Chasing the Moon

by Robert Stone

  Only a few days after Richard Nixon was declared the winner of the 1968 presidential election, NASA’s now acting administrator, Tom Paine, finally made the official announcement: Apollo 8 would head to the Moon in late December on the most ambitious—and the riskiest—space mission ever attempted. He admitted it was entirely unclear whether the Soviet Union would undertake a similar mission as well, but it remained a distinct possibility.

  Within hours of Paine’s dramatic statement, Russia launched another Soyuz, Zond 6, on a circumlunar mission. But this time the biological specimens died when the cabin depressurized during the return voyage, a detail unreported to the world press at the time. The reentry was equally problematic, ending with a parachute failure and crash landing. Nevertheless, the Russians made every effort to save face by celebrating Zond 6 as a success. The Soviet Union then commenced a disinformation campaign designed to convince the world that Russia would attempt a piloted circumlunar mission in December. In fact, no such plans were being considered. In addition, a KGB colonel stationed in the United States was instructed to plant rumors at Cape Kennedy that Apollo 8’s Saturn V had been sabotaged. It was hoped that this report would force a sudden launch cancelation. Fortunately, the KGB plan flopped when the letter detailing the sabotage plot was placed in NASA’s crank-letter file. (It was only rediscovered when the KGB agent defected and confessed many years later.)

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  FRANK BORMAN HAD been given only four and a half months to get the Apollo 8 crew ready. Under normal circumstances they would have trained for a year and a half. In addition to preparing for the lunar portion of the mission, as the first astronauts to ride the Saturn V, they were put through a series of simulations intended to ready them for every imaginable kind of launch emergency.

  If for some reason the Saturn V should explode during launch, the command module was equipped with an escape tower system powered by a small solid rocket, which would separate and lift the spacecraft away from any conflagration. But following the Apollo fire, additional safeguards had been instituted. If there was a danger of combustion prior to launch and the escape tower was not an option, the astronauts had other alternatives. They could exit the spacecraft and access a slide-wire harness mechanism that would rapidly bring them to a shelter, or they could jump down a chute and enter a bunker equipped with padded chairs and shock absorbers intended to withstand an explosion. Both were unlikely options. Bill Anders dutifully carried out the training, but privately he voiced his belief that in such a situation there was little chance he would still be alive to make it to the doorway of the blast room in time.

  Anders did his own pragmatic and analytical risk assessment of the mission. He figured there was a one-third chance they would not come back; a one-third chance the mission would fail but they would return; and a one-third chance it would go as planned. A decade earlier he had routinely flown a nuclear-armed F-89J Scorpion from an American base in Iceland, occasionally shadowing Russian bombers near the Arctic Circle. Comparing the two assignments, Anders believed riding the first Saturn V to the Moon was far less risky; to him, Apollo 8’s odds were acceptable.

  What worried him was something else. Like nearly every other fighter pilot he had met, Anders was most concerned that he would make a stupid mistake. He would rather die than screw up.

  Borman didn’t harbor doubts about the upcoming assignment. He simply told himself it would succeed. He had done all he could to reduce the mission to the essentials. To his mind it was a conservative lunar flight plan; it didn’t involve a rendezvous and docking or any extravehicular activity. When, at a Houston press conference, ABC’s Jules Bergman pressed Borman for a comparative-risk equation, Borman had to admit spaceflight was a risky business but that only a minimum number of unknowns had been accepted for the Apollo 8 flight plan. For a risk comparison, he equated Apollo 8’s mission to a combat tour in Vietnam.

  Prior to becoming the first astronauts to fly the Saturn V, the Apollo 8 crew received emergency evacuation training in case of a launchpad explosion. Despite his assumption that there was little likelihood they would survive such a conflagration, in October 1968 astronaut Bill Anders familiarized himself with the newly installed slide-wire escape system at Pad 39B.

