Genesis

by Robert Zimmerman

  Five windows had been built into that surface, two for Borman on the left, two for Anders on the right, and the round hatch window for Lovell in the center. Also built into that surface were two independent sets of six small thruster engines, each jet able to generate 94 pounds of thrust. One set of jets would be used for orientating the capsule as it reentered the atmosphere, the other reserved as a backup should the first fail.

  Attached to the command module’s base was the service module. In this thirteen foot long cylinder were oxygen tanks for supplying the astronauts with air, as well as three fuel cells, which combined the oxygen with hydrogen to generate electricity and drinking water.66 On service module’s outside surface were four clusters of four additional rocket engines, used to adjust the spacecraft’s orientation in space. Each one of these sixteen engines produced 100 pounds of thrust.

  The spaceship’s main engine, called the Service Propulsion System, or S.P.S. for short, was also part of the service module. The S.P.S., generating 20,500 pounds of thrust, was the rocket engine that would put the astronauts into lunar orbit in three days and, more importantly, blast them back to the earth when it was time to leave.

  In this tiny spacecraft three men now drifted towards the moon. While Anders focused on photographing the earth, Borman piloted the spacecraft. Unlike driving a car, steering in space required more than left or right turns. Borman used two hand controls, resembling many of today’s popular computer joysticks. One control accelerated the spacecraft in the desired direction, while the other merely pivoted the spacecraft around its center of mass. For example, by moving this second joystick backward or forward, Borman pitched the spacecraft’s nose up or down. Tilted left or right, and the spacecraft rolled to the left or right. And twisting the joystick caused the whole spacecraft to yaw, a term borrowed from nautical dictionaries. Here the spacecraft was like a bottle lying on its side, and the pilot a teenager spinning it one way or the other, depending on the direction he turned the hand control.

  As Borman maneuvered the spacecraft the abandoned third stage was causing him a lot of aggravation, trailing behind them in its own independent path to the moon. “The damned S4B was uncomfortably close, its nose wandering within 500 feet.”67 Soon he was forced to turn the capsule away from the earth in order to keep watch on the booster.

  C.G. stands for “center of gravity.”

  Nor did he like how the S4B was venting fuel. “It’s spewing out from all sides like a huge water sprinkler,” he told the ground. “I believe we’re going to have to vent or thrust away from this thing. We seem to be getting closer.”

  Moving away from the booster wasn’t going to be as simple as Borman would have liked. The computers on the ground had calculated Apollo 8’s heading, and determined that it was so accurate that the next mid-course correction was hardly needed. But mission control also wanted to fire the S.P.S. engine before the spacecraft got too far from earth. Like Borman’s maneuvering controls, the S.P.S. was quite different from most earthbound engines, and was one of the reasons that NASA had gambled on sending Apollo 8 to the moon. The S.P.S. used hypergolic chemicals, meaning that when the fuel, a mixture of hydrazine and unsymmetrical dimethyl-hydrazine, made contact with the oxidizer, nitrogen tetroxide, the chemicals instantly ignited, producing thrust. No spark was needed. Without a complicated ignition system, the engine was simpler, and hopefully more reliable.

  Two days before launch, however, engineers doing ground tests on another S.P.S. engine noticed an anomaly that posed a possible hazard. The engineers found that unless the combustion chamber of each new S.P.S. engine was primed, “wetted” with a small amount of fuel, there was a chance that the engine might explode the first time it was turned up to full thrust. The solution, not complicated, required giving the S.P.S. a single very short burst. The first mid-course correction, scheduled about eleven hours into the flight, would be the ideal opportunity to do this.

  First, however, the ground engineers needed Borman to push the spacecraft a little bit more off course. The S.P.S. was too powerful an engine to make very small course corrections -- it would be like using a bomb to kill a fly. By doing a sideways burn now with the capsule’s small attitude thrusters, the spacecraft’s course would be changed enough so that several hours hence they could use the S.P.S. engine to correct it.

