December 27, 1968. After splashdown Frank Borman addresses the crew of the U.S.S.
Yorktown, with Bill Anders and Jim Lovell standing beside him.
On board ship they were wined and dined by the captain and crew. President Johnson congratulated them by phone. Then they were flown to Hawaii, where thousands of people flocked to see them. Such celebrations were to be expected after a successful space flight.
Then they landed at Ellington Air Force Base, just south of Houston. Because it was 2:30 in the morning, they only expected a small contingent of newsmen, NASA officials, and their families there to greet them.
Instead, the airfield was packed with thousands upon thousands of well- wishers. Many were co-workers at NASA, out to celebrate. Many others were mere strangers, exuberantly cheering the astronauts for what they had done.
Though it was the middle of the night, some neighbors had disassembled the American flag that they had built and set up on the Anderses’ lawn in order to reassemble it at the airbase. They plugged it in, bathing the returning astronauts in its red, white, and blue lights.
This was nothing like Gemini 7, thought the Bormans and Lovells. The Anderses were simply astonished at the size of the crowd. The astronauts placed Hawaiian lei’s around the necks of their wives, and embraced their families. Alan Anders, eleven, suddenly began crying. Seeing his father there on that tarmac, with thousands of people cheering, released all the fears and doubts that he had been keeping inside.
Everywhere the astronauts went they were feted with honors and applause. In the month following splashdown the astronauts and their families went on whirlwind tours of New York, Washington, Miami, Chicago, and Houston, giving speeches and attending parades and parties.
In New York, Governor Rockefeller arranged for them to stay in the penthouse suite of the Waldorf-Astoria. To the Anderses’ boys, Alan and Glenn, this forty-two-story building seemed the tallest in the world. They amused themselves by flinging grapes out the window, seeing if they could hit pedestrians. “The best part was that we could drink all the soda we wanted,” Alan remembered.
Soon the letters and telegrams began pouring in, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The families didn’t know how to answer them all. One in particular struck Borman as especially poignant. “To the crew of Apollo 8. Thank you. You saved 1968.”237
President Nixon, who had just taken office, asked Borman to go on a goodwill tour of Europe, and Anders to take over as Executive Secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council.
And then came the awards. The three men were given the Distinguished Service Medal from President Johnson, the Hubbard Medal from the National Geographic Society, the Collier Trophy from the National Aeronautic Association, and the Goddard Trophy from the National Space Club, to name just a few.238
Time magazine named the three astronauts its “Men of the Year.” This honor, announced in the magazine’s first issue of 1969, had been given each year since 1927, and was awarded to those individuals who had wielded the most influence on human history in the preceding year, “for better or for worse.”239 Prior to launch, the editors at Time thought they would name “The Dissenter” as 1968’s “Man of the Year.” The demonstrations, the violence, the discord, had dominated almost every day’s headlines.
On December 28th, however, they had changed their minds, writing how the flight of Borman, Lovell, and Anders had “overshadowed--even if, in the long view of history, it did not cancel out--many of the most compelling events of the year.” Times’s editors noted that while the utopia the dissenters craved would never be found on the moon,
. . .the moon flight of Apollo 8 shows how that Utopian tomorrow could come about.
For this is what Westernized man can do. He will not turn into a passive, contemplative being; he will not drop out and turn off; he will not seek stability and inner peace in the quest for nirvana. Western man is Faust, and if he knows anything at all, he knows how to challenge nature, how to dare against dangerous odds and even against reason. He knows how to reach for the moon.240
Not everyone celebrated the journey of Borman, Lovell, and Anders. Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the woman whose court suit had banned prayer in the public schools, immediately registered a complaint about the prayers the astronauts had read. “Christianity, you know, is a minor religion,” she noted as she announced a letter campaign to ban public prayer in space.241 Within months she had collected 28,000 signatures on a petition, and went to court demanding a ban on any Bible reading by any U.S. astronaut or any government employee while on duty.242
The court suit only helped fuel the wave of support for the mission. In the next year NASA received more than 2,500,000 letters and petitions objecting to her suit and supporting the right of American astronauts to exercise their religious beliefs publicly. Eleven months later the court finally agreed, dismissing her suit. “The First Amendment does not require the state to be hostile to religion, but only neutral,” said one judge.243
In the Soviet Union the success of Apollo 8 also met with mixed feelings. The day before Borman, Lovell, and Anders reached lunar orbit, Georgi Petrov, head of the Institute of Space Research of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, wrote in Pravda that while he wished the astronauts well, he believed Soviet methods of space exploration were inherently safer.
The Apollo 8 system is distinguished by the fact that the crew apparently plays the main role in controlling the craft. Soviet scientists and designers have been working on systems in which man’s control of the spaceship is completely duplicated by automatic devices. . . . It seems to me that such a control system and preliminary testing of the entire flight program by automatic stations before sending off a manned spaceship insures greater safety.244
While Petrov’s description of the Apollo 8 system was naïve, his honest description of the Zond and Soyuz automatic control systems was especially ironic. The Soviet decision to make their spacecraft a technological reflection of their society, in which the ground controller was the centralized authority dictating what the ordinary citizen cosmonaut could do, had helped guarantee that they would lose the race. The complexity of building such an automatic spacecraft made it impossible to get it ready in time.