  It was a startling analogy at the time, but it captured how many astronauts with fighter-pilot experience viewed their unique situation. Anders felt embarrassed to be celebrated as a national hero in the press when largely unheralded American military pilots were flying from aircraft carriers, facing anti-aircraft artillery fire, and avoiding surface-to-air missiles on a daily basis.

  The war in Vietnam was one of many issues dividing political opinion in the United States, but for those working long hours to fulfill Kennedy’s deadline, there was little time to take notice. Borman had become so focused on helping NASA recover from the Apollo 1 fire and prepare for Apollo 8 that he had no opportunity to reflect on what was happening elsewhere in the world that year. The struggle for civil rights, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, the riots in the cities, and the political protests seemed as if they were happening on another planet.

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  LESS THAN TWO weeks before the launch date, the White House requested that Borman, Lovell, and Anders—then in the midst of intensive preparation—attend a black-tie dinner. This was intended as the departing president’s formal tribute to all the astronauts and to James Webb, whom Johnson would honor at the dinner with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The astronauts flew in from the Cape, while their wives arrived with a large contingent from Houston. More than 130 guests filled the dining area of the East Room, including Charles Lindbergh, his wife, writer Anne Morrow, Wernher von Braun, and the widows of two of the Apollo 1 astronauts. It was a lengthy evening, ending at midnight with a performance of excerpts from Jacques Offenbach’s A Trip to the Moon, loosely based on Jules Verne’s novel.

  Anticipation about the coming lunar flight was mixed with a sense of melancholy, this being one of the last official dinners President Johnson would host before Richard Nixon assumed the presidency. The future course of the American space program would be set by another administration, and it was unclear what that might be. The only astronaut to speak that night was Wally Schirra, who toasted the departing president with a reminder that the United States could continue to set goals and go anywhere it wanted when those in charge provided vision and leadership. Though he didn’t mention it that evening, Schirra hadn’t forgotten the words Johnson had spoken to him in confidence a few months earlier. Johnson had been in Louisiana to deliver a morale-boosting speech to workers fearing layoffs at the Saturn V’s first-stage assembly facility. The budget cuts to the space program were on everyone’s mind. Turning to Schirra, Johnson said, “It’s unfortunate, but the way the American people are, now that they have developed all of this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they’ll probably just piss it all away….”

  Competing with the formal speeches in the crowded East Room could be heard the noise of stifled coughs and sneezes. The Hong Kong flu had just been declared an epidemic by the National Communicable Disease Center, and upon their return to the Cape, the crew would enter semi-isolation, with limited physical contact with family. And so the dinner concluded with a surreal moment of last goodbyes. During his parting with his wife, Valerie, Bill Anders gave her an audiotape with a private message that was to be played should he fail to return.

  Susan Borman continued to wear a brave face and hide her fears, even as Pat White and Betty Grissom sat a few feet away. On the day of the dinner, former Manhattan Project physicist Ralph Lapp was quoted in a newspaper story, calling for the delay of the Apollo 8 launch. “We are pushing our luck,” he said. “NASA experts will assure you they have thought through the risks and have planned for them. Well, they didn’t in Apollo 1.” The Tuscon Daily Citizen published a headline
: APOLLO 8 A DEATH TRAP? BORMAN DENIES IT.

  In a year filled with much bad news, pessimists feared how it might end. The flight plan’s many unknowns and dangers prompted journalists to speculate about what might happen if the service-propulsion-system engine failed to reignite in lunar orbit to bring them back to Earth. At a press conference, one reporter forthrightly asked Deke Slayton if the crew would have the option of taking suicide pills rather than wait until their oxygen was depleted. Slayton assured reporters that if such a situation arose, “The crew would have no recourse but prayer.”

