by Robert Stone
On Earth, everyone absorbed what they had just witnessed. Cutting away from the snowy screen, the CBS News director showed Walter Cronkite atypically wearing his glasses onscreen. Cronkite attempted to regain his composure as he looked into the camera. “Well…quite a finish for this last transmission from the Moon.”
Apollo 8’s Christmas Eve broadcast had preempted the network’s prime-time evening schedule. In a bit of network housekeeping, Cronkite informed his viewers that in a few minutes they would resume their announced programming with a new episode of 60 Minutes, a CBS program that had premiered three months earlier. Tonight’s holiday episode would feature Christmas Eve conversations with two women widowed earlier in the year, Coretta Scott King and Ethel Kennedy.
Throughout the United States, the Genesis broadcast was viewed in living rooms illuminated by Christmas trees and holiday decorations. The family of novelist William Styron was celebrating Christmas Eve with composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein and his family at their rural Connecticut farmhouse. This had become an annual tradition for the two families. Styron had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction earlier that year; Bernstein was at that moment unquestionably the most famous name in the American classical-music world. But like many intellectuals and artists of the late 1960s, Bernstein had no interest in the American space program, dismissing it as an expensive technocratic boondoggle. Styron was among the few who wanted to follow the progress of Apollo 8 on television that evening, something his host reluctantly agreed to allow.
As Anders began his reading, the holiday conversation and the laughter in the room grew quiet. Partygoers furtively looked toward the television to see what was going on. “I remember that a chill coursed down my back and an odd sigh went through the gathering like a tremor or a wind,” Styron recalled. He looked over at his host “and saw on his face an emotion that was depthless and inexpressible.”
In Mission Control, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were seated next to the Maroon Team capcom, Ken Mattingly, as the broadcast proceeded. In the back of the room, Chris Kraft, George Low, Robert Gilruth, and Julian Scheer were watching as well. Shortly after the broadcast had concluded, Scheer took a call from an Asian journalist covering the flight in Houston. The reporter needed to file his story in a few minutes and was in a panic, having been unable to write down everything the astronauts had said.
“We heard the astronauts read something. Can you give me the words over the phone from the mission transcript?”
Scheer asked him, “Where are you calling from?”
“From my hotel room.”
Scheer then calmly instructed him, “Open the drawer of the table next to your bed. In it you will find a book. Turn to the first page. The words you are looking for are there.” Astounded, the journalist thanked Scheer for being so accommodating.
The American reaction to the Genesis reading was overwhelmingly favorable. However, some misinterpreted the intent of the reading as a provocative endorsement of American religious faith’s superiority over communism. At the opposite extreme, atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair commenced a very public court battle against NASA to prevent any religious observances on future spaceflights. O’Hair announced her lawsuit, arguing that the astronauts had violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. In response, grassroots church groups flooded NASA with petitions of support. O’Hair attempted to take her fight to the U.S. Supreme Court, but it went no higher than the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which ruled against her.
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ON THEIR TENTH and final orbit, Borman, Lovell, and Anders readied their spacecraft for the decisive engine burn that would increase their velocity and push them out of lunar orbit. Now the calculations and preparations that Poppy Northcutt and others on the return-to-Earth team had formulated to bring Apollo 8 home would be put to the test.
The spacecraft was on the far side of the Moon, out of contact with Earth, when the crew reignited the large bell-shaped engine for slightly less than three and a half minutes and increased their velocity to 6,000 miles per hour. Once again there was no immediate sign of the spacecraft at the moment it was due to reappear. Capcom Ken Mattingly called out repeatedly, “Apollo 8, Houston,” for two minutes, but the audio channel was silent. Fortunately, the eighty-five-foot dish antenna at Australia’s Honeysuckle Creek ground station began to receive radio-telemetry data before any voices were heard. On the spacecraft, Bill Anders realized the high-gain antenna was in the wrong position and corrected the alignment.
