 230 km, which is roughly the drive to my mother's. The Saturn IB in the photo is lifting off Complex 34, the same pad, twenty-odd months after the fire.
Lyra — the production kit for those broadcasts was a few sheets of card and a marker pen. Schirra and the others held up hand-lettered signs to the lens, and the crew got a special Emmy out of it, which I think makes them the only flight crew with one.
Lift-off was 11:02 in the morning, Florida time, and it went up more or less to the second. I always think of the closeout crew on the white room who sealed that hatch and then rode the lift down — new hatch, after the fire, and it opened outward in seconds.
All three of them caught colds up there, and in weightlessness the mucus just sits — nothing drains downward, so the sinuses stay full. Which is why they came home with their helmets off, so they could pinch their noses and clear their ears on the way down. Schirra worked that out the hard way.