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  IN DECEMBER 1965, Susan Borman had taken her boys, Edwin and Frederick, to watch their father and Jim Lovell head into space for the first time. When Gemini 7’s Titan II began to move upward into the Florida sky, she found watching the launch unbearable. As the boys’ eyes followed the rocket’s ascent, Susan, sitting between them, averted her eyes and buried her head on Edwin’s shoulder while clenching Frederick’s right hand. Three years later she decided not to go to the Cape. Of the three Apollo 8 wives, only Marilyn Lovell was in Florida.

  Once again Susan would watch with Edwin and Frederick but this time in front of the living room television. Family and neighborhood friends came by to offer support and bring food, among them Pat White, who still lived a few doors away.

  It was approaching 7:00 A.M. in Houston. Susan had situated herself on the carpet close to the television. Frederick and Edwin sat on the couch behind her. On the television, a countdown clock was superimposed over a telephoto image of the Saturn V. Jack King announced rather matter-of-factly, “We’re coming up to the sixty-second mark on a flight to the Moon.” Susan listened to King count down, but once again she couldn’t look. She pulled her knees forward, pressed her fists into both cheeks, and tightly closed her eyes.

  Inside the spacecraft, Borman, Lovell, and Anders could feel a vibration and sense a distant rumble as they became the first humans to lie atop a Saturn V as it started to release 7.5 million pounds of thrust. The experience was suddenly far louder and more violent than anything they had anticipated during the launch simulations. Bill Anders sensed the rocket moving so violently that he wondered to himself if perhaps everyone outside was witnessing a disaster. In his mind he pictured the small guidance fins located at the base of the first stage ripping into the girders on the launch platform. Looking at the control panel didn’t offer him reassurance; the vibrations were so violent, his vision was little more than a blur.

  Luckily, he knew that if they were in danger Frank Borman would twist the launch-abort handle. Located next to Borman’s left hand, the handle would activate the launch escape-system tower. In fact, the violent buffeting had already prompted Borman to remove his hand from the abort handle to avoid grasping it to steady himself and while doing so unintentionally twist it in error.

  Outwardly the launch looked good, with the Saturn V performing just as the Huntsville team had expected. Within twelve minutes, both the first and second stages had been discarded and Apollo 8 entered Earth’s orbit, still attached to the Saturn’s third stage, known as the S-IVB. In the course of their first revolution around the Earth, Anders was so occupied with monitoring the spacecraft’s systems and making sure they were operating correctly, he had little opportunity to glance out the window. For Borman and Lovell, the view of Earth from space no longer held much novelty. Lovell was already the world’s most traveled astronaut, having spent more than seventeen days in space. Borman briefly looked out the window and reported to Houston, “It looks just about the same way it did three years ago.”

  In Houston, astronaut Michael Collins was serving as the first of three rotating capcoms—capsule communicators—a term retained from the Mercury and Gemini eras. From his seat in Mission Control, Collins calmly informed the crew they should prepare to reignite their third stage while passing over the Indian Ocean during the second orbit. The five-minute firing would increase their speed to 35,505 feet per second and cause them to pull away from the Earth’s gravitational influence, sending them on an elliptical trajectory toward the Moon. NASA’s acronym-rich language allowed the moment to pass with little residual drama. “Apollo 8, you are go for TLI,” Collins radioed, referring to trans-lunar injection. Borman’s response was equally cool: “Roger, understand, we are go for TLI.”

  CBS’s Walter Cronkite didn’t want the significance to go unnoticed by his viewers. “That’s the big decision! They are going to go for the Moon. There wasn’t any excitement from Apollo 8. No cheers that we heard. That’s the big one!…That undoubtedly was one of the most momentous—probably the most momentous—command ever given from Earth to a spacecraft in the seven years of the manned space program. And yet, as you heard, it was accepted with absolute calm.” In the Mission Control room, Collins had little opportunity to reflect on his message’s significance. It appeared to be just one step in a chain of commands. But Collins later admitted, “Jeez, there’s got to be a better way of saying this!”