“Please be informed there is a Santa Claus,” Lovell was heard announcing to the world moments later. In Houston, it was only a few minutes past midnight on Christmas Day, and an immediate sense of relief filled Mission Control after a very tense twenty-four hours. An exhausted flight-operations director Chris Kraft immediately headed home. On the large display screen at the front of the Mission Control room, holiday colors surrounded a map of the Earth. Only now was it deemed the right moment to bring out a decorated Christmas tree, which was placed at the front of the control center.
It wasn’t entirely evident to anyone at the time, but the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union came to a quiet close on that Christmas Day. Planning for a Russian piloted lunar program continued, but few believed it likely that a Slavic voice would be the first heard from the Moon, unless the Apollo program experienced another significant setback. With Apollo 8’s splashdown on December 27, the Associated Press released another of its “space box scores,” tallying up the United States’s standing versus that of the Soviet Union. Some thought it trivialized an important moment in history, as if it were nothing more important than a sports championship.
The day after Apollo 8’s splashdown, the editors of Time met to discuss their selection for the news magazine’s annual “Man of the Year” cover feature. Weeks earlier, as 1968 was drawing to a close, the editorial board had tentatively chosen “the Dissenter” as the focus for their yearly feature. The past twelve months had been marked by continuous protests against war, militarism, repressive authoritarian governments, racial injustice, and academic censorship, and often answered by state violence and incarceration. Time’s editors acknowledged that dissent was motivated by an idealistic belief in a better tomorrow—a political vision of a future markedly different from what had been celebrated at the New York World’s Fair four years earlier.
However, the successful conclusion of Apollo 8 prompted Time’s editors to reassess their plans and consider the significance of the just-completed space mission through a lens of history. Announcing that Borman, Lovell, and Anders would grace the cover as the magazine’s “Men of the Year,” Time’s editors acknowledged the important role of the dissenter as a force for change while suggesting that the flight of Apollo 8 “shows how [the dissenter’s] utopian tomorrow could come about.” Apollo 8, the editors believed, would stand as a lasting example of what humans could do if, rather than turning inward or passively withdrawing from society, they chose to work together to challenge the unknown and face dangerous odds—even when reason argued otherwise.
The success of Apollo 8 also brought renewed attention to the hundreds of thousands of engineers, contractors, and scientists who were not represented on Time’s cover but had played a part in making history. NASA’s new acting administrator awkwardly attempted to celebrate them by hailing the moon voyage as “the triumph of the squares.” Despite her familiarity with a slide rule and the IBM mainframe, Poppy Northcutt was hardly anyone’s idea of a square, and the success of Apollo 8 only heightened the media’s attention to her role in the mission. But she was also increasingly aware of the responsibility that came with her fame. Were she to make a mistake, it might be used to justify the prevailing negative stereotypes about women in math and the sciences. She wasn’t traveling aboard the Apollo spacecraft but she was another space-age pioneer,
publicly breaking barriers and heading into uncertain territory.
Not long after the first features telling her story appeared on television and in newspapers, Northcutt started to receive fan mail. Girls and young women wrote her letters revealing that, before they saw her profiled, they hadn’t been aware women were employed as engineers in the space program or worked at Mission Control. Her fame extended to the sorting rooms of the post office. One letter delivered to her home was simply addressed: “Poppy, Space Program, U.S.A.”
Her employer, TRW Inc., decided to feature her in a national ad campaign, the first time the Fortune 500 corporation had chosen to highlight one of its employees in such an advertisement. She became the public face of TRW. Marketing one of the nation’s leading defense and aerospace contractors as young, smart, and committed to changing the future was a bold departure from ads featuring images of missiles and submarines. And the campaign was a notable success. The positive response resulted in more fan mail—even proposals of marriage—and an unexpected side effect: As TRW’s most publicly visible employee, Poppy was almost impossible to fire.
