Shoot for the Moon

by James Donovan

  Now, Slayton told Borman—a “tightly wound little sumbitch,” in the words of another astronaut—the same thing: The next flight was going to the moon. Instead of flying the mission after McDivitt’s—blasting into high Earth orbit, around four thousand miles up, to test the command-service module and LM in deep space—did he want to go around the moon instead? Not only would this enable the agency to leapfrog a testing step, but it would scoop a possible similar Soviet flight. NASA higher-ups had just received word from the CIA that the Soviets were planning a lunar flyby before the year ended. That seemed to confirm what was already suspected—the previous fall, two unmanned Russian satellites had linked up, and two more had docked just a few months ago, in April. The rumors of a monster rocket more powerful than the Saturn V with a total thrust estimated in the fourteen-million-pound class—Webb’s Giant—appeared to be true. Though the Soviets denied it publicly, it was clear that they had the moon in their sights. It looked doubtful that Webb’s Giant would be ready to go to the moon very soon, but the Proton rocket, which had recently launched an unmanned Zond around the moon, could probably do the same thing while carrying a cosmonaut or two.

  There were two other important reasons for sending Apollo 8 around the moon. First, the flight would enable the crew to photograph potential landing sites for the lunar-landing mission. That information would prove invaluable. Second, the flight would add important data about mascons, for “mass concentrations”—areas on the moon, always in the mares (the large, dark plains mistaken by early astronomers for actual oceans), where regions of denser material under the surface cause an increase in gravitational attraction. The resulting orbit perturbations had first been noticed in the Lunar Orbiter missions sent around the moon in 1966 and 1967. The mascons’ origins, and almost everything else about them, were unknown—some scientists postulated meteorites that slammed into a thick primordial mush billions of years ago and remained intact; others believed it was a long sedimentary process. More information was needed before men on precisely calculated trajectories tried to land, since a slight change could mean a huge difference to a LM with a limited fuel supply. The moon still held many mysteries, and some of them had to be solved before a lunar landing could be deemed safe.

  In 1961, when Kennedy had issued his challenge, no one knew exactly what the surface of the moon was like.

  Galileo Galilei, the early-seventeenth-century Italian polymath, was not the inventor of the telescope—at least one man, a Dutchman named Hans Lippershey, had applied for a patent for one in 1608. But the more powerful telescope Galileo constructed the next year was the first to be aimed skyward. One of his first objects of study was the moon, and his detailed, accurate ink renderings of its surface—its mountains, craters, and seas—would not be significantly improved until two centuries later; even the most powerful terrestrial telescopes improved only topography, not composition. At the time of Kennedy’s moon speech, no one knew for sure whether its surface was hard or soft, rock or dust, thick or thin. This information, of course, was essential to have before engineers, Russian or American, could plan a lunar landing. Toward that end, both countries soon initiated unmanned programs specifically designed to analyze the moon’s surface.

  The Russians began sending unmanned probes toward the moon in 1959; this was their Luna program. In January of that year, Luna 1 was intended to hit the moon, but it missed and became the first man-made object to orbit the sun. In September 1959, Luna 2 crashed onto the lunar surface, the first man-made object to hit the moon. Luna 3 circled the moon in October 1959 and sent back the first photos of its far side, which can never be seen from Earth. The next five Luna missions attempted to achieve a soft landing using retro-rockets, but each one either missed the moon or unintentionally crashed into it. Finally, in February 1966, Luna 9 achieved a soft landing, the first on another heavenly body, and returned several panoramic photos—the first close-up images of the lunar surface. Also that year, three more Lunas went into orbit around the moon; two of them gathered scientific data, and one returned high-resolution photos. In December 1966, Luna 13 soft-landed and transmitted more panoramas.

