18 July 1969: The Apollo 11 astronauts were woken up this morning and asked to practice their flight checklist by their doctors, 8 hours after they took Seconal to go to sleep.

“We want to know how alert they are after taking Seconal. Later in the week we’ll give them another pill and wake them up after one hour. Later we’ll give them another test after a 4-hour sleep,” the astronauts’ chief physician Charles A. Berry told the Associated Press. The astronauts would be expected to use sleeping pills during their mission to ensure they had enough sleep for critical stages such as the lunar landing.

Check out the front page of the 18 June 1969 Daily Capital News of Jefferson City, Missouri, which carried the AP story on the astronauts’ training regime.

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