  In order to change the spacecraft’s course, however, Borman needed to reorient the capsule, putting the earth in the windows instead of the S4B booster. “I don’t want to do that,” Borman explained. “I’ll lose sight of the S4B.” He and mission control compromised. The commander would position the spacecraft so that he could see both earth and booster, and make as much of a sideways burn as possible from this position.

  Now however, Borman had to relocate the earth. For the next ten minutes he struggled, with Lovell’s and Anders’ help, to put both the earth and the booster in view. After five minutes Collins asked him if he had been able to do the burn. Borman responded, “As soon as we find the earth, we’ll do it.”

  This brought a burst of startled laughter in Houston. It seemed absurd to say that the earth was hard to find.

  Finally Borman was able to make the burn. He looked out his window at the S4B and reported, “We seem to be drifting away from this thing a little bit, although it is still pointing at us quite closer than I’d like.”

  Then he used the service module’s side thrusters to put the module in what he called “barbecue mode,” a slow roll spinning once per hour. This evenly distributed the burning heat of the sun over the entire surface of the spacecraft.

  They had been in space for six hours, and awake for twelve. One by one the three men pulled off their bulky spacesuits so that they were dressed, not in street clothes, but in lightweight jumpsuits. Instead of magnetic-soled shoes, they wore cloth booties. And instead of “walking” from point to point, they simply pushed off one wall and floated across the cabin. Each man ate something, and things began to quiet down.

  For a variety of reasons, astronaut Pete Conrad had pinned the nickname “Shaky” on Jim Lovell.68 Though Jim always made things work in the end (like Borman and Anders, Lovell had never lost a plane in flight, and had finished ahead of Conrad in test pilot training), silly -- and sometimes life-threatening -- things seemed always to happen around him.

  Shortly after reaching orbit, Lovell started to move from his couch to his navigation station in the lower equipment bay. As he did so he accidentally pulled on the toggle switch for his life vest, activating it. Suddenly he was wearing two bulging and growing balloons in a space that gave him very little room to maneuver.

  Borman and Anders laughed. When Borman spoke to the ground, he described Lovell by saying that “we’ve got one full Mae West with us.”

  Since the vest was filled with carbon dioxide, deflating it would cause the excess CO2 to saturate the filters for cleaning the capsule’s atmosphere. And Lovell had to get rid of it if he was to do his work.

  Lovell carefully glided to the urine dump. Normally an astronaut would insert his personal plumbing into a hose and void his liquid waste into the great emptiness of space. Now Lovell inserted the hose into his life vest, squeezing the carbon dioxide gas through it and out of the capsule.

  Soon he no longer resembled a big-breasted Hollywood star, and could store his spacesuit with the others.

  With Borman steering and Anders alternating between taking photos and monitoring the capsule’s operations, Lovell now got busy doing his main task, trying to prove that a human being could pinpoint his position in space without the use of ground-based help.

  With the spacecraft’s navigational telescope and sextant, Lovell sighted on several stars as well as the horizon of the earth, using this data to triangulate the spacecraft’s course and position. This manual navigation system had been designed as a backup to ground-based calculations. Should communications fail, the astronauts would then use Lovell’s sightings to program their course changes by hand.

  Called
the inertial measuring unit (or I.M.U.), this equipment tracked the spacecraft’s orientation relative to the earth and solar system. Because space has no up and down or horizon line, the astronauts needed some other reference for pointing the spacecraft’s nose and engines in the right direction. Set on three gimbals, one for each of the three dimensions, the I.M.U. was held stable by gyroscopes. Beginning from its initial setting on the launchpad, the unit recorded any changes thereafter of the capsule’s orientation. These changes in turn were reflected by a control panel indicator the astronauts called the eight ball, a grapefruit-sized sphere incised with the sky’s longitudes and latitudes. As the capsule pitched, rolled, or yawed relative to the stars, the I.M.U. told the eight ball to turn and roll correspondingly.

