Rocket Men

by Robert Kurson

  In 1960, Borman applied to and was accepted by the Air Force’s exclusive Experimental Flight Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. It was in the skies, he thought, that the fight against the Soviets would be decided; technology would determine how high and how fast.

  He began training in a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, flying at 1,600 miles per hour, more than twice the speed of sound. Much of what he did at Edwards was experimental and untested, making it dangerous in ways one couldn’t train for, and in ways that he never discussed with Susan.

  Borman graduated first in his class academically and second in flying and won the award for best overall student at Edwards. (He would have been first in flying but for a momentary failure to raise a landing gear, a slipup that would bother him for years.) He then signed on to establish a new program at Edwards, the Aerospace Research Pilot Graduate course, designed to prepare future astronauts to fly. He and four other top pilot-engineers would create a curriculum, making sure it best positioned a man for selection by NASA. It did not escape his notice that as an instructor, NASA might consider him to be among the best candidates of them all.

  In March 1961, Borman came to a crossroads. NASA was looking to bring on a second group of astronauts and asked top Navy and Air Force pilots to apply. If he had any interest in going into space, now was the time to strike.

  Borman didn’t thrill to the idea of riding on rockets or exploring the cosmos or even stepping on the Moon. The instant celebrity conferred on astronauts seemed a distraction to him. And yet only NASA could deliver him onto a new battlefield, where technology and futuristic flying machines could help determine whether democracy or Communism prevailed. With the Cold War growing hotter every day, he could think of no more important place to do his part than on the frontier of space.

  He talked to Susan. He told her he had a chance to help America, and to make history, but it would require undertaking a new life and unknown risks. Susan answered as she always had: They were a team and she would support him. A short time later, he submitted his application to NASA, joining more than two hundred other highly qualified hopefuls. He endured exams—physical and psychological—and several rounds of cuts as NASA trimmed its list of finalists to about eighty, then to thirty-two. Finally, in the fall of 1962—eighteen months after he first put his name in the hat—Borman became one of the agency’s nine new astronauts, selected from America’s best to go where mankind had only dreamed of going.

  * * *

  —

  NASA introduced its second group of astronauts to the public at the University of Houston on September 17, 1962. Soon to be dubbed the New Nine by the press, they included James Lovell and Neil Armstrong. All nine had been test pilots and had studied aeronautical engineering. All were married and had children. From the moment he stood beside these men, Borman could tell he was among a rare group, talented and competitive beyond any he’d met.

  The new astronauts became instant celebrities. As with the Original Seven, each received a contract with Life magazine and Field Enterprises that paid him $16,000 a year for exclusive access to his and his family’s personal stories. For her part, Susan would be obliged to speak at luncheons and urge young mothers to buy World Book encyclopedias (published by Field Enterprises) for their families.

  NASA assigned each new astronaut to a specialty. Borman’s was boosters, the rockets that lifted spacecraft off Earth and into orbit and beyond. His focus would be on a crucial aspect—the crew safety and escape systems. Borman and his colleagues would spend hundreds of hours in classrooms, visiting contractors, and on field trips, learning everything from astronomy to meteorology to flight mechanics to computers to spacecraft construction. If America was going to reach the Moon by President Kennedy’s deadline, now just seven years away, the astronauts had to learn in gulps, not sips.

  That applied to public relations, too. Meet-and-greets became commonplace, black tie functions the norm. Everyone in America, it seemed, wanted a piece of the astronauts. Once, Borman and Susan shared a limousine with a celebrity on their way to a gala sponsored by a wealthy Texas oilman.

  “I’m Tony Randall,” the man said.

  “So nice to meet you,” Borman said. “I really enjoyed your song ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco.’ ”

  The actor did not appreciate being mistaken for the singer Tony Bennett. Borman did not appreciate the arrogance in Randall’s indignation.

  “To hell with him,” Borman whispered to Susan.