  It was now time for Susan Borman to put on her public face and confront the battery of lenses and microphones on her front doorstep. The astronauts’ wives morbidly referred to the gaggle of correspondents stationed outside their houses as “the Death Watch.” Susan smiled, looked down, and answered the questions politely, once again accepting her assignment to support her husband and the space program. Privately, though, she couldn’t shake an overwhelming premonition that Frank wasn’t coming back. The newscasts had been filled with so much bad news that it seemed inevitable. She imagined how it would be told: Apollo 8 trapped in lunar orbit, circling the Moon for all eternity, carrying the bodies of three men who would never return. No one would ever look at the Moon the same way again. Late that evening when she was alone, she dutifully began to compose the words of a eulogy. She wanted it to be true to Frank’s memory instead of words written by a government speechwriter who never knew him.

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  MISSION CONTROL, WHERE Michael Collins was acting as the first-shift Green Team’s capcom, had served as the nerve center for every piloted spaceflight since the second Gemini mission in 1965. At the moment of liftoff, the Cape’s launch team handed over responsibility for the mission to Houston. The average age of the Houston flight controllers during Apollo was roughly thirty. Some were engineering students who had come to work for NASA directly after graduating from college; others received their training while in the military. Nearly all were white and male, and their names were unknown to the American public, with the exception of Christopher Columbus Kraft, director of flight operations. Shortly after Mission Control began overseeing flights from the newly opened Manned Spacecraft Center, Kraft was featured on the cover of Time magazine. The disciplined organization and culture of the rotating Apollo Mission Control teams—each shift designated with a color, which became a mark of pride—evolved directly from Kraft’s experience as NASA’s first flight director.

  The unique flight plan of Apollo 8 would require the addition of Mission Control specialists in entirely new disciplines that had not been part of previous earth-orbital missions. Teams had already been working for years designing and writing the computer programming to calculate the essential dynamics to safely achieve lunar orbit and the procedures to later return to Earth. One of the stars of the return-to-Earth team was a twenty-four-year-old mathematician who routinely put in seventy hours a week writing and refining the complex computer programs. Frances “Poppy” Northcutt was an employee of TRW, a leading defense and aerospace software and systems company contracted by NASA to handle the lunar calculations. A University of Texas math major, she was initially hired out of college as a technical aide assigned to analyze and graph data. (Her job title was “computress.”) However, it soon became apparent she was overqualified, and she was promoted to the team calculating Apollo lunar return-to-Earth operations.

  Northcutt had already taken courses in comp
uter programming and celestial mechanics in college, so she was well prepared to work on designing the basic programming that would take the first humans to the Moon. She immersed herself in the challenge, seldom reluctant to ask questions in order to better understand every aspect of the problem.

  Once Tom Paine approved the creation of software for the December lunar mission, Houston’s team of mathematicians went into high gear. During the weeks that followed, Northcutt worked with Houston’s flight controllers to familiarize them with the many intricacies of the return-to-Earth program, which was unlike anything they had worked with previously. Assigned to an operational support role at Mission Control, she was given her own station among the rows of young men wearing white shirts and headsets. As the launch date approached, Northcutt and her team were continuing to make tweaks and corrections to the computer program. The existing procedures dictated that no changes could be made to a program after a designated date, but in the case of Apollo 8 changes were being inserted well past the lock-in time and close to the launch date. Northcutt said it was not unlike a daredevil pilot flying an old biplane held together with baling wire and rubber bands, but if it worked, that was all that mattered.

  Northcutt’s very visible status as the first woman assigned a technical console in Mission Control also caught the attention of aerospace journalists looking for a story with an unusual angle. Though she was inevitably introduced to the world as “the first woman in Mission Control,” the fact that she was young and photogenic also accounted for some of the media attention. But she took it all in stride, believing that if people could learn her story and see women holding important jobs in science and technology, it might inspire others and change the prevalent sexist stereotypes. Smiling for the media’s lenses was a minor burden if it could better society.