The first earthrise picture photographed by Frank Borman. The cloud formations prove this,
as they are identical to Bill Anders's picture, taken a few minutes later.
It was just before noon in Houston. Mike Collins had not yet given the astronauts his daily news update, and he now asked Borman if they were interested in hearing it. Borman wasn’t. “I’ll give you a call,” he said, wanting at that moment no distractions. He needed to get Houston to dump the onboard tapes so that they could be reused during the next revolution. He needed data for the Trans-Earth Injection burn, or T.E.I., the engine firing thirteen hours hence that would blast them out of lunar orbit and send them back to earth. And he once again needed an official okay that they were go for another lunar orbit.
Earthrise, as photographed by Bill Anders, December 24, 1968, possibly one of the most reprinted lunar photos ever taken. If you turn the book sideways so that the moon's horizon is on the bottom, the picture will probably then look familiar, as this is how every publisher since 1968 has presented it. At Bill Anders's home, however, it is framed with the moon's horizon on the right. “That's how I took it,” he says. To Anders, floating in zero gravity, the earth wasn't rising from behind an horizon line (which is how a human living on a planet's surface would perceive it). Instead, floating in a space capsule seventy miles above the moon, Anders saw himself circling the moon's equator. The lunar horizon therefore appeared vertical to him, and the earth moved right to left as it came out from behind the moon.
Finally, ten minutes before they slipped behind the moon for the fifth time, Collins gave them the news. “Your TV program was a big success. . . It was carried live all over Europe, including even Moscow and East Berlin. . . San Diego welcomed home today the Pueblo crew in a big ceremony. They had a pretty rough time of it in the Korean prison. . . Christmas cease-fire is in effect in Vietnam, with only sporadic outbreaks of fighting.”
Borman listened with half an ear. As he had said to Collins just five minutes earlier, “We’re tired right now.”
As Apollo 8 disappeared behind the moon for the fifth time, Borman relinquished the controls and went to sleep.
For the next two orbits, while Borman dozed, Lovell kept the spacecraft oriented downward while Anders took pictures. With the commander asleep, the other two men seemed to relax somewhat, chatting about the experience so far. “It doesn’t seem like we’ve hardly been here that long, does it?” Anders asked at one point.
“It seems like I’ve been here forever,” Lovell replied. Finally where he had wanted to be since he was a child, Lovell couldn’t get enough of it.
Another time Lovell joked that neither of them was a scientist. “All those scientists are saying now, ‘Oh, if we only had a geologist aboard!’”
Anders looked at the fogged-up windows. “[A geologist] couldn’t see anything . . . Nothing but a big blur out there.”
“You know,” Anders added, “[the moon] really isn’t anywhere near as interesting as I thought it was going to be. It’s all beat up.” Like his wife, Anders had expected the moon to look like all the classic science fiction paintings, sharp-edged mountains and razor-cut ridges delineated by harsh black and white shadows. Instead, the mountains looked rounded and eroded, as if they “had been sandblasted through the centuries.”184 And as did his wife, he found this disappointing.
In many ways, Bill Anders could be called the first real scientist to fly in space. While most astronauts had graduate degrees, almost all had been trained in aeronautics, the science and engineering of flight. Anders, however, had earned a degree in nuclear engineering. This gave him a slighter wider background in research and the hard sciences. In addition, during his five years of waiting for a space flight he had gone on every geological field trip offered by NASA. He found that he was interested in studying the many mysteries that haunted scientists about the moon’s formation. Anders really wanted to help answer these questions.
Lunar sunrise.
The solution to one mystery seemed obvious from only seventy miles away. Scientists had debated for decades whether the numerous lunar craters were formed from volcanic activity or asteroid impacts, with most astronomers accepting volcanoes as the solution as recently as 1950. If of impact origin the solar system’s entire formation history would have to be rethought, considering the enormous number of craters visible on the moon.185 As Anders photographed the lunar surface he tried to describe what he saw. Though there was “some hint of possible volcanic . . . activity” in a few areas, he noted that almost every crater appeared to be of impact origin. He added that a manned landing on the far side of the moon would be difficult. “The backside looks like a sandpile my kids have been playing in for a long time. It’s all beat up, no definition. Just a lot of bumps and holes.”
