 We tend to ignore the unmanned Apollo missions, but we shouldn't. Apollo 4 launched on November 9, 1967. It was the first all-up testing of a Saturn V rocket, and the first time an Apollo command module was launched into orbit. On board that command module was an automatic camera designed to take a series of pictures from an hour before to an hour after the capsule reaches Apogee, a point 11,319 miles away from the Earth. The view was spectacular.