  As Borman settled in at NASA, it became clear to peers and management that he was a different breed, even among these unique men. He did not dabble in reflection, showed no patience for shades of gray. Mission came first, always, and if he sensed you were unqualified for a job or, worse, a bullshitter, he got your ass out of the way. He seemed unconcerned with NASA politics, blew smoke up no one’s posterior, superiors included, and would not say, or do, anything he did not believe in. Some astronauts considered him arrogant or hard-headed, but all respected him, and few would have disagreed with Borman’s own assessment—that he was among the best of the astronaut corps.

  Like most astronauts, Borman was conservative politically. Yet he voted for Democrat Lyndon Johnson for president in 1964 because Borman believed strongly in racial justice and civil rights. He was affected by Johnson’s famous “Daisy” television commercial, aired during the campaign against Barry Goldwater, that juxtaposed a little girl against the mushroom cloud made by a nuclear bomb. The image disturbed Borman, yet he was ready, at a moment’s notice, to drop the same kind of bomb on the Soviet Union if that’s what America deemed necessary.

  In 1964, Deke Slayton, the man in charge of crew assignments, teamed Borman with Jim Lovell to be primary crew for Gemini 7. The mission was planned as a fourteen-day Earth-orbital flight, the longest space mission ever attempted, intended primarily to test human endurance in space and to conduct a cascade of medical experiments.

  During training, Borman and Lovell averaged more than twenty days a month away from home. When Borman got time off, he spent it with his family at home in Houston, taking Susan and his sons hunting and fishing. (Susan doubted she could bring herself to shoot a deer, but after Frank and the boys bought her a rifle, she had no trouble taking the shot. Frank never figured out whether she missed on purpose; to him, it meant everything that she tried.) To learn to water-ski, he and Susan checked out a book from the library, then took turns driving the boat, pages flapping in the wind. He loved how fast Susan took to it, even as he struggled. His boys delighted in how their father, a master of the skies, could barely swim. To make it to his sons’ junior high football games, Borman pushed NASA’s T-38 jets to their operational limits on Fridays after work, then ran to the hamburger stand Susan operated at the games, ready with his order in hand.

  On Saturday, December 4, 1965, Susan and her two sons arrived at the VIP area at Cape Kennedy for the launch of Gemini 7. At 2:30 P.M., the Titan II rocket fired. As it rose in a column of white smoke and orange flame, Susan held on to her boys but looked away. Photographers captured the image—a good mother, a woman overwhelmed. Six minutes later, Gemini 7 was in orbit around Earth. Susan and her sons boarded a bus to the airport to go home. Out the window, Frederick and Edwin searched the sky for a glimpse of their dad’s rocket ship.

  Despite being confined to a cabin no larger than the front half of a Volkswagen Beetle, the longer Borman and Lovell flew, the more they liked each other. Every day, over and over, they sang “He’ll Have to Go,” a 1959 country ballad by Jim Reeves. “Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone,” they crooned; “Let’s pretend that we’re together all alone.”

  After eleven days in space, Borman and Lovell received visitors. Approaching like a white star, Gemini 6, which had just launched from Cape Kennedy, closed to within one foot of Gemini 7, proving that two ships could rendezvous in space (a necessary maneuver for flying
a lunar landing mission, in which astronauts would use a lunar module to shuttle between an orbiting spacecraft and the Moon). Lovell burst out laughing when the Gemini 6 crew, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford, flashed a sign to Borman: BEAT ARMY. Schirra, Stafford, and Lovell were Navy, and as a West Point man Borman had no choice but to take it.

  By the time Borman and Lovell splashed down in the western Atlantic, they had set records for duration of flight (more than 330 hours, or 13.75 days), distance traveled (more than 5 million miles), and number of orbits (206). More important, they’d helped America take a major step toward the Moon by proving man could endure long stretches in space. The two weeks they’d spent was the maximum duration it was believed a lunar mission would require.

