Susan Borman flanked by Fred on left and Ed on right,
taken during the flight. Credit: Borman
Her kids, meanwhile, were doing what kids normally do. While fifteen- year-old Barbara went shopping with her high school friends and ten-year-old Susan spent time playing with friends in Timber Cove, thirteen-year-old Jay was being a typical teenage boy. When he got up this Monday morning he told his mother that his stomach was really bothering him. In order to get him to the doctors at NASA without the press noticing, she slipped him out the back door and hid him in the back seat of her next-door neighbor’s car with a blanket over his head. At NASA the doctors told her that the boy was merely upset because of all the excitement.
Meanwhile, two-year-old Jeffrey periodically opened the front door and held his own impromptu press conferences with the reporters stationed there. On his head he wore his own little astronaut helmet, which he proudly showed off to the press.
By midday the Lovell house once again began filling with people, most of whom were women who like Marilyn attended St. John’s church. Father Raish also came by. At one point he suggested that they hold communion right there, since Marilyn hadn’t been able to get to church that weekend.
“Father Raish was a very warm human being, and he sensed when he was needed,” Marilyn remembered. In the six years since the family had moved to Houston, he had become a special person to her. Because of Jim’s heavy work schedule she was often alone, and he frequently made it a point to stop by the house in the late afternoon. They would sit and chat. “I could bare my soul to him,” she said years later.
The women immediately agreed to Father Raish’s suggestion. Together they knelt around the family room coffee table, and he led them in prayer.
* * *
Valerie Anders had gotten up early Monday morning to dress and feed the kids. She found that her youngest ones, Eric, four, and Greg, six, had become more fussy and needy, while Gayle, eight, had started to suck her thumb again for the first time in months.
The mob of reporters were still on her lawn, trapping her in her home. Since the day was cold she opened her garage and put a large pot of coffee there for them.
* * *
On the spacecraft things continued to go well. One minor problem, a chilly cabin temperature, had been solved during the night by turning on all the cabin fans (which the astronauts had shut down because one in particular was very noisy).
The astronauts were now over 188,000 miles from earth. Their radio signal, moving at the speed of light, took more than a full second to get home. And yet, even after two days of travel, they still had almost twenty more hours before they would reach the moon. The waiting continued.
Anders found himself both bored and edgy. After more than forty-eight hours in space, he had officially rested only six hours, the least of all three men, and had actually slept much less. Even taking a sleeping pill on Sunday afternoon had not helped. He found that the combined excitement and tension of his first space flight would not let him relax. Nor did it help that, as much as they tried to keep quiet, Lovell and Borman liked to talk.
Yet, when he wasn’t trying to sleep he was startled by how surprisingly tedious space flight was. He sat, scanning the dials again and again for problems, constantly updating himself on the spacecraft’s status. Everything was running perfectly. Periodically he did some basic maintenance chore, such as purging the fuel cell batteries to keep them running, or switching antennas as the spacecraft rotated.
And he stared out the window, finding that the only thing he had to look at was a steadily shrinking earth, drifting across his window once a minute as the spacecraft gently rotated. The moon he had not seen. With the spacecraft pointed tail-first at the moon, the windows never faced it. As he later said to mission control, “It’s like being on the inside of a submarine.”
* * *
At 10:30 AM Valerie Anders decided to make a break from her home and visit mission control. Leaving the kids in the care of au pair Silvie, she was escorted by NASA press officials through the gauntlet of reporters to a NASA car and driven to the Manned Spacecraft Center.
Once there she went to the private lounge positioned behind communications. She waved to Mike Collins, and sat down to watch for a while. Nearby sat George Low, manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program. Low had taken over the program in January 1967 following the launchpad fire that had killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. Less than eighteen months later, he became the man who pushed NASA to send Apollo 8 to the moon.
He and Valerie chatted. She quickly saw that, though he tried to hide it, seeing her made him very nervous. If something went wrong he would have brought disaster to her and her five little children. His concern touched her, and Valerie tried to ease his mind by being bright and cheery and talking about how well everything was going. She had faith in George Low, and she wanted to show him that.
After a few minutes she heard Bill tell Mike Collins that he was passing the controls to Borman so that he could “take a little snooze for a while.” Quickly Valerie passed a message to Collins. She wanted him to tell Frank to tell Bill that she wished him “a happy nap.” In the spacecraft, Borman grinned at Anders, now floating in the small space below the couches and trying (but failing) to sleep. “Okay,” he said to Collins. “Tell her that he makes us tired sometimes too.”
About this time Jim Lovell finally woke up, having slept for almost seven hours. As the mission’s navigator, he now began a long discussion with the ground on what stars to look at and where he should sight. He reiterated his problems with fuel and light glare, noting that unless he allowed his eyes to completely adapt to the darkness of space he could not see the stars.
Despite these difficulties, however, on Sunday Lovell had managed to make his own estimate of the spacecraft’s course and position. When Houston compared calculations, they found that his numbers were “within a couple of a thousandths of a degree of the theoretical optimum.” Mattingly had added jokingly, “Well, I am getting a lot of confidence in your ability to run that mystery show now.”
