Genesis

by Robert Zimmerman

  * * *

  Frank Borman, however, has absolutely no interest in going back to space. After the flight of Apollo 8 he was quite content to do work that was less dangerous and put less stress on his wife.

  For a while he flirted with the idea of joining the political world, going on a trip to the Soviet Union in conjunction with President Nixon’s policy of detente. Then he decided, like the other two astronauts, that the challenges of the corporate world were more interesting. He joined Eastern Airlines’ management team, and eventually took over as its C.E.O., trying to shepherd that company through the de-regulation of the airline industry.

  It was the only challenge in his life Frank Borman failed to meet. Eastern’s union wages were too high. For four years he managed to get the unions to go along with reduced wages and profit-sharing, while simultaneously straightening out the company’s finances. When deregulation hit the industry in 1978, however, one union backed out of the deal, causing the whole profit- sharing arrangement to collapse. When that same union next made demands that exceeded the ability of the airline to pay, Borman was faced with either acquiescing to the demands or going bankrupt during a strike. He chose to avoid a strike, hoping he could get the union to reconsider.

  Susan and Frank Borman, about to go flying together, 1997. Credit: Borman

  The union refused, and in fact increased its demands. Eventually, Eastern was sold, and Borman was forced to step down. On the day he lost the company, this tough no-nonsense test pilot came home and cried in his wife’s arms.

  But a worse upheaval had earlier struck the Borman family. By the early 1970’s both Fred and Ed were attending West Point, and Susan Borman found herself for the first time alone at home without a family to raise. The doubts and fears that she had experienced during Apollo 8 had continued to haunt her, and she increasingly resented her earlier willingness to bury herself entirely in the life of her husband. Even though he no longer had a life-threatening occupation, he was still obsessed with it, and put in endless hours at Eastern. With her two children now grown, Susan felt trapped by Frank Borman’s life.

  Frank Borman with grandchildren, 1983. Credit: Borman

  She began to drink. She eventually had a nervous breakdown. For a time Susan hated her husband, her life, and her existence. Similarly, Frank felt a terrible remorse and shame for always putting Susan second and his career first. After a period of therapy and intense soul-searching, however, they began rebuilding their lives together.

  Today, they live in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where Frank owns and operates a major car dealership as well as a number of other businesses. No longer does he do work that could get him killed. No longer does he work so hard that he ignores the needs of his wife.

  Susan, meanwhile, has learned to live her own life, without abandoning her deep abiding love for Frank. And she has become significantly more religious. Even now, thirty years after Frank’s return from the moon, she still cannot believe that the mission succeeded. To her, the odds had been too great. Divine intervention must have played its part. As she told me, “I honestly to this day believe, with every cell in my body, that [Apollo 8] was a miracle.”

  * * *

  In the end, the thought that defines these three families is that of a promise kept and an oath fulfilled. While many other couples in the ensuing decades have decided it was unimportant to keep faith with their mates and children, these six men and women accepted their oath of marriage as a bond to be honored.

  And honor it they have. Their life story makes a lie of the modern myth that enduring marriages are impossible. These were partnerships for life, and each partner had a task to make the marriage work. In the end, everything they did, they did for each other.

  EARTH

  Fred Gregory held on for dear life. Once again his body was shaking like crazy, but unlike his helicopter experience in Vietnam, this time he knew what was happening. Below him roared a spaceship weighing four-and-a-half million pounds, its engines firing almost six-and-a-half million pounds of thrust. In mere minutes he was traveling more than a dozen times faster than he had ever flown in a jet.

  Fred Gregory, a man who had had absolutely no interest in space exploration when Borman, Lovell, and Anders had gone to the moon, was now on his way into earth orbit. The date was April 29, 1985, and Fred was now pilot of the space shuttle Challenger.

  Much had happened since he had flown that helicopter in the jungles of Vietnam. By 1973 the United States’s armies had withdrawn, after more than 50,000 American and many more Vietnamese casualties. By 1975, North Vietnam had overrun the South and won the war.

  Gregory finished his tour of duty in 1967 and came home looking for new and challenging aviation work. He went to the library to research what jobs were available to skilled military pilots, and learned that there were military schools where he could train to become a test pilot, flying experimental jets in the most dangerous circumstances. He applied, was accepted, and completed the test pilot course at the Naval Test Pilot School at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station.

  By 1970 he was an engineering test pilot at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, flying both helicopters and jets in the craziest of situations. For example, Fred cheerfully volunteered to pilot a jet into thunderstorms so that meteorologists could study their violent and deadly wind and electric patterns. He did this more than fifty times, letting the winds buffet and shake his airplane so hard that many times it was almost torn apart.

  When NASA announced in 1976 that it was looking for pilots for its new space shuttle, Fred was intrigued by the idea of flying this new kind of radical “airplane.” Unlike the space capsules of the 1960’s, this looked like something he could pilot.

  Almost a decade after Apollo 8 he still knew little and cared less about the space program. In fact, though his wife Barbara insists that they watched the reading of Genesis in his parents’ home on Christmas Eve, 1968, Gregory today doesn’t remember this moment at all.

