by Robert Stone
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THE FIRST DAY of Apollo 8’s mission ended with an incident no one had planned for. As he tried to fall asleep, Borman became ill with violent nausea and diarrhea. Lovell and Anders were forced to undertake some unpleasant zero-gravity housekeeping by breaking out the few available paper towels and capturing the undulating blobs of bodily fluids floating throughout the cabin. If Borman had come down with the Hong Kong flu, all three were likely to be stricken.
Borman’s condition went unmentioned over the publicly accessible audio communications link with Houston. Instead, the crew recorded a five-minute report about the situation, transmitted though a private, tape-delayed communications channel. A small panic ensued in Houston when the tape was accessed a few hours later and the NASA physician was informed of Borman’s condition. Apollo 8 was already 125,000 miles from Earth, more than halfway to the Moon. But by the time Houston inquired about Borman’s illness the next day, it had already subsided. Luckily, it wasn’t the flu. Borman may have been experiencing what is now known as space-adaptation syndrome, a condition some astronauts undergo when adjusting to weightlessness in a roomier spacecraft.
The command-and-service module was positioned facing toward the Earth as Apollo 8 proceeded on its outbound journey. As a consequence, the astronauts never once saw the Moon during their approach. Out their windows they could only observe the Earth slowly receding in size. As early as the beginning of the spacecraft’s third day in space, the Moon was exerting a greater gravitational influence on Apollo 8 than was its home planet.
In the course of preparing to enter lunar orbit, the spacecraft was positioned to fire the service propulsion engine. Curious, Bill Anders looked out his window and could see little more than a huge black void. The absence of stars made him aware that for the first time he was looking directly at the Moon, large, silent, and entirely unilluminated. This sudden realization caused the hair on the back of his neck to stand up. “Oh, my God!” he exclaimed.
Anders’s words caused Borman a moment of concern; he’d assumed something on the instrument panel had caught Anders’s attention. But as he looked up and saw his crewmates with their faces at the window, Borman gently said, “All right, all right, come on. You’re going to look at that for a long time.” Epiphanies could wait. Successfully carrying out their assigned mission was what mattered. Borman needed all three to focus on the engine burn that would place them in lunar orbit.
Just before Apollo 8 vanished around the far side of the Moon on the morning of December 24, the Black Team’s capcom, Jerry Carr, conveyed a cryptic message: “Frank, the custard is in the oven at three-fifty. Over.” Borman was puzzled for a few seconds before he realized this was a message of assurance from Susan. Years earlier they defined their partnership: He would be responsible for piloting the dangerous planes and spacecraft, while she would attend to the duties of a military wife, which she referred to as “staying home and cooking the custard.”
Apollo 8 was scheduled to fire the large bell-shaped engine at the rear of the service module for close to five minutes shortly after disappearing behind the Moon. Should the engine fail to fire, Apollo 8 would reappear twenty-two and a half minutes later; if it fired successfully, slowing the spacecraft’s momentum, it would reappear an additional ten minutes later, captured by the Moon’s gravity in an orbit roughly seventy miles above the lunar surface. At Mission Control there was little the team of engineers could do but wait at their consoles, ready for any contingency.
On board the spacecraft was the most sophisticated miniature computer yet invented. The seventy-pound guidance computer, developed at MIT, used inertial-navigation technology to define the spacecraft’s platform, monitor its position, and keep it pointed in the right direction. It was the first portable computer to employ an integrated circuit, had a thirty-six-kilobyte memory, and operated on less power than a sixty-watt light bulb. (Half a century later, a novelty greeting card’s microchip possessed greater computing power.) But if the timing of the engine burn to place Apollo 8 in lunar orbit was too long or too short, this state-of-the-art device was incapable of providing the calculations needed to make a correction.
Those essential computations took place in Houston, where a team of engineers and technicians was standing by to analyze the data about Apollo 8’s position, velocity, and flight path. Using the cutting-edge IBM System/360 mainframes in Mission Control’s computer complex, they would then produce updated or revised calculations when needed. As a return-to-Earth program specialist, Poppy Northcutt was on hand to analyze the lunar-orbital data as soon as the spacecraft’s signal was reacquired. If Apollo 8 emerged from behind the Moon earlier than planned, its return-to-Earth trajectory would need to be checked, and if necessary, refined. If the engine had burned too long, the spacecraft could be in a dangerously low orbit and need calculations to refire the engine to make an adjustment.
At the moment Apollo 8’s signal was due to be reacquired, nothing was heard. Neither telemetry nor voice communications were received. Had the engine failed to fire, Apollo 8 would have already reappeared on a trajectory heading back to Earth. In the Houston control room, the anxiety was unbearable. Northcutt noticed no one was breathing. Everyone just kept staring at the clock as seconds clicked away. Capcom Jerry Carr was repeatedly putting out a call, “Apollo 8, Houston. Over.” Each time, only radio static came in return.