  Originally NASA had planned to shut the I.M.U. off when not in use in order to conserve power, and let Lovell re-set it manually prior to each burn. Borman and the other astronauts disagreed vigorously with this idea. As Borman wrote later, “Experience had taught me that when you have something running perfectly, particularly a mechanical or electrical device, it’s best to leave it alone.”69 After much discussion the engineers agreed. The I.M.U. was left on for the entire flight, with Lovell’s sightings used merely for back-up.

  This decision seemed even wiser now, only a few hours from earth. While still in orbit Lovell had found it difficult to locate any stars because of the planet’s glare. Now, on the way to the moon, the venting from the S4B booster was making star identification tricky. The fuel scattered into millions of tiny frozen globules, and the light reflected off these particles to fill the void around them with many “pseudo-stars.”

  Nonetheless, Lovell made an attempt at pinpointing his location, and radioed his results back to earth. There, ground controllers compared his results with their own to see how accurate the figures were.

  Accuracy was essential. Not only were the astronauts traveling farther than anyone ever had at a greater speed, but the elements that made up their motion were exceedingly complex. The spacecraft had left a planet whose surface was moving at about 1,000 miles per hour as the globe rotated. That planet was also cruising through space at 67,000 miles per hour. The spacecraft was aimed at a moon moving at 2,300 miles an hour relative to the earth, with an orbital plane that differed from the spacecraft’s. Each of these vectors had to be incorporated into both Lovell’s and the ground engineers’ calculations so that they could aim Apollo 8 not at where the moon was, but at a point in space it would reach three days hence. And their calculations had to be accurate within four ten-thousandth of a single percentage point. This was not unlike a person jumping from a speeding roller coaster car and trying to catch a bullet shot past them as they fell.

  The S4B third stage, surrounded by pseudo-stars.

  About ten hours into the flight, Mike Collins’s shift ended and he was replaced at communications by Ken Mattingly. Mattingly had joined NASA in April 1966 as part of the fourth class of astronauts. Addicted to flying, he had spent his life in the Navy finding ways to get himself in the air. Now he was on the Apollo 8 support team, handling radio communications with a spacecraft almost 60,000 miles from home. To Mattingly this seemed an exhilarating turn of events.

  He now radioed that he had the numbers for the first mid-course correction, scheduled for one hour hence. Borman, still at the controls, told him he was ready to take them down.

  This aspect of early space exploration should horrify a modern computer user. Apollo 8’s on-board computer was not capable of doing the calculations necessary for each planned rocket firing. Nor was its programmable memory of approximately four kilobytes (about eight to thirty thousand times smaller than today’s average desktop) large enough to store much data.70

  The ground computers did the calculations, and then mission control verbally passed the numbers up to the astronauts. They in turn then manually entered this data into the computer, which in turn controlled the automatic firing of the spacecraft’s engines.

  Passing the numbers up from the ground, however, was hardly a simple task. Consider the list of numbers that Ken Mattingly now radioed to Frank Borman for mid-course correction number one: “Okay. Sixty-three thousand, one hundred and forty minus one sixty-three, plus one twenty-nine zero thirteen fifty-six forty-eight ninety-seven, minus zero zero five, ninety-nine, plus zero zero zero zero zero, plus four seven zero one six, one seventy-seven one forty- three zero zero zero November Alpha, plus zero zero one ninety-seven forty- seven zero twenty five fifty-one four sixty-eight eighteen twelve twelve eighty- three two fifty-seven zero twenty-three.”

  He took a breath, then continued. “Up two sixty-three, left seventeen, plus eleven ninety-five, minus one sixty-five zero zero one twenty six eighty- three three fifty-six zero eight zero fifty forty-seven zero five, north stars, zero sixty-eight zero ninety-seven three fifty-six, no ullage.”

  Borman, who was writing this litany down as he heard it, now repeated it back to Mattingly, confirming that he got it right. Later, Jim Lovell entered the numbers into the on-board computer, which would then be programmed to fire the rockets when scheduled.

