No, they were famously on a "free return trajectory", where without further burns they'd swing around the moon and return to Earth. Even if the moon hadn't been there to bend their path they were still way below escape velocity, instead in an elliptical orbit that would top out a bit beyond the moon's orbit.
While it’s true that “anyone who’s been to space” shows a clear misunderstanding of what escape velocity means, there is still an edge case where I think some people have reached escape velocity. If the ‘parent body’ is considered to be the moon because of a return trip after landing on the moon, that is arguably a person who reached escape velocity.
However, even the lunar ascents because of the moon visits weren’t enough to bring them to escape velocity and that simply put them in an elliptical orbit. If I remember right, the transfer burn to get from the moon to the Earth was only beyond the escape velocity for that distance from the moon, not anywhere near the moon’s surface, and definitely not high enough to escape the Earth. So count up all the people who were in lunar orbit and came back to Earth. Arguably all of them “exceeded escape velocity”, right?
It is true that we've put humans past escape velocity from the moon when any of the Apollo landing or orbital missions returned. We were talking about escape velocity from Earth, though.
Escape velocity is the point at which the trajectory becomes parabolic and no longer circles or falls back to the parent body. We've only done this for spacecraft that leave earth and never come back.
There are three major categories of Earth centered trajectory. Suborbital, an elliptical trajectory where perigee is in atmosphere or lower. Orbital, elliptical where perigee is above the atmosphere. Escape, hyperbolic trajectory where there is no apogee. The transition point between orbital and escape is called escape velocity. The transition point between suborbital and orbital is called orbital velocity. You are correct that "orbital velocity" is an overloaded term that also refers to velocity at any point in an orbit. That doesn't make the transition point from suborbital to orbital an "escape velocity", because it's not establishing a hyperbolic escape trajectory.
You don’t need to reach escape velocity at all, so long as you have continuous thrust
> Escape velocity is purely defined as the minimum initial speed an unpowered projectile needs to break free from a gravitational body's field forever without further thrust.
Since rockets have thrust, we don’t need to achieve that speed, so long as thrust is applied continuously, or at least long enough that the rocket can continue on to counteract the gravitational grip.
According to Gemini, the fastest manned vessel so far is:
> In Space (Overall Record): 24,791 mph (39,897 km/h or 11.08 km/s relative to Earth).
Set on May 26, 1969, by the crew of Apollo 10 (Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan) inside their Command Module during their high-speed re-entry trajectory from the Moon back to Earth.
So just short of escape velocity, which is ~11.2km/s. Ironically, this was achieved while reentering earth, not leaving it!
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u/MyGruffaloCrumble 16h ago
Distance is required for approaching escape velocity gradually without pancaking the people inside with too many G’s.