Periodically Borman would open his eyes and though still half-asleep mumble a question about the time, the ship, the situation. The others would reassure him that all was fine, and he would drift back asleep.
At 4 PM, the spacecraft moved behind the moon for the seventh time. Lovell was still at the helm, and humming and singing aloud as he guided the ship through space.* Anders worked the cameras. Neither had slept.
*Lovell sang aloud repeatedly throughout the mission. Neither he, Borman, nor Anders remember the tunes, however, and the transcripts do not say, stating merely that he was “(singing).”
Borman, however, was finally up, but he wasn’t ready to return to work. He ate, used the “Waste Management System,” and joked with the other two men.
At one moment Lovell looked out the window, and then at his crewmates. “Well, did you guys ever think that one Christmas you’d be orbiting the moon?”
Anders quipped, “Just hope we’re not doing it on New Year’s.”
Lovell, who was usually the joker, didn’t find this funny. “Hey, hey, don’t talk like that, Bill. Think positive.”
* * *
Two hundred forty thousand miles away on earth, Marilyn Lovell decided she needed to go to church. She had spent the day of Christmas Eve at home with friends, trying to fill the time as the spacecraft orbited the moon. Periodically she wandered back to her bedroom for some quiet. Other times she listened to the squawk box. And she smoked a lot.
Finally, by late afternoon the magnitude of the day’s events were wearing on her. She wanted to pray, but she wanted to do it alone. She called Father Raish at St. John’s to ask him if she could come to church, and he told her to come right over.
As soon as Father Raish hung up the phone he ran to find the church organist, asking her to play the musical program planned for that evening’s midnight mass service. Raish then went throughout the church and lit all the candles, making the place look like it would for that night’s mass. He knew that the astronauts would be leaving lunar orbit just after midnight, which meant that Marilyn couldn’t attend services. Nonetheless, he wanted her to have the experience.
When Marilyn entered the church a few minutes later she gasped. “It was one of the most beautiful sights that I can remember. And it was all for me.”
She and Father Raish went up to the altar together, kneeled down, and prayed. For Marilyn, this was a profound moment in her life. “It meant so much to me that he did this.” Even today it brings tears to her eyes to think of it.
After a short while it was time to leave. By now the sun had set, and as Marilyn drove home the sky was dark.
Because the Houston sky had been cloudy since the launch on Saturday, the astronaut wives had still not seen the moon. Even now Marilyn could see that the evening sky was mostly covered with clouds.
Then, just before she turned the car into Timber Cove, the clouds separated and she found herself staring at the faint arc of the crescent moon, gleaming in the evening sky. It was Christmas Eve, and around that distant globe circled three humans, one of whom was her husband. A shiver ran through her body.
She pulled up in front of her house and rejoined her children and friends for the last lu
nar telecast and the hoped-for exit from lunar orbit.
* * *
Susan Borman had no religious outlet. Though she believed in God, her faith in NASA had disappeared the night Ed White died.
Remembering how Pat fought with NASA over Ed’s funeral, Susan now decided that she wasn’t going to be caught unprepared. Sometime that afternoon, even as she listened to Frank’s voice on the squawk box, she sat down at the kitchen table and began to write out the memorial service she wanted for him.186
She wondered how she was going to live with his death. She then rationalized, What a magnificent place to die! She began to write the words, about how no one should be sad, that everyone should be comforted because Frank is still there, in orbit, for ever and ever. That would be what Frank would want, she thought.
The words she scribbled onto that piece of paper seemed to express for her how Frank’s death in orbit would complete both their missions. He would have made the greatest possible sacrifice for his country, and she would stand before the world and tell them so.