Inside the Apollo spacecraft, Carr’s voice finally came through in a crackling transmission received by the spacecraft’s high-gain antenna. “Okay, here we go,” Lovell said to Borman and Anders when he heard the call. At that moment Anders was attempting to photograph the crater Tsiolkovsky, named for Russia’s rocketry pioneer. “Go ahead, Houston, this is Apollo 8,” Lovell replied. “Burn complete. Our orbit is 169.1 by 60.5.”
A cheer was heard in the Mission Control room. Northcutt and the team of specialists immediately began analyzing the orbital dynamics, determining the calculations to make it uniform. The spacecraft’s lunar orbit had been unusually affected by “mascons,” strange irregular concentrations of mass beneath the Moon’s surface; the phenomenon had only been discovered earlier that year. In the case of Apollo 8, the mascons’ influence on the spacecraft had proven so powerful that it altered the orbit sufficiently to extend the period of silence just prior to the reacquisition of the radio signal.
After relaying the data about the engine burn and other spacecraft systems, Carr asked the question on the mind of nearly every person listening. “What does the ole Moon look like from sixty miles?”
Lovell’s response was immediate and precise. “The Moon is essentially gray,” he said matter-of-factly. “No color. It looks like plaster of Paris or sort of a grayish beach sand.” Those hoping for something a bit more romantic or surprising may have been disappointed, but his words still conveyed an undeniable sense of wonder.
Ever the business-minded commander, Borman focused on completing the ten lunar orbits and heading home. “While these other guys are all looking at the Moon, I want to make sure we’ve got a good SPS [service propulsion engine],” he called out to Houston. “And we want a ‘go’ for every revolution.”
By the beginning of the fourth revolution, the Apollo spacecraft was still pointing down, facing the lunar surface in its established circular orbit sixty miles above the Moon. Anders, whose flight designation on Apollo 8 remained lunar module pilot even though there was no lunar module on this mission, had been given the additional assignment to oversee the extensive photography of the lunar surface. NASA scientists had narrowed down a list of potential landing sites and wanted the crew to obtain images of greater quality than what had been returned by the recent orbiting robotic mapping probes. In the weeks before the launch, Anders and Lovell had taken a crash course on lunar topography and geology and acquainted themselves with the prominent landmarks. After spending a few hours shooting photographs of the lunar surface,
Anders began to find the Moon’s landscape monotonous and a bit tiresome. Nearly all the craters began to look alike.
Fortuitously, Borman needed to readjust the spacecraft’s attitude, because the ground stations on Earth were having difficulty acquiring a good signal. As he did so, he turned Apollo 8 so that it was no longer pointing downward. Anders, who was by his window, suddenly saw something he wasn’t prepared for.
“Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” Anders grabbed his camera with black-and-white film and shot the first picture of the Earth emerging on the lunar horizon.
By this point in the mission, Borman had begun making fun of Anders’s habitual attention to doing everything in accordance with the flight plan. “Hey, don’t take that,” he teased. “It’s not scheduled.”
Borman’s comment revealed one of the greatest ironies of the Apollo program. For all the rigorous planning for the first lunar mission, no one at NASA had bothered to consider the importance of the view of Earth they saw out their window. It had never been discussed in advance, nor had it been mentioned that the Earth would appear to them as if it was rising above the lunar surface in the darkness of space. The crew had been given no photographic instructions for taking a picture of the Earth, and they had no light meter to help prepare them to record the sight out the window.
Anders rapidly scrambled to find a color-film magazine. He was holding the one Hasselblad camera with the big 250-millimeter lens. That ungainly long lens had already been making Borman nervous whenever Anders moved it around in the cramped confines of the command module. “Just grab me a color exterior. Hurry up!” Anders called to Lovell, who was also searching for color film. Once the color magazine was attached to the Hasselblad, Anders had time to shoot only two images. By this point, Borman was also looking out the window. “Take several of them,” he urged.
The unplanned photograph became known as “Earthrise,” one of the most influential and iconic images of the twentieth century. Anthropologist Margaret Mead declared that the entire expense of the Apollo program was justified by the creation of that single picture. Visually, it captured the isolated fragility of the jewel-like Earth set against the barren and monochrome lunar surface.
Its widespread reproduction would occur as environmental consciousness and the philosophical concept of “spaceship Earth”—the realization that our planet was a contained, fragile, and finite system—were gaining currency in the larger culture. While many images of the Earth in space were taken subsequently during the Apollo program, no other photograph would have the same immediate and profound cultural impact as “Earthrise” when it was first seen throughout the world.
“Earthrise” was the first of two significant cultural moments that occurred in lunar orbit on December 24. The second took place on Apollo 8’s ninth orbit.