  The first American probes launched toward the moon were part of the Ranger program, which began in 1959; they were designed to transmit photographs of the moon’s surface until they hit it and were destroyed. The first six Ranger flights failed, but Ranger 7, in July 1964, and two follow-ups in 1965 were all successful. They sent a total of 17,225 images of the lunar surface, sharp, up-close photos with details of its pockmarked seas, craters, and plains, magnified about a thousand times more than ever before. The solar-powered Ranger spacecraft were the first of a new generation of sophisticated probes that would explore not only the moon but the planets beyond it. Most experts, after analyzing the Ranger photographs, were of the opinion that the moon’s surface could support a spacecraft landing, though no one was absolutely sure.

  The next U.S. program provided a more definite answer. Surveyor was designed to make a soft landing, take close-up photos, and analyze the hardness and composition of the lunar soil. On June 2, 1966, the first Surveyor—more than twice as large as the two-foot-tall Luna lander—cut its three small rockets off at thirteen feet above the moon, fell the remaining distance, bounced once on its tripod landing gear, and settled safely onto a demonstrably hard surface with only a thin covering of dust. That eased a lot of fears at NASA; for starters, it gave the engineers a better idea of what kind of landing gear they’d need. Four more Surveyor landings over the next twenty months confirmed a solid basaltic crust, one that would support a lunar lander…at least in the areas examined by Surveyor. And the moon’s color, to almost no one’s surprise, was various shades of gray.

  One more item was necessary—a photo map of the surface so a suitable landing site could be selected. Getting that map was the job of the Lunar Orbiter program, which from August 1966 through November 1967 sent five unmanned probes into orbit around the moon. All five worked perfectly, and they also provided information about radiation levels near and on the moon. Their photos, with a resolution of two hundred feet or better and sometimes as close as three feet, enabled NASA to map 99 percent of the moon, both the far and near sides, and Apollo 8 photographs would, it was hoped, improve on even these. By the time NASA was ready to send a man to the moon, sufficient mapping would be available.

  The change in plans for the Apollo 8 mission was due largely to George Low, the newly hired Apollo program manager. While looking for ways to keep the Apollo momentum going and maybe counter yet another Soviet space spectacular, he had come up with a plan.

  The original idea was to test the combined operations of all modules—command, service, and lunar—in Earth orbit. But since Grumman’s LM still wasn’t ready, the mission would essentially be a repeat of Apollo 7’s journey. Instead of an Earth-orbital flight, how about making the next flight, Apollo 8, circumlunar? Sending a crew to the moon without the LM would provide Mission Control with some much-needed experience in working a mission’s navigation, tracking, and communications in deep space. It would also allow NASA to skip a step in the Apollo flight sequence, which would make an end-of-the-decade landing more likely.

  One morning, Low talked to Kraft, Gilruth, and Slayton about it. “It would ace the Russians,” he told them, “and take a lot of pressure off Apollo.” They responded enthusiastically. In fact, they decided to fly up to Huntsville that afternoon to run it by von Braun. He too was excited at the thought of one of his Saturn Vs going to the moon and promised his full support. His rocket would be ready, despite the troubles that had cropped up on its second test flight. Jim Webb, however, was harder to convince and insisted on a successful Apollo 7 flight first—that was still to come. But preparations had to begin immediately.

  The flight dynamics branch had seen Low’s bet and raised it. When Kraft asked his key people what they thought of the idea, they said they wanted a day to mull it over. When Kraft arrived at work the next day, they were in his office wa
iting. They had decided it was a great idea—but they didn’t want to circle the moon just once; they wanted to go into orbit around it. “An order-of-magnitude difference of risk right there,” remembered Kraft. If they could do that and use the same orbit parameters they were planning on using for the lunar landing, well—they’d have them ready. Kraft considered that wrinkle and finally presented it to Low and the other administrators. At first, they were shocked—Webb especially, since he was still raw from the Apollo 204 fire and its aftermath—but they came around. Eventually it was agreed: Apollo 8 would orbit the moon.

  Now Slayton wanted to know: Was Borman up for a round-the-moon mission, and could he and his crew be ready two or three months sooner? If Borman decided to stay with the mission he and his crew had been training for—an Earth-orbital flight—his backup crew of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Fred Haise would be given the assignment. It took Borman less than a second to say yes. He and his crew would be ready.