  His interest in the shuttle program and the exploration of space finally came alive one day when he was home watching television. Nichelle Nichols, who had played Lt. Uhura on the science fiction television show Star Trek, was spokeswoman on a NASA public service announcement calling for new astronaut applicants. She looked into the camera and said, “We want you!”

  Fred looked back at her in shock. He felt almost as if she were talking directly to him. He sent in his application, and by 1978 he was in the program.

  Now it was 1985, and Fred Gregory was flying his first mission in space. Once in orbit, the crew settled down to routine business. This mission was the second Spacelab mission to fly, and in the cargo hold a crew of five scientists conducted experiments on materials processing, atmospheric physics, astronomy, fluid behavior and life sciences.

  As pilot, however, Gregory had little to do with the experiments. Instead, he and his commander, Robert Overmyer, alternated twelve hour shifts, sitting alone in the cockpit, monitoring the shuttle’s performance as it orbited the earth time after time.

  For seven days Fred circled the earth. Though he didn’t know it, his experience was remarkably similar to that of Borman, Lovell and Anders. At one point the parallels were uncanny. Though the mission itself went smoothly, the life sciences experiments involved two monkeys and two dozen white rats. Unfortunately, the cages were not well sealed, and before too long floating animal feces and dried food particles drifted throughout the shuttle. Like the Apollo 8 astronauts decades before, Fred spent a good portion of his free time trying to scoop floating feces out of the air.

  In other, more significant ways, Gregory’s experience was very different from that of the astronauts on Apollo 8. The shuttle was large, more closely resembling the spaceships in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey than the Apollo 8 capsule. The shuttle had three separate decks, and could accommodate eight astronauts comfortably, and ten in an emergency. Its atmosphere was a mixture of twenty percent oxygen and eighty percent nitrogen, rather than pure oxygen. The kitch
en area on the middeck included an oven for reheating food packages, color-coded utensils and food packs for each astronaut, and condiments such as salt, pepper, taco sauce, hot pepper sauce, catsup, mayonnaise and mustard. Its cargo bay was so large that four Apollo 8 capsules could fit within it. Rather than splashing down in the ocean, the shuttle landed on a runway like an airplane. And above all, it was reusable.

  These were the engineering differences. Other disparities were far more profound. When Gregory stared down at the blue, white, and brown planet below him, he did not see a fragile, delicate Christmas ornament as did Borman, Lovell, and Anders. Instead, he saw something incredibly robust and sturdy, a grand and tough planet that actually seemed capable of healing itself repeatedly despite any and all forms of injury.

  This impression was further strengthened on Gregory’s final shuttle flight before he retired from active duty. On November 25, 1991 he took off as commander of the shuttle Atlantis on a seven-day mission. Besides putting a military surveillance satellite into orbit, the crew spent most of its time conducting earth observation experiments.

  In 1991, the earth’s atmosphere had undergone a number of violent upheavals. In January the Iraqi military had fled Kuwait, igniting 732 oil wells behind them. For months these wells burned, sending tons of smoke into the air. Some experts worried that the black clouds could affect the earth’s climate. When Atlantis reached orbit in late November the last well fire had been quenched only two weeks earlier.277 Then, in June, the Mount Pinatubo volcano exploded, sending columns of ash and smoke twenty-five miles into the air, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people, destroying whole cities, and dumping over two cubic miles of volcanic ash across a million-and-a- half square mile area from Indonesia to Vietnam.278

  Within three weeks Pinatubo’s plume had completely encircled the globe, spanning fifty degrees of latitude worldwide.279

  What amazed Gregory was how little visible evidence remained from earth orbit of these ferocious events. Only five months after Pinatubo’s eruption he could see little atmospheric evidence of that gigantic and furious explosion. Though he knew intellectually that the eruption’s giant aerosol cloud still permeated the atmosphere worldwide, he could not see it.

  Even more surprising was what he saw of the Kuwaiti oil fires. Though Gregory could still see some evidence of the fires’ smoke in the atmosphere above the Middle East, he was amazed to see it diminish each day. By the time he returned to earth the air actually seemed clearer. “I equated [the earth] to a cat cleaning itself,” Fred told me. “When it became dirty it just licked itself clean.”

  The Apollo astronauts had looked at the earth and had seen a tiny, frail object in the blackness of space. The Apollo astronauts, however, were flying in a tiny, very frail capsule, voyaging far beyond the utmost limits of human capability. Unconsciously, they were projecting their own fragility back on to a distance earth.

  Fred Gregory, however, floated in his shirtsleeves in a true spaceship, as hardy and as safe as any combat jet. He did not feel himself constantly vulnerable to certain death, mere inches away. Nor did his experience push the envelope of human experience farther than was prudent or safe. Instead, he was doing what humans now considered risky but ordinary work, though that work did extend the human experience outward into regions that were little explored and newly won.

  The crew of shuttle mission 51-B floats in orbit, May 1985.

  Fred Gregory is on the far right.