  Borman was immediately made a full colonel, the youngest in the Air Force at age thirty-seven. A few weeks after splashdown, Susan wrote an article that was published in newspapers around the country. People had noticed how frightened she’d been during launch and the flight, and not everyone appreciated it—including some at NASA.

  “These past weeks I had worn my feelings on my sleeve,” she wrote. “Some said they were pleased to see an astronaut’s wife willing to admit she was scared. Others, including some people in the space program, were critical because I failed to maintain the traditional stiff upper lip. ‘For heaven’s sake, wipe your tears. You’re ruining my morning coffee,’ one woman wrote. At one time, such criticism would have cut me deeply. But…I have come to realize you can’t be all things to all people. So I decided not to pretend and not to try to hide my feelings—I decided to be myself.”

  Soon after Gemini 7’s return, Borman received a telegram from West Point offering him a permanent professorship of mechanics. Susan loved the idea of returning to an idyllic life at West Point. But Borman said he couldn’t do it—his heart was in flying, and he had a Cold War to help win. He would stay with NASA.

  A year later, the tragic Apollo 1 fire occurred. Susan made it her mission to comfort and support her friend Pat White, the wife of one of the fallen astronauts. She visited the new widow every day, listening to her, holding her, and crying with her, trying to be strong as Pat kept repeating, “Who am I, Susan? Who am I? I’ve lost everything. It’s all gone.” At night, when Susan got home, she began to drink a bit, if only to quiet her nerves.

  In the past, Susan had dealt with fatalities among Frank’s colleagues the same way he did—by assuming it would never happen to him. But Ed White was different. He was a near-perfect physical specimen, even stronger than Frank, yet even he had been unable to get the spacecraft’s hatch open during the fire. Frank told her that Charles Atlas himself couldn’t have moved the hatch, but it was more than that to Susan. Ed White had been a West Point graduate, a devoted husband and father, and a committed patriot. He didn’t screw around with muscle cars or other women. Which was to say he was just like Frank.

  After eighteen months investigating the fire, testifying before Congress, and working on the Apollo command module redesign, Borman was offered the chance to be the commander of Apollo 8, man’s first lunar mission. The flight was full of risks and unknowns, but it was where Borman had been pointing since he first soloed a single-engine airplane over the skies of Tucson. He hadn’t known how that flight would end, either, but his instructor, Miss Bobbie, had believed he could go anywhere. Now, when he told Deke Slayton he would go to the Moon, he believed it, too.

  ASTRONAUTS SCHEDULED TO FLY TO THE Moon in just four months should have been training in NASA’s command module simulator, a ground-based model of the real thing. But, like most everything else connected to Apollo 8’s new mission, it wasn’t yet ready.

  Borman, Lovell, and Anders settled on what their responsibilities would be for the mission, each according to his own experience and to his role on the flight. Borman would focus on the boosters and abort systems, the trajectory, and piloting the spacecraft. As commander, he would also be in charge during the flight, overseeing the crew and assuming responsibility for mission success.

  Lovell would be the command module pilot, in charge of navigation. He would use the spacecraft’s sextant, an optical instrument similar to those used on board sailing ships through the centuries, to measure angles between the Sun, Moon, and stars. (Primary navigation would be done by computers and Mission Control personnel, but Lovell needed to navigate, too, in case of technical failure on the ground or a complete loss of communications.) He would also map lunar landmarks and scout candidate areas for future landings. To learn the new guidance system, Lovell needed to spend time at MIT’s Draper Lab, where he would practice sighting stars by focusing on the bright white light coming from atop a tall insurance building across the Charles River.

  Anders would be the systems engineer, responsible for understanding how the highly complex spacecraft functioned. He had to master every switch, dial, lever, and gauge in the command module, where the astronauts would live for six days. He needed to have a thorough understanding of the service module attached to its base, which housed the systems for electric power and life support, and propellants essential to making the journey. There were thousands of intricate parts and connections and operations, and Anders had to make sure they all worked. He would also be in charge of photography, chronicling the flight on still and movie film. To this end, Anders fought to bring a 250 millimeter Zeiss Sonnar telephoto lens aboard. It was giant and heavy, but he had a feeling he’d need it.