  An hour later and eleven hours into the flight, the computer did exactly that. As commanded, the S.P.S. engine fired, burping for just over two seconds. Not only did this blast successfully prime the S.P.S. engine, it was so accurate that it made the next two course corrections unnecessary. Mission control decided that Apollo 8 could continue on its course to the moon, still three days away.

  * * *

  Valerie Anders was practically a prisoner in her own home. The mob of reporters on her front lawn had grown so large that she didn’t dare go outside. To her chagrin her two older boys, eleven-year-old Alan and ten-year-old Glen, couldn’t resist talking with the reporters and getting their pictures taken.

  As with every astronaut wife, she had been assigned a NASA press liaison to schedule press conferences. Soon after the spacecraft left earth orbit she went outside to answer questions, giving them what she called the standard “courageous astronaut wife” answers. Nonetheless, her own exuberance came out. “It was about the greatest thing I’ve ever seen,” she told reporters.71

  She spent the rest of the day in her home. By that Saturday evening Valerie had to get away. Her next door neighbors, astronaut Charlie Duke and his wife, Dorothy, were holding a Christmas eggnog party to celebrate the completion of their new house. Duke had been selected as an astronaut in 1966 and was now settling into the Houston community. Leaving her kids in the charge of her au pair, she snuck out her back door and slipped across the driveway into the Dukes. Once there she joined the party for an hour or so, drinking eggnog and chatting with Mike Collins and Jerry Carr about how well the flight was going.

  Then she went home to put her kids to bed and go to sleep. As she lay in bed alone she listened to a special “squawk box” that NASA had installed in her bedroom. This box, placed in all the astronauts’ homes, was linked directly to mission control, and allowed her to hear the ground-to-capsule communications.

  Valerie had always been a good sleeper, and had thought the astronauts’ voices would lull her to sleep. Instead, their talk fueled the high she had been on all day, and she lay there listening with endless interest.

  Finally she turned the box off. In the silence of her bedroom she drifted quietly to sleep.

  * * *

  In Florida, Marilyn Lovell had watched the launch with exhilaration. She held her youngest son Jeffrey, almost three, and tilted her head back as the Saturn 5 climbed into the air. As Jim had predicted, the rocket slid slightly to the side before it cleared the tower, then rose majestically on a pillar of smoke and fire. Then the sound wave hit her, and the noise was so loud it sounded like the staccato distortion on a overloaded sound speaker.

  Because she had watched other live launches with Jim, including the Apollo 7 launch two months earlier, she was prepared for the experience. All she could think about as she watched that rocket rise was how happy her husband must feel, do
ing what he had always dreamed of doing.

  Afterward, the NASA press officer took her to a nearby motel for a poolside press conference, a task she found far more nerve-racking than watching the launch. She was astonished when a reporter asked if Jim was going to name a mountain after her. How on earth did they find out about that? she thought to herself. She told the reporters to ask Jim about it when he got into lunar orbit. She and the kids then returned to their beachside cottage, where a crowd of friends and relatives had gathered with food and champagne.

  By the end of the day she was exhausted. As she lay in bed, she could hear the gentle crash of the ocean waves on the beach. But she had no squawk box, and was out of touch with the one voice she wanted to hear most. Not surprisingly, Marilyn found it difficult to sleep that night.

  * * *

  By Saturday night the three astronauts had been awake for almost nineteen hours. Frank Borman passed the controls to Bill Anders and went to bed. He slipped into the small space under the three couches and slide into a thin baglike hammock, designed to hold him in place as he slept.

  After two hours of sleeplessness, however, he decided to let the ground know about his wish to take a sleeping pill. As was the custom, anytime the astronauts wanted to take aspirins or stomach pills they first cleared it with the doctors on the ground.

  The sleeping pill didn’t help. Borman dozed, sleeping fitfully.