Anders had responded, “Hey, we have to spend four more days up here with him, will you take it easy? [Jim] is already talking about going back to M.I.T. as a professor.”
The ground had discovered another interesting navigational phenomenon. When the astronauts dumped their waste urine overboard, it actually acted as a propellant and changed their course slightly. This unexpected power source eventually required them to do a small additional mid-course correction.
Time passed. The astronauts dozed, or did other routine maintenance.
* * *
Finally, at 12:30 PM Ken Mattingly, now at communications, asked Frank Borman about their second planned television show. “Are you planning to show us TV pictures of the earth today?”
“Well, that is what we wanted to do,” Borman answered. “It seems that would be the most interesting thing we can show you, but we, you know, had trouble with the lens.”
Mattingly then began describing to Borman the solution proposed by the video technicians on the ground. First the astronauts needed to take one of the filters from the film cameras and duct tape it to the front of the video lens. Then, with the camera mounted in its bracket, the men could aim the camera by reorienting the spacecraft. “Do not touch the body of the lens while televising,” Mattingly told Borman. “Apparently if you put your hands on the [telephoto] lens itself, it causes electrical interference.” They were also warned to give the lens’s automatic light meter from ten to twenty seconds to warm up. The technicians suspected that the previous day the lens hadn’t had time to adjust to the high contrast of light coming from a bright earth surrounded by a black sky. For more than an hour Mattingly and Borman went over these steps, with Mattingly noting that “the show as scheduled is just out the window at the earth only.”
Borman agreed, though he had his doubts about the lens. “I bet the TV doesn’t work.”
Mattingly hedged, “We
ll, we won’t take that bet, but anyway, we are standing by for a nice lurid description [of the earth].”
Finally, at 2 PM, they turned on the camera. With Borman as pilot and Anders as cameraman, Lovell became the narrator. Because the camera had no eyepiece, the astronauts could only aim it using instructions from earth or, as Anders noted, by “looking down the side or putting some chewing gum on top.” Borman and Anders struggled to keep the earth centered in the camera frame, with Borman maneuvering the capsule to make the major adjustments and Anders fine-tuning the picture by tweaking the camera’s mounting.
This time the camera lens worked. The astronauts successfully transmitted to earth the first live televised pictures of the home planet as a globe.
In many ways, this telecast foreshadowed today’s news coverage, where every major event is televised live, and every citizen can watch it happen merely by pressing a button. Yet, because this type of newscast was unprecedented, there were no announcers, no talking heads “analyzing” what everyone was watching. The moment had a freshness and impact gone from much of modern news broadcasting.
By now Valerie had returned from mission control to find an almost party-like atmosphere at her home. Many of Valerie’s friends had come by, and she, her children, Bill’s aunt and uncle from Texas, and others crowded around her new color television to watch the telecast. Not surprisingly, Valerie found that her children were more interested in watching cartoons or going outside to play with friends. However, she insisted that they stay and watch.
Susan Borman was also pinned to the television. But her two sons had had enough of the crowds of people and the mob of reporters. That morning they had both decided to go duck hunting in an effort to get away from all the hoopla. They got into their hunting coveralls and loaded their gear into Fred’s car, planning to drive out to the country farm of a family friend.
The photographer from Life magazine noticed what they were doing and decided it would make a great picture to see them arm-in-arm with their mother holding their shotguns. Susan hated these posed shots, but she went outside in her backyard to do her job. The boys simply wanted to get away as quickly as possible, so they obliged as well.
Then they climbed into Fred’s car and headed out. Not surprisingly, a handful of journalists jumped into cars to follow, and for a few minutes the boys led the world’s press corps on a merry chase through El Lago and Timber Cove. To get away Fred turned into the front entrance of NASA to cut through the Manned Spaceflight Center and exit its back gate. While the Bormans could pass through quickly, their shadowers were left at the main gate, trying to get clearance. Fred and Ed then disappeared into the country for a few hours’ relief from the constant stream of visitors at their home.
At the Lovell house the situation was similar. While most of her family and friends gathered in front of the television, Marilyn almost had to drag Jay in from the backyard. He wasn’t interested in seeing a grainy, black-and-white picture of the earth when he could be out with friends on this Christmas vacation day.
On the television Jim Lovell began by noting how the earth’s observable size was quite small: “About as big as the end of my thumb” when held at arm’s length. He then described the visible continents, from the North Pole on top to the southern tip of South America at the bottom. “For colors, waters are all sort of a royal blue; clouds, of course, are bright white . . . the land areas are generally a brownish -- sort of dark brownish to light brown in texture.”
The earth, December 23, 1968. This televised view matched the bottom right
70mm still photo shown near the end of chapter one.
Everyone, in space as well as earth, could see that there was absolutely no visible evidence that a civilization of more than three billion people existed on that small planet.