  Anders had come to change his thinking about Apollo 8’s new mission in the weeks since it had been conceived. He’d been disappointed when told his crew would go to the Moon but wouldn’t land there, given that it required him to give up his training as a lunar module pilot and become a command module specialist instead. On future missions, he’d probably be the guy who stayed behind in the orbiting spacecraft while his two crewmates walked on the Moon. For a man who dreamed of collecting rocks from the lunar surface, that packed a wallop.

  But then he’d gotten to thinking: Flying on Apollo 8 meant that he, Lovell, and Borman would be the first human beings ever to leave Earth, and the first to arrive at the Moon. And the first to see its far side. That was like being another Christopher Columbus, and what more could a curious man hope for than that?

  The astronauts weren’t the only ones under the gun. Director of Flight Operations Chris Kraft and others began constructing a detailed flight plan, one that accounted for every hour of the six-day journey; even a wasted minute would be unacceptable, given the risk and opportunity. Kraft also began his own study of the spacecraft and flight support systems; Kraft wanted to understand the ship better than the astronauts did, so if anything faltered, he’d already have been through the emergency and worked out every possible solution in his mind.

  Nearly everyone involved in Apollo 8 had to coordinate with other departments, linking arms across NASA and industry to form a massive, cohesive whole. The agency and private industry needed to work together to prepare the command module, mate the spacecraft to the Saturn V rocket, and move it all to the Cape. Mission Control in Houston had to coordinate with the Cape to work out countdowns and launch windows, with the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville to determine the rocket’s maneuvers and trajectories, and with the contractors and universities that would help make complex calculations. It also had to make sure every part and every system was built to specification and on schedule. Computers and software had to be built and updated, electrical wiring diagrammed and tested, and the tracking stations around the world—which would relay voice and data between the flying spacecraft and Mission Control in Houston—brought up to speed. All of this, and so much else, had to be finished in just over one hundred days, all while NASA prepared for the launch of Apollo 7 in just one month. If that flight wasn’t near-perfect, Apollo 8 wouldn’t go.

  * * *

  —

  On Friday evening, August 23, the astronauts went home for a rare weekend off. Many of
their neighbors were like them—astronauts or NASA employees, conservative politically, with front lawns and haircuts that were military short. Boys still said “Yes, sir” when speaking to adults, girls still wore dresses. When the network newscasts came on the black-and-white televisions that night (color was still a luxury for many), few in these neighborhoods recognized the country looking back at them.

  Thousands of antiwar protesters had descended on Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, which was scheduled to start in three days. Gathering in parks and on the streets downtown, these protesters, most of them under thirty years old, intended to make their demands for peace known to the Democrats, and to the world.

  Rumors as to the protesters’ intentions had circulated for weeks. Word had it that these long-haired young people planned to dump LSD into the water supply, stage nude-ins at Lake Michigan, turn over cars and toss Molotov cocktails, run off with delegates’ daughters. A siege mentality took root in Chicago’s elders. Except for one rally in Grant Park, Mayor Richard J. Daley refused to issue permits for the protesters to march, gather, or camp out in parks. To enforce Daley’s peace, twelve thousand Chicago police officers, armed with military gear, stood at the ready, backed by six thousand members of the Illinois National Guard and six thousand regular Army troops.

  To the astronauts, Chicago seemed a universe away. They lived military lives, rarely intersecting with the counterculture. Like most astronauts, Borman, Lovell, and Anders found the lifestyle and tactics of hippies and the antiwar movement unbecoming, even unpatriotic. But they didn’t dismiss these young people. Each of them knew that the powder keg that looked ready to ignite in Chicago hadn’t formed overnight; tensions had been building since the start of the year, one that was shaping up to be among the worst in the nation’s history.