Petrov also said that the Soviet Union’s space goals were to establish permanent orbital stations. Unable to beat the United States to the moon, the Soviets had decided to make believe they had never intended to go. Instead, they now claimed that their efforts had been aimed towards a different objective.
This was a lie. Their aggressive effort to beat the Americans to the moon had failed not only because their spacecraft was unnecessarily complex, but because their increased caution after the death of Komarov had stymied them.245
The Soviets had insisted that no manned mission to the moon could take place until at least one unmanned robot mission was able to duplicate the flight, without problems. Thus, though both Zond missions in September and November 1968 had been able to send a spacecraft around the moon and return it intact to earth, both flights had failures that prevented them from meeting the mission criteria.
So, despite having scheduled a lunar mission for December 4th with a crew of cosmonauts trained and willing to fly it, Brezhnev’s government refused to take the chance. Apollo 8 was therefore able to get to the moon first.
For the Soviet engineers and cosmonauts it was an agonizing experience watching the flight of Apollo 8. “It is a red letter day for all mankind, but for us it is marred by a sense of missed opportunities,” wrote Nikolay Kamanin, director of cosmonaut training, in his diaries. “Americans are flying to the moon and we have nothing to counter their exploit. The most dismaying thing is that we cannot tell the truth to our people. We try to write and speak about the reasons for our setbacks, but all our attempts are mired in official bureaucracy.”246
Less than a month after the flight of Apollo 8, the Soviet government canceled all plans to send any cosmonauts to the moon. The race to the moon was officially ove
r. America had won.
* * *
In the United States the celebrations continued. All three families attended the Super Bowl in Miami. The Borman boys, high school football players, were given jobs as ball boys, and the three astronauts led the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance prior to kick-off. They then watched Joe Namath’s A.F.L. New York Jets upset Johnny Unitas and the N.F.L.’s Baltimore Colts 16-7.
Bill Anders’s picture of that breathtaking first earthrise was placed on a six-cent U.S. stamp. At first the government planned to issue the stamp with no text, but decided to add the words “In the beginning . . .” in response to the thousands of letters that poured into the Post Office.247
The three astronauts spoke before a joint session of Congress. Borman spoke last and longest, as was his right as commander of the mission. “Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit, and I hope we never forget that,” he told a cheering room of legislators.248
Thomas O. Paine, acting administrator of NASA, couldn’t help exulting at Apollo 8’s success. “It’s the triumph of the squares,” he said. “The guys with computers and slide-rules who read the Bible on Christmas Eve.”249
CHANGES
And yet, did they triumph? In retrospect the great irony of Apollo 8 is that in the three following decades, society decided to draw from this space flight a completely different message, one that the astronauts and the other “squares” that sent them to the moon would not necessarily have endorsed.
Seven months after Apollo 8, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, fulfilling Kennedy’s pledge that “whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.” Before launch Buzz Aldrin had decided that, like Borman, Lovell, and Anders, he too wanted to give thanks to his God. He had worked out a short ceremony with his local church pastor, who had provided Aldrin with a tiny Communion kit with a silver chalice and wine vial “about the size of the tip of my little finger.”250
But something had changed in the ensuing months. Though Julian Scheer once again told the astronauts they were entirely free to say whatever they wanted, at least one official at NASA actually advised Aldrin against saying his prayers in public.251 As Aldrin noted many years later, some at the agency wanted to avoid any “adverse publicity from people like [Madalyn] O’Hair.”252 Her complaints and court suit over the astronauts’ reading of Genesis seemed to have intimidated the agency.
So, when Aldrin asked a breathless world several hours after the lunar landing “to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way,” he was euphemistically telling the world that he was at that moment taking communion. He poured the wine and read silently words from the Book of John,
I am the wine and you are the branches.
Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit;
For you can do nothing without me.
Yet no one, not even Aldrin’s wife, knew that he was praying at this particular moment. Astonishingly, the objections of a few had served to muzzle Aldrin’s freedom to speak.253
Even more surprising was how little anyone protested. No one in NASA, including Aldrin, saw anything wrong with an astronaut censoring himself because others disliked the public expression of prayer. While Borman, Anders, and Lovell had assumed they had the freedom to say whatever they wished, Aldrin did not. Something had changed in NASA in the ensuing six months.
In the ensuing decades the social pressure on astronauts to censor themselves only worsened. Today, when philosophical words are spoken in space, they rarely have the same sincere ring of honesty as the words of the Apollo 8 astronauts. Astronauts today all too often toe the party line, fearful that if they speak too boldly, their bosses on earth might ban them from further missions in space.
Instead, the politicians speak, using space as a platform to promote themselves. Prior to Apollo 8 no American President had ever spoken directly to an astronaut while still in orbit, as Khrushchev had done. Such an action seemed too self-serving and propagandistic: the astronauts had dangerous work to do, and it seemed unseemly for a mere politician to insert himself unnecessarily in that work.