In the midst of the crew’s frenzied preparations a month earlier, Borman had received a telephone call from Julian Scheer. NASA’s public-affairs chief said he understood the flight plan had scheduled a live television broadcast from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. Borman had long opposed television broadcasts being added to Apollo missions, but after Apollo 7 there was no going back. The broadcast from the Moon would be seen by millions around the world and might result in the largest audience of all time, Scheer told him. He wouldn’t give Borman any suggestions of what to say. Instead, he merely recommended that the crew say something appropriate to the occasion.
Drafting a speech was last thing Borman had time for as he readied for the journey. Neither Susan Borman, nor Bill Anders, nor Jim Lovell had had any good ideas. So Borman contacted an old friend from the U.S. Information Agency, who in turn passed the assignment on to his close friend Joe Laitin, a journalist who had recently stepped down as assistant White House press secretary. After handing it off, Borman gave it no more thought.
Laitin struggled to find the right words. He tried to imagine what it might be like in lunar orbit, on Christmas Eve, 239,000 miles from Earth. After two terrible assassinations, violence in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic convention, and countless conflicts all over the globe, “Peace on Earth” seemed a fitting message. But Laitin was certain it would be criticized as a hypocritical sentiment when the United States itself was waging an unpopular war in Southeast Asia. He tried to craft the perfect message but found the assignment the most difficult of his career. When his wife, Christine, found him well past midnight seated at the kitchen table before his typewriter, he was in a state of despair and out of ideas. She offered one suggestion, something both universal and fundamental that she thought might fit the occasion. Laitin thought it was an inspired idea, and he typed it up and sent it on the next day.
When Borman received the memo with Laitin’s suggestions, he showed them to Lovell and Anders and asked that the notes be retyped onto fireproof paper and inserted in the flight plan.
Apollo 8 was in its ninth orbit, on the far side of the Moon, when Borman decided to focus on the upcoming broadcast. It was only a few minutes before the spacecraft would regain contact with the Earth. Recalling Scheer’s words, Borman told Lovell and Anders, “We’ve got to do it up right, because there will be more people listening to this than ever listened to any other single person in history.” With his ballpoint pen, he marked the sections on the page that each of them would speak.
Looking at Lovell, he said, “Let Bill say the first four, and you say the next four, and I’ll say the last two. There’s no more.” Borman wanted to maintain as much control of the broadcast as possible. Following the suggestion in the prepared notes, the camera would be pointed out the window and he would choose to end the broadcast at the moment when it felt right. But first they would provide their personal impressions from the past day and try to point out a few geographic features, including a possible future landing site on the Sea of Tranquility.
The television camera was attached to a window-bracket mount to provide a view of the lunar surface as it passed below, heading toward the approaching darkness on the distant horizon. As the terminator separating the sunlit portion of the Moon from the portion shrouded in darkness got nearer, the crew prepared to read. They had no reservations about the chosen passage. All were active in their local churches—Borman and Lovell were Episcopalian, while Anders was Roman Catholic—but they didn’t consider it a religious text per se. Anders thought the opening lines from the Bible’s Book of Genesis an inspired choice, since the creation story is common to all the world’s religions. And it would speak to the gravity of the occasion better than any words they might compose.
Holding the flight-plan binder with the marked page in his hands, Anders began the conclusion of the broadcast. “We are now approaching lunar sunrise. And for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you:
In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth.
And the Earth was without form and void,
and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,
and God said, “Let there be light.”
And there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good,
and divided the light from the darkness.
Anchoring the live broadcast for CBS News, Walter Cronkite was among the estimated one billion viewers watching in silence. As Anders began the reading, Cronkite momentarily thought to himself, “Oh, this is a little too much…this is corny.” A second later Lovell began reading.
And God called the light Day,
and the darkness he called Night.
And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters.
And let it divide the waters from the waters.”
And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.
And it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven.
And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Borman took the binder and began reading the bottom of the page, as the last sliver of light on the lunar surface was rapidly disappearing from view.
And God said, “Let the waters under the Heavens be gathered together into one place.
And let the dry land appear.”
And it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth.
And the gathering together of the waters he called the seas.
And God saw that it was good.
“And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.”
A second later Borman gave a signal for Anders to cut the television transmission, and screens around the world suddenly broke to an image of video static.
On board the spacecraft, but unheard over the communications loop, Lovell said, “That’s it.”
Borman prompted Lovell and Anders not to speak another word over the communications link to Houston. Concerned that Anders might restore the television signal, Borman told him, “No. Leave it off. Great. Great!”
Despite only a minimum of preparation, Borman realized, the broadcast had ended with perfect timing. “Hey, how can you beat that? Jeez, we just went into the terminator right in time.”