  But the plan was full of risks. So many things had to go right, things that had never been attempted before outside of simulations on the friendly surface of Earth. Borman and his crewmates—Jim Lovell, who had replaced Mike Collins after he underwent spinal surgery that summer, and Bill Anders, who would sorely miss the LM he had become quite attached to during training—estimated that the chances of a fully successful flight were only one in three: “A one-third chance of success, a one-third chance of a survivable accident and a one-third chance of not coming back,” Borman remembered thinking at the time.

  Four days after the Apollo 7 splashdown, forty-seven-year-old cosmonaut Georgy Beregovoy, a former test pilot and World War II ace, flew the first successful mission of the revised Soyuz spacecraft, designed to carry up to three men. His Soyuz 3 orbited the Earth for four days and achieved Russia’s first space rendezvous, with Soyuz 2, and, just as important, he made a safe reentry and landing. (The information that he had failed at two docking attempts was withheld and would not be known in the West for years.) Like the Americans, the Soviets had a space program that was up and running again.

  On December 9, 1968, almost six weeks after Richard Nixon was elected the nation’s next president, Lyndon Johnson held a formal dinner and ceremony at the White House. It would be his final chance to offer tribute to his cherished space program and to the man who had led it since 1961. In the State Dining Room, one hundred and forty-three people gathered, among them twenty-three Apollo astronauts and their wives, Jim Webb, Wernher von Braun, Thomas Paine, Charles Lindbergh, and many other distinguished guests, including Vice President Humphrey and members of Congress. Johnson awarded Webb the Presidential Medal of Freedom—“The highest civilian honor the president can bestow on any individual whose work advances a great cause,” he said—and praised him generously. He also saluted the Apollo 8 crew, wished them Godspeed, and said, “I hope none of you take cold.” The president retired early, but Vice President Humphrey kept the Marine band playing long after midnight as the guests drank and danced. When the party finally wound down, a tipsy Gene Cernan capped off the night by sliding down a long brass banister on the way out.

  The first time that the Apollo spacecraft and its massive and massively complex Saturn V booster left Earth’s gravitational field and ventured into the black void of space, it would carry three humans. It would disappear behind the far side of the moon and remain out of communication for thirty-six minutes, and there, the service module’s SPS engine—which had no backup—would have to perform a perfectly timed retro-brake burn to allow the spacecraft to fall into orbit just sixty-nine miles above the moon’s surface. After it made ten orbits, another precisely timed burn would alter its trajectory and send Apollo 8 back to Earth. Then it would shed its service module and enter the atmosphere at Mach 32, nearly 25,000 miles per hour. It would have to do this at just the right reentry angle of attack and upside down, with the blunt end of the gumdrop-shaped command module slowing its speed and the heat shield’s ablative material absorbing much of the five-thousand-degree heat and flaking off. If it entered at too steep an angle, g-forces would tear the spacecraft apart, and the friction-created heat would incinerate everything and everyone inside. Too shallow an angle, and it would bounce off the atmosphere like a rock skipping over a lake and resume orbit without the power necessary to return; its occupants would eventually run out of oxygen. Their corpses would continue to circle the Earth in a kind of space crypt until the craft’s orbit deteriorated and it plunged down into the atmosphere, unintentionally cremating the astronauts’ remains.

  With all that in mind, the three crewmates—Borman, the genial Lovell, and Anders, who was, like Borman, an intensely focused, serious-minded type—practiced the procedures over and over in simulators, running through some eight hundred emergency situations until they could do them all in their sleep. Navigation and trajectory throughout the 579,606-mile trip (that included the trip to the moon, the orbits, and the trip back) would have to be pinpoint accurate, and, since it involved three rapidly moving objects—the Earth, the moon, and the spacecraft—MIT’s computers would need to calculate various in-course velocity corrections. In short, there was little room for error.