Fifteen-year-old Ed wandered into the kitchen and saw her writing feverishly. He asked her what she was doing.
She explained, “Your father’s memorial service. He might not come back.”
From Ed’s young perspective, this simply wasn’t possible. He took the pen from her. “Just remember, Mom, Dad gets to choose the way he goes -- you and I don’t have that privilege.”
Susan nodded. But she took the sheet with her words and carefully hid it under some clothes in a bureau drawer. She was convinced she would need it.
Shortly thereafter they got into their car, picked up Frank’s parents, and drove into Houston for Christmas dinner with Jim and Margaret Elkins and their children. Here she would have a few quiet hours free from the zoo of journalists and television cameras. Here she would watch their last press conference from lunar orbit. And here she would find out what Frank and the others had decided to say to the world on Christmas Eve. Though she knew they had planned a special message for this telecast, she didn’t know what it was.
* * *
Borman stared out the window and was pleasantly surprised to see his second earthrise. He felt strangely detached from that tiny blue-white planet. Somehow, his entire existence in the blackness of space was now contained in their tiny capsule and its “environment of winking amber and red instrument lights.”187
What those lights indicated, however, meant the difference between life and death, and the lack of sleep was finally beginning to interfere with how the three men were reading those dials. Even as Borman contemplated that slowly rising earth, both Anders and Lovell made separate errors inputing data into the computer. Borman listened, and suggested that it was “time to take a rest.”
Lovell nodded, “Okay, just a minute.” Neither he nor Anders wanted to go to sleep. There was too much to do, and how could the first humans orbiting the moon waste time sleeping?
Yet, as they regained contact with the earth on this seventh orbit, all three men were clearly slowing down. Sometimes they had to ask questions twice, and sometimes they didn’t understand the answers.
Lovell to Borman: “How do you feel?” “Fine. Why?”
“I was just curious.” “You tired?”
“Oh, I’m a little tired,” Lovell nodded. “I guess we all are.”
And yet, neither he nor Anders could bring themselves to take a break.
At 5:40 PM Borman told Houston that he wanted to scrub some of Lovell’s duties on the next revolution, so he could get some rest. Then he asked Anders if he wanted to get some sleep as well. Anders said no.
Borman wasn’t satisfied. He knew that on orbits nine and ten, leading up to the T.E.I. burn, they all had to be sharp and on the money. Their lives depended on getting that burn right.
While Lovell was already getting ready for bed, Bill Anders resisted. He didn’t feel tired, and he still had a great deal of unfinished photography on his flight plan. “Hey, Frank, how about on this next pass you just point [the camera] down and turn the goddamn cameras on. Let them run automatically.”
“Yes, we can do that.” Borman really didn’t want to prevent Anders from finishing his job.
At that same moment, Borman suddenly realized he had ruined a roll of film. He cursed, and then his instinct to make fast decisions kicked in. He was no longer going to negotiate. He knew Lovell and Anders needed rest, and as commander of the mission it was his responsibility to make sure they got it.
Also at that moment, Ken Mattingly radioed to confirm the tasks that Borman had scrubbed from Lovell’s flight plan. Borman instantly responded, “We’re scrubbing everything. I’ll stay up and point, keep the spacecraft vertical, and take some automatic pictures, but I want Jim and Bill to get some rest.” He looked at the flight plan. “Unbelievable -- the detail these guys study up. A very good try, but just completely unrealistic.”
Anders still resisted. “I’m willing to try.”
“No. You try it, and then we’ll make another mistake, like entering instead of proceeding or screwing up like I did. I want you to get your ass in bed. Right now.” Borman had had enough of this conversation. “Go to bed! Hurry up! I’m not kidding you, get to bed!”
Anders didn’t move. For the next five minutes he hung there, gently offering suggestions to Borman about how to set the camera up. He knew that as commander Borman had the right and authority to order him to bed. Anders just didn’t want to go to sleep. How often would he get a chance to orbit the moon?