Since she came to work on the space program, Northcutt had been irritated by a clause in the Texas labor law. Despite performing the same work as her male colleagues and working the same extended hours—often six days a week—she was paid 23 percent less. She found great meaning in working on Apollo, but the inequality of compensation was especially frustrating. Culturally, she observed that male engineers were always assumed to be competent unless proven otherwise. This was never the case with women, who were first required to demonstrate their competence.
Poppy Northcutt, who achieved fame as the first female flight controller in Mission Control during the flight of Apollo 8, appeared shortly thereafter in a successful advertising campaign for her employer, TRW, an aerospace, defense, and computer contractor.
Northcutt began to read about an emerging movement advocating for women’s rights and for the elimination of sex discrimination in the workplace. “If anyone has the freedom to stick their neck out, it’s me,” she thought to herself. “And it’s my obligation to do so, since I don’t carry the same risk as the secretary who puts herself on the line.” She learned about the National Organization for Women and their plan for a nationwide strike. When the date arrived, she told her boss she had decided to take the day off. She didn’t tell him why, but the reason wasn’t secret for long—she was recognized in a public demonstration outside a Houston federal building. Life magazine took notice as well and featured her in a cover story on an emerging phenomenon the magazine referred to as “Women’s Lib.”
Though Time magazine had chosen to alter the subject of its “Man of the Year” issue at the last moment, from within the story of Apollo 8 itself had emerged one of its “dissenters,” motivated by idealism to effect change and promote equality though protest.
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FRANK BORMAN HAD returned to Earth as one of its most famous citizens. He decided to stick with his decision never to command another space mission. Unlike Lovell and Anders, he had no great desire to walk on the Moon. Never again would Susan need to endure a week as stressful as the one she had just experienced. Now there were new demands, but of a safer sort. Within a month Borman and his family were sent on a tour of eight European countries, where they would be greeted by, among others, the pope, Queen Elizabeth, Spain’s general Francisco Franco, and France’s president Charles de Gaulle.
When Richard Nixon was sworn in as the thirty-seventh president of the United States three weeks after Apollo 8’s splashdown, Frank and Susan Borman were given VIP seats only a few rows behind the podium. The nation was growing increasingly polarized, separated by racial and generational divisions exacerbated by political attitudes toward the war. But with Apollo 8’s accomplishment, the country was reminded of another more promising possibility.
In his inaugural address, President Nixon quoted a line by poet and former librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, whose essay had appeared on the front page of The New York Times as the Apollo 8 astronauts were heading homeward. “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”
CHAPTER SIX
MAGNIFICENT DESOLATION
(1969)
IT WAS A glorious New York tradition, which originated at the end of the nineteenth century with the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. Since then Manhattan had held more than 160 ticker-tape parades to celebrate visits from kings, queens, generals, sports heroes, explorers, and aviators. But by the late 1960s they were becoming a rarity. Nevertheless, when the Apollo 8 astronauts arrived in the city in early January 1969, there was no question: A ticker-tape parade was obligatory. It was New York City’s first in three and a half years.
More than two hundred tons of confetti and scrap paper were transformed into a chaotic celebratory blizzard by the force of the bitter January winds rushing down the canyon of Sixth Avenue. Sitting for a half hour in the numbing cold on an elevated limousine platform, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders managed to smile and wave at the hundreds of thousands of well-wishers standing on the streets and peering from windows.
When the motorcade crossed onto Broadway, the astronauts noticed that the avenue’s signs had been changed to read APOLLO WAY. At the United Nations, Secretary General U Thant welcomed the astronauts as the world’s first true universalists. “We saw the Earth the size of a quarter,” Borman responded. “There really is one world—we are all brothers.”