  Hence, Fred could look down at the earth and see another vision, that of a large planet with a complex ecology, able to balance and maintain itself, despite terrible afflictions. Long after every human had died, Gregory knew that that planet would go on renewing itself.

  That Gregory’s perspective was different from the astronauts of thirty years ago is hardly surprising. While his early lack of interest in space exploration might have reflected the lean years of the 1970‘s—when few in America were interested in exploration -- his desire to go into space in the 1980’s was a clear precursor of the space boom happening this very moment. Not only has NASA sent probes to Mars, the moon, and Saturn for the first time in decades, the first components of the American-led International Space Station have been completed, and should Russian funding problems finally be solved, it will reach orbit sometime within the next year [1999].

  The clear blue Pacific Ocean, west of the Philippines, as seen by Fred Gregory, 1991.

  The light haze in the center of the picture is the sun's reflection.

  However, the boom in private space development is more significant. Revenues from commercial space launches in 1997 totaled $85 billion, and are expected to increase to $121 billion by the year 2000.280 One company has launched a constellation of seventy-two satellites in its plan to provide cellular telephone service anywhere in the world.281 Another has launched eight out of a planned array of forty satellites, and a third has launched twelve of thirty-six. And in 1997, commercial launches exceeded government launches for the first time in history.

  Today, private enterprise dominates the space industry. Several industry studies predict that in the next decade between 1,700 to 2,000 new satellites will be launched, with seventy percent of these commercially financed.282 With this many satellites planned, a gigantic need has developed for new and cheaper rockets. Almost a dozen private firms are developing reusable spaceships.283 One man, Andrew Beal, has invested a quarter of a billion dollars of his own money to develop a new expendable rocket.284 Another businessman, Jim Benson, has formed a corporation to send an unmanned mission to a nearby asteroid, with launch expected sometime prior to February 2001. Though some might think this plan farfetched, Benson’s company, SpaceDev, estimates sales in its aerospace and engineering divisions will exceed ten million dollars in 1998. According to the company’s literature, “SpaceDev believes there is pent-up demand for economical space exploration.”

  The new century will see a renaissance of space exploration as exciting and as challenging as the space race of the 1960’s. And this rebirth will happen under the banner of freedom and private property, the very principles for which the United States fought the Cold War.

  FREEDOM

  And in Berlin, the wall is no more. Where that death strip of barbed wire and guard towers once stood are gleaming office buildings and shopping malls. No longer do foreign troops patrol the city. The only indication that remains of the forty year head-to-head conflict between capitalism and communism is a small museum one block from Checkpoint Charlie (where a giant office complex now stands). In this museum are many of the tools and equipment used by the thousands who succeeded in vaulting the Berlin Wall to freedom. And there are testimonies to the over eight hundred people thought to have died trying to escape East Germany.285

  The Cold War is over, and the Soviet Union is a memory. As Ronald Reagan correctly predicted in 1982: “The march of freedom and democracy . . . will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.”286

  Despite Khrushchev’s claim that Nixon’s grandchildren would live as communists, it is Nikita’s descendants who today live as capitalists, striving hard to catch up with America after more than seventy years of communist rule.

  Perhaps Frank Borman expressed it best. In summing up the fall of communism he said very simply, “In the final analysis, everybody wants to be free.”

  Ironically, perhaps the only good legacy left by the communist dictatorship was its space program. For more than twelve years, space station Mir has dominated space exploration, providing a platform for science and international prestige. Even as the Soviet Union collapsed and disappeared from the earth, an abject demonstration of the failure of a centralized state-run society, its space station has lived on.

  Today, the Russian government owns Mir, and clearly recognizes its value. In fact, the Russians have taken a decidedly capitalist approach to maintaining their entire space program. Forced to raise cash, the Russians have eagerly sold as advertisement space the walls of thei
r mission control, much like a sports stadium. They have commercialized their launch services, offering them to private communication satellite companies.

  And they have rented their space station to such Western countries as England, France, Germany, and even the United States. In exchange for substantial cash payments in the hundreds of millions of dollars, foreign astronauts have visited Mir and used it for training and scientific research.

  In America, meanwhile, ordinary Americans still do what they have always done, despite the cultural pressure to deny the existence of a distinct American way of life. When astronaut Michael Foale returned to earth after spending four months on Mir, he noted that “I have, of course, thought a lot about my family . . . And my priority now is to spend more time with my young children over the next year or two . . . I’m looking forward to the adventure of learning how to walk again and live in my house with my wife and my children, get to know my wife again, date her again, maybe marry her again.”287

  And Foale’s replacement, David Wolf, told reporters prior to launch that while in space he would observe the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, including fasting and prayer. Unable to attend synagogue services, Wolf pointed out that he could “still do it in mind.”288

  Furthermore, during his four month stay, Wolf became the first human to vote from space, casting his ballot for local elections in Houston. A new law in Texas had made it possible for an astronaut in space to do this electronically.

  Jim Benson, meanwhile, in his commercial plans to explore an asteroid, intends “to make an ownership claim of the asteroid, [setting] a precedent for private property rights in space.”289