At 6 PM they slipped behind the moon for the eighth time. Just before, Ken Mattingly radioed NASA’s support of Borman. “We agree with all your flight plan changes. And have a beautiful backside. We’ll see you the next time around.”
Still Anders resisted. He kept trying to find a way around Borman’s order. While he didn’t directly disobey it, he also didn’t follow it immediately either.
Borman understood this. He figured he could just wait Anders out. He answered his questions by telling him to go to sleep. “I think this is a closed issue . . . I don’t want to talk about it. . . Shut up, go to sleep, both of you guys . .
. You should see your eyes -- get to bed. . . Don’t worry about the exposure business, goddamn it, Anders, get to bed. Right now! Come on!”
Finally Anders began to lose the battle, not so much with Borman but with his own body. He had hardly slept since launch, and next to him Lovell was already sleeping. Anders started to doze, but fought it. He asked Borman if the cabin was cold. Borman said, more gently this time, “Well, you’re tired. It’s not cold.”
Soon Borman sat in silence in the command seat, staring out at the stark lunar surface. Despite knowing that Anders especially resented this forced nap, Borman had never shirked from making the hard decision when he knew it was the right thing to do. And he wasn’t going to start now.
For the next few hours, he sat and observed the lunar surface, periodically taking pictures. Below him passed what for eons humans had called the dark side of the moon, that unseen hemisphere whose face was always turned away. Now a human being was not only able to study it, he was flying a mere seventy miles above its surface.
At 7:30 PM he asked Ken Mattingly, “How is the weather doing down there, Ken?”
“Entirely beautiful. Loud and clear, and just right in temperature.” Borman wasn’t really interested in the weather in Houston. “How about the recovery area?” he asked. He knew that once they fired the S.P.S. engine to send them back to earth, it would be very difficult to change their arrival time. If the weather in the Pacific turned bad, they would have to land anyway.
“That’s looking real good.”
“Very good,” Borman said. He looked at the tiny cloud-covered planet in his window. It would be very nice to be back there.
Ken Mattingly felt he had to say more about the good weather in the recovery area. “Yes, they told us that there’s a beautiful moon out there.”
“Yes,” said Borman. “I was just
[thinking] there’s a beautiful earth out there.”
In two hours they would give their last lunar press conference. Of the three astronauts, Borman had worried most about this moment. For weeks he had fretted about what they would say.
On that beautiful earth lived three billion people. Many had doubts about why his country had sent him here. Others wished that, instead of three Americans, two Russians had gotten there first. At least one third were about to celebrate one of the most holy religious holidays of the entire year.
Borman looked at the barren moon below him, and the distant earth beyond. For all he knew, he could be looking at a primeval universe immediately after its birth. The moon looked like a skull, bleached white by the hot sun. And though he knew there was life on earth, he could not see it.
And yet, on that distant orb people still lived, loved, fought, and survived. Looking at the three-quarters-full earth hanging in blackness, Borman sincerely wanted to tell everyone there what this journey had meant to him.
He hoped that he and his crewmates had found the way to do it.
10. “WHY DON’T YOU BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING?”
C-PRIME
In Berlin the wall still stood. On its seventh anniversary, August 13, 1968, few demonstrated against its presence. Four thousand East German guards patrolled that grim border, and in the seven years since its construction over a hundred people were known to have been killed trying to burrow under or climb over it. During that time thousands more had fled successfully, including more than five hundred East German guards.188
Holiday passes between East and West Berlin had ceased. Except for emergency hardship passes, issued in the event of a death in the family, no West Berliners had been permitted to visit their East Berlin relatives in more than two years, since Easter 1966.189 The East German government marked the wall’s anniversary by praising its construction, noting how the outgoing tide of skilled and educated workers had stopped, and how this had benefited the East German economy.190
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