Tear Jerker / From the Earth to the Moon

• The entirety of "Apollo One."
  • After the fire, Stormy's son comes home and stops short when he sees his father through the door of his study, crying uncontrollably. His mother quietly pulls him away.
  • The engineer who proved that the hatch blowing on the Liberty Bell 7 was due to a fault in the hatch and not pilot error. He visibly gets closer to tears as he explains how if he hadn't proved Gus right, Apollo 1's hatch might have had the same explosive release, in which case the astronauts could have escaped safely rather than being trapped in the fire.
    "Never did like irony much."
  • The last five minutes, where the widows of Grissom, White, and Chaffee present Deke Slayton with an astronaut pin their husbands had planned to give him after the mission, to show the grounded Slayton they considered him a real astronaut even though he'd never flown in space^note Slayton was one of the Mercury Seven but was dropped as an active astronaut due to a heart condition. He'd go on to run the astronaut program before getting to fly on the Apollo-Soyuz mission. Made more heart-wrenching by it being Truth in Television, and while the episode suggests it occurred after the hearings and investigation, it actually happened immediately after the accident, when Slayton and other astronauts and their families gathered at Pat White's home to help comfort the bereaved families. Slayton was always moved how when they were suffering the worst losses of their lives, they were thinking of him. It takes a heart of stone to get through the end of this episode without tearing up.
  • The scene (recreated in The Original Wives' Club) where Pat White comes home to find Jan Armstrong unexpectedly waiting for her and immediately realises that her husband is dead. Her wordless devastation as she tries to shield her children is much worse than any hysterical breakdown.
• The events in "1968". The successful test launch of the Saturn V cuts immediately Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. The Borman sons casually discussing the presidential race is halted when they get the newspaper proclaiming that Robert Kennedy was shot. And Susan Borman becomes convinced that the engines on Apollo 8 will fail and leave her husband, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders orbiting the moon in a flying coffin for the rest of time.
• The ending of We Interrupt This Program. Throughout the episode gruff media veteran Emmett Seaborn has been doing his best to protect the families of the Apollo 13 crew from the media scrutiny of Immoral Journalist Brett Hutchings - and is rewarded by the bosses whom he clashed with giving Hutchings the post-flight interview with Gene Kranz instead without telling him. The look on his face as he realises he's been passed over is heartbreaking (the pitying looks of the NASA men as they realise it are almost as bad) and is an unusual Downer Ending for a series that usually ended each episode hopefully.
• Susan Borman resolving to answer a magazine checklist about drinking problems honestly in The Original Wives' Club - and her crushing breakdown on realising at the end of it that yes, she's becoming an alcoholic.