By the Apollo 11 landing on the moon, however, that changed. Richard Nixon, who had done almost nothing to conceive, design, build, and fly the American space program, spent two minutes on the phone with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they stood on the moon, mouthing empty platitudes while these men’s lives were at risk. Nor has Nixon been the only one to do this. Practically every President since Nixon has thought it acceptable to use space as his own personal bully pulpit.254
* * *
Other changes were as fast and as immediate. In January, 1969, the New Republic published a short article by Ralph Lapp noting that no one knew exactly what would follow a lunar landing. “Slum-dwellers, awed by Apollo 8 and subsequent flights, may conclude that they should receive space age benefits. If the United States can accomplish such wonders, they may reason, can’t we have decent housing, good schools, and a better life?”
Then in March Tom Wicker wrote on the New York Times op-ed page:
The vision, skill, courage and intelligence that have gone into the space program ought to shame mankind--and Americans in particular. Because if men can do what the astronauts and their earthbound colleagues-- human beings all--have done, why cannot we build the houses we need? Why must our cities be choked in traffic and the polluted air it produces? . . . Why does every effort to remove slums and rebuild cities bog down in red tape and red ink?255
Neither Wicker nor Lapp were asking that the space program be replaced by other government programs. Yet others took their words and came to that very conclusion. On May 20th, even as Apollo 10 and its three astronauts were halfway to the moon on the last dress rehearsal for the planned landing of Apollo 11 in July, Edward Kennedy stood up at the dedication of the $5.4 million Robert Goddard Library at Clark University to declare that Americans should slow their exploration of space, diverting the money instead to earth-based social programs.256
Nor was Kennedy alone in his demand. In the months following the Apollo 8 mission, the calls to reduce the American space program were incessant and many. For example, when the American Association for the Advancement of Science held a panel discussion on the space program at its December 1969 meeting, more than one hundred demonstrators also gathered to protest what they called a “moondoggle” and “our twisted national priorities.”257 The organizers of the protest later referred to NASA as a place “where the most outrageous forms of waste for profit are perpetuated . . . and used to divert attention from the obvious neglect of peoples’ needs.”258
Frank Borman himself got a personal up-front look at this groundswell of hostility. That spring President Nixon asked him to visit a number of colleges and universities to explain what the space program was about. In writing about that college tour years later, Borman bluntly described it as “a disaster.” Astronaut Borman, a former test pilot and military man, found himself the target for the student anger at the continuing Vietnam War. Often students refused to let him speak, drowning him out with boos and catcalls. At Columbia, birthplace of violent student protest, the audience threw marshmallows at him, while others climbed onto the stage in gorilla costumes.
To Borman, one night at Cornell was particularly painful. “I wanted to talk about space, not an unpopular war, yet I ended up becoming almost an apologist for the military-industrial complex in the eyes of my radical-minded audiences who didn’t want to hear about space.”259 Almost all the students Borman met, many of whom belonged to the S.D.S., seemed to reject the idea of exploration. “‘How can you spend all this money going to the moon when there are so many poor, so many economic inequities, so much poverty?’“ they asked Borman.260Rejecting the space program, the students, many of whom admired socialism, instead wished to use the government to re-shape society, thereby solving other national problems that they considered more important. As former S.D.S. President Todd Gi
tlin wrote, “Much of the New Left . . . scorned the 1969 moon landing as a techno-irrelevancy if not an exercise in imperial distraction and space colonialism.”261
Ironically, the United States had entered the space race to prove that in the competition between the totalitarian Soviet Union and the free and capitalist United States, individual responsibility and private enterpise could do it better. “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” John Kennedy had said in his first inaugural address. According to this ideal, each citizen was individually responsible for doing what he or she could to make society better, not the government. Consider how the 1960’s American space program operated: NASA was run so much from the bottom that the presence and influence of Washington is practically invisible. The hard scheduling and engineering decisions were instead worked out by the ordinary lower-echelon workers thinking independently in the field. Not surprising then that the last person to find out about the prospect of sending Apollo 8 to the moon was NASA’s administrator, the man who was supposedly in charge at the top. James Webb might have been responsible for making the final and essentially political decision, but unlike his Soviet counterpart he interfered little with design and engineering problems.
NASA, however, was a government program, and its success helped prove -- not only to the demonstrators that Borman faced, but to an entire generation -- how it was possible to use government to solve society’s ills. “As revolutionary visions faded, many became crisp professional lobbyists: environmentalist, feminist, antiwar,” wrote Gitlin of the aftermath of the 1960’s. “Most were willing to think of themselves as unabashed reformers, availing themselves of whatever room they found for lobbying, running for office, creating local, statewide and regional organizations.”262
While Americans had often used local government to achieve their ends, and while the first half of the twentieth century had seen continuous growth in the use of the federal government to wield change, the 1960’s saw a burst of federal activism that was possibly the largest in the country’s history.263 The success of the space program, though certainly not the sole cause, surely helped weaken resistance to centralizing American political power around the national government.
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