Lovell in particular was struck by the scale of the cosmos. His navigation work, sighting off the moon, the earth, the sun, and the stars, had given him a real sense of where he was in that vastness. And though he had at that moment spent more time in space than any other human (having flown two weeks with Borman in 1965 and four days with Buzz Aldrin in 1966), he found himself awed at the smallness of earth in that black sky. As he told his earthbound audience, “What I keep imagining is, if I were a traveler from another planet, what would I think about the earth at this altitude -- would I think it was inhabited?”
To Bill Anders, that tiny blue-white earth suddenly reminded him of the Christmas tree ornaments he and Valerie had hung only three weeks before. The planet was round, it glittered, and its surface seemed delicate and easily destroyed.
While they didn’t say so, and none of them would have even admitted it to themselves, the three men were truly staggered by the immensity of the emptiness around them, and the jewel-like splendor of the shimmering sphere floating within it.
Nor were they alone in their impression. On earth one could feel it in their words, and see it in the televised image of the earth. As Anders noted during the broadcast, “You are looking at yourselves at [200,000] miles out in space.”
Valerie Anders, focusing her mind on the excitement and joy of the space flight, gazed at the television with utter elation. She had trouble imagining how far away the astronauts were. That’s the earth, she thought incredulously, with all its billions of people on it.
Susan Borman looked at this vision of the earth and felt only disbelief. How could this be?, she thought. She found herself struggling to imagine Frank actually in space so far from home. To Susan, the television image actually made it all seem less real, like a science fiction television show. So, rather than watch, she closed her eyes and listened to Frank’s voice. When she did, she found that she could imagine him in the capsule, surrounded by infinite space.
It wasn’t enough. She couldn’t put herself there with him. Nor could her fantasizing help get him home.
For Marilyn Lovell, the vastness of space and the danger that surrounded her husband finally hit her. Jim unwittingly helped pound the point home when, still amazed at how little of human civilization he could identify from this distance, he wondered aloud if a visitor from the stars would know to “land on the blue or the brown part of the earth.”
Bill Anders joked, “You better hope that we land on the blue part.”
As the telecast ended, Marilyn’s children scattered, and suddenly Marilyn felt a compelling need to get closer to her husband. She decided to make a quick trip to mission control to watch the action and reassure herself that all would be fine. The NASA liaison officer quickly arranged for a ride, and in less than ten minutes she was in the V.I.P. section of the control room.
Her timing couldn’t have been worse. Almost as soon as she arrived the Apollo 8 spacecraft passed the point in which the moon’s and earth’s gravity balanced. Up until that moment the earth had been pulling at them, slowing them down until their ship’s speed had dropped to only 2,223 miles per hour. Now they had crossed into what the engineers called “the moon’s sphere of influence,” its gravity pulling at them and drawing them in. Jerry Carr, at capcom, made a point of letting Borman know. “By the way, welcome to the moon’s sphere.”
At first Borman didn’t understand. “The moon’s fair?” he asked, puzzled. “The moon’s sphere,” Carr said, more slowly. “You’re in the influence.” Borman joked, “That’s better than being under the influence.”
Marilyn left less reassured than when she arrived, and returned to a strangely quiet house. Her kids were off playing somewhere, and the crowds of friends had drifted away when she had gone to mission control. Marilyn was completely alone for the first time since the launch.
She stood in her empty home, listening to the hollow sound of the squawk box quietly hissing its never-ending stream of technical jargon.
Carr: Apollo 8, Houston. We’re dumping at this time.
Anders: Roger. Tape voice is probable. We ought to get a check on it as low bit rate for D.S.E. voice.
Carr: Apollo 8, are you saying that everythin
g that’s on there now is in high bit?
Anders: That’s where my switch was.
Carr: Okay. We’ll take a look at it then . . .
Then Paul Haney, the public voice of NASA, noted that the spacecraft’s speed was increasing. The capsule was now more than 205,000 miles from earth, traveling at over 2,700 miles per hour.
Unexpectedly, Marilyn grasped the reality of her husband’s situation. Jim would go into lunar orbit, something would fail, and she would never see him again. She sat down at the little bar between the kitchen and the family room, poured herself a drink, and broke down in tears. For several minutes all she could do was cry, the tension finally breaking in long sobbing gasps.
Not long after, there was a knock on the door. Marilyn wiped her face, took a breath, and went to answer it. There stood young Betsy Benware, the teenage daughter of Betty Benware, one of Marilyn’s neighbors. She was holding a tray with a dinner her mother had cooked for Marilyn.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Lovell?” Betsy asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Marilyn. She didn’t want anyone to worry about her. She took the food appreciatively and sent the girl home.
Within minutes Betty Benware arrived at the Lovell home. She had already called some of their other friends, and soon the house was once again filled with people, gathered there to stay with Marilyn through the night and through the coming lunar visit.
They fed her, and then convinced her to try and get some rest. She went to her bedroom, lay down, and for the first time since the launch fell into a deep sleep. The crying fit had released much of her pent-up tension. She slept for almost seven hours.
* * *
More than two hundred thousand miles away, Apollo 8 flew on, its speed increasing rapidly and irrevocably. It was falling towards the moon, and nothing in the universe could prevent it from getting there.
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