  At 7:51 a.m. on December 21, 1968, Apollo 8 lifted off from launch complex 39A perfectly. After three orbits around the Earth, Michael Collins, acting as CapCom, told the crew, “You are go for TLI,” and the third stage’s J-2 engine—which had failed to restart in its most recent unmanned test flight—ignited and accelerated the craft to 24,259 miles per hour, enough to achieve translunar injection. After jettisoning the third stage, the command-service module was on its way to the moon, and its three occupants had already traveled farther away from the planet than any other human. While pulling away from Earth’s gravity, the spacecraft slowed to 2,200 miles per hour, then it accelerated as it left Earth’s sphere of influence and the moon’s gravity began to take hold. Two and a half days after launch, the astronauts turned the craft’s hind end forward, fired its retrograde rockets to slow it down, and disappeared behind the moon and out of radio contact.

  In Houston, Mission Control conversations became hushed as most of those present stared at their consoles, then at the large screens, then at the two clocks, smoking and fidgeting as the seconds ticked away. Bob Gilruth and Chris Kraft sat next to each other in the back row, waiting with everyone else for confirmation from Apollo 8 that the burn had occurred at exactly the right moment and lasted exactly four minutes and two seconds to decelerate the craft to 3,700 miles per hour, the right speed to drop them into lunar orbit without crashing them into the surface or hurling them into deep space. After they’d waited for thirty-six excruciating minutes, Lovell’s garbled voice was picked up: “Go ahead, Houston. Apollo 8.” One flight controller jumped up without thinking and yelled, “The Russians suck!” The three astronauts were in orbit around the moon, at their lowest point skimming 69.5 miles above the surface. All the controllers stood and cheered, then got back to work. Gilruth wiped tears from his eyes. Kraft reached over and squeezed his arm, and they shook hands firmly.

  It was Christmas Eve. When they weren’t making frequent navigation checks and firing their attitude-control thrusters to keep the windows facing the right way, the crew spent much of the first eight orbits taking hundreds of photographs, charting potential landing sites, and describing what they were seeing like a boatful of tourists circling Manhattan Island. “Oh my God, look at that picture over there. There’s the Earth coming up,” Bill Anders said a few seconds before he took a color photo of the scene. “Wow, is that pretty!” On the ninth and next-to-last revolution, as millions of Americans watched the first televised photos of the moon, the three astronauts took turns reading from the Bible, the first ten verses from the book of Genesis: “‘In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.’”

  On the next revolution, when they were again behind the moon, the engine fired for three minutes and twenty-three seconds to boost the spacecraft out of lunar orbit and into a perfect
trajectory toward home. The reentry went smoothly, and just before dawn on December 27, Apollo 8 splashed down safely in the Pacific, six hundred miles northwest of Christmas Island and just three miles from their recovery ship, the carrier USS Yorktown. This flight, like the previous one, had gone almost perfectly save for some minor anomalies that were more irritating than life-threatening. Mission Control had proven it could handle a spacecraft almost a quarter of a million miles away, even when the vehicle disappeared behind the moon and contact was lost. Just as important, the spacecraft had flown there almost completely autonomously and extremely accurately—a tribute to Apollo’s computer-controlled navigation, guidance, and tracking systems.

  The photo Anders snapped of a luminous blue-and-white Earth rising over the lunar horizon would become one of the most reproduced and best-known photographs of the twentieth century. “Earthrise” and other photos taken by the crew—the first color images to show humans their home as a complete globe—would change the way people felt about their planet. “We flew all the way to the Moon,” said Anders, “and the most important thing we discovered was the Earth.”

  By any standard, 1968 had been a rough year, one of upheaval and pain in the United States and elsewhere, and there’d been plenty to distract Americans from the space program. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April; Robert F. Kennedy, in the middle of what might have been a successful presidential campaign, was murdered in June. Rioting, looting, arson, and murder in the nation’s streets continued. In Vietnam, the Tet Offensive in the early part of the year resulted in thousands of American deaths and the public’s realization that the war it had been told was being won wasn’t. Support for the war eroded even more, as evidenced by large protests on college campuses across the nation. In Biafra, a new African republic, a million people died of starvation. The Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia to halt liberal reforms in Prague. Red China exploded a thermonuclear device, and in the Middle East, Arabs and Israelis were about to engage in another war. Global peace had never seemed so unlikely.