At precisely the same moment that New Yorkers were turning out in the bitter cold to cheer and celebrate the epic achievement of Borman, Lovell, and Anders, journalists were gathering in an auditorium in Houston to meet another Apollo crew. Here there were no celebrations or marching bands. Instead, NASA was introducing the newly named crew of what was expected to be the first mission to attempt a landing on the Moon in just six months. Designated Apollo 11, it would undertake the landing as long as Apollo 9—the debut flight of the lunar module in Earth’s orbit, in March—and Apollo 10—a test of the lunar module’s systems a mere ten miles above the Moon’s surface, two months later—were both successful. All three of the Apollo 11 astronauts were known to those who had covered the space program in recent years. The commander was Neil Armstrong, well remembered from the crisis on Gemini 8; the lunar-module pilot was Gemini 12’s ace spacewalker Buzz Aldrin; and the command-module pilot was Michael Collins, a veteran of Gemini 10. Collins would remain in orbit above the Moon as the lunar module attempted its landing and return.
The festivities in New York overshadowed much of the news from the Houston press conference. And unlike the Apollo 8 crew, Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins were fairly reserved when appearing in public.
No one could argue with Deke Slayton’s selection of Armstrong to command this mission. He and Aldrin had just come from serving as part of the Apollo 8 backup crew, so their assignment to Apollo 11 followed Slayton’s normal rotation. Michael Collins, who had been replaced on Apollo 8 by Jim Lovell due to his surgery, had since returned to flight status and been reassigned by Slayton to Apollo 11’s third couch.
The ungainly and dangerous Lunar Landing Research Vehicle was nicknamed the “Flying Bedstead.” In May 1968, Neil Armstrong narrowly escaped an LLRV accident in Houston when his vehicle suddenly became dangerously unstable, causing him to fire his ejection seat when only 200 feet above the ground.
A perfectionist focused on obtaining every bit of valuable data, Armstrong personified the disciplined, conscientious test pilot. His calm, reticent, soft-spoken style was the antithesis of the macho jet-jockey stereotype. Still, Armstrong’s handling of the emergency on Gemini 8 and his jet combat experience during the Korean War, while flying th
e experimental X-15 rocket plane, were legendary. But a crisis when at the controls of the experimental Lunar Landing Research Vehicle in May 1968 was arguably the most impressive demonstration of Armstrong’s unique skills as a pilot. Nicknamed “the Flying Bedstead” due to its ungainly spindly appearance, the LLRV had been created to train the astronauts who would land the lunar module on the Moon’s surface. It was powered by a single large jet engine positioned vertically downward; sixteen smaller supplemental chemical thrusters allowed the LLRV’s pilot to hover, maneuver, and land in a rough simulation of the Moon’s one-sixth-gravity environment. But the LLRV was also a dangerously finicky contraption, and during what appeared to be a routine training flight at Houston’s Ellington Field, Armstrong’s vehicle began to gyrate wildly when only two hundred feet above the ground. As it pitched up at an angle, Armstrong miraculously fired his ejection seat and parachuted to safety, seconds before the LLRV crashed and burned not far from the Manned Spacecraft Center. Film of his accident and escape astounded all who viewed it.
Ambitious and brilliant, Aldrin was a fortuitous choice to serve as the lunar-module pilot for the first landing. His intense personality was nearly the opposite of Armstrong’s, whose deceptive lack of ego could make him disappear in a crowd. During a meeting, Aldrin would make others aware of his extensive knowledge about an esoteric subject, often going into detail about things that were not the central focus of the discussion. He was the kind of person who enjoyed tackling theoretical challenges, tirelessly focusing his energies to arrive at the perfect solution.
During the Houston press conference, Aldrin revealed that his late mother’s maiden name was Marion Moon. Kept from the press and the public, however, was a sad secret. His mother’s death the previous year had been the result of an overdose of sleeping pills, and he blamed himself for her suicide. She had struggled with depression in the past, and as attention surrounding her famous son increased, so did her anxiety, which proved overwhelming. The social stigma surrounding mental health problems at the time was both powerful and pervasive, making any public mention of her suicide impossible. With Life magazine and NASA’s public-affairs office highly invested in promoting the astronauts as perfect American role models, such sensitive personal details were kept confidential.