Already, ten thousand or more young Americans had been killed in Vietnam, and 1968 wasn’t nearly over. Antiwar demonstrations had erupted around America, racial tension had led to riots, student protests had turned bloody. In a nine-week span, between early April and early June, two of the country’s most inspirational figures—Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy—had been assassinated. Swaths of the population no longer trusted government or authority or institutions. Even music seemed more political—and angry—than before.
Now all of the year’s turmoil seemed to be coming to a head in Chicago. As the crew of Apollo 8 prepared to resume training after a weekend at home, two thousand demonstrators massed in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. Many had nowhere else to sleep, but the city’s curfew required them to disperse at 11 P.M. When the hour struck, police outfitted in gas masks and helmets moved in, firing tear gas canisters into the remaining crowd, clubbing and kicking whomever they could reach.
The convention opened the next day. Protesters marched on police headquarters, then redirected to Grant Park. At the convention, Daley promised, “As long as I’m mayor of this town, there will be law and order in Chicago.” On television, 89 million Americans tuned in to see the direction the country might take.
On August 28, the Democratic Party voted against adopting an antiwar plank to its platform. The peace candidate, Eugene McCarthy, refused on principle to address the convention, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey secured the nomination. A crowd of ten thousand rallied in Grant Park. Tempers flared, and soon billy clubs and boots were flying. Rennie Davis, one of the organizers of the demonstrations, was beaten unconscious. Thousands began to march to the site of the convention, but they were turned back by National Guardsmen, some brandishing automatic weapons and grenade launchers.
That left the protesters outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue, where they remained into the night. By the thousands, they shouted epithets and profanities at police, delegates, politicians—anyone in charge—and to many it no longer sounded like free speech or the expression of opinion, it sounded like America had burst, and the bile that discharged flowed uphill on one of America’s most exclusive streets, seeking higher and higher levels so that Humphrey would hear it in his twenty-fifth-floor room, and LBJ would hear it at his ranch in Texas.
The police stood there taking the worst of it. In ordinary times, a person cursed at a Chicago cop at their peril. Yet peril seemed to be what the demonstrators wanted most. After thirty minutes, the police obliged them, smashing and clubbing and kicking and dragging anyone they could reach—demonstrators, onlookers, journalists—and it didn’t matter that the network television cameras were filming or that people were yelling “The whole world is watching!” or that those in the streets weren’t Vietcong or Soviets but the sons and daughters of fellow citizens; all that mattered for the next eighteen minutes of brutality and mayhem was that something had fractured in America and no one had any idea how to stop it, and after order was restored there still seemed to be cries coming from the streets, even though there was no one left to make them. Among the millions who watched the unedited footage on television, there hardly seemed a soul among them—rich or poor, young or old, left or right—who didn’t wonder if America could be put back together again.
* * *
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On Sunday, September 8, the crew of Apollo 8 flew their T-38 jets from Houston to Cape Kennedy in Florida, checked in to the Holiday Inn at Cocoa Beach, and prepared to die.
Often.
In the morning, they would start training in the command module simulator, an Earth-based model of the Apollo spacecraft they would pilot in December. Housed in nondescript buildings at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston and at Cape Kennedy in Florida, the machines were highly accurate mock-ups of the real thing, their cabins outfitted with every switch, lever, dial, gauge, light, alarm, circuit breaker, and readout the astronauts would use on the lunar journey. Everything worked—the simulator itself didn’t move, but optics could be projected onto screens, navigational information displayed, sounds played over speakers, and lights flashed. The seven hundred–plus manual controls functioned just as they would during an actual mission. An astronaut could spend years poring over diagrams and schematics, but he would never know a complex machine like the command module without spending time inside its landlocked twin.
Any segment of a mission could be replicated, any situation reproduced, any scenario played out. The astronauts could “fly” the simulator just as they would the real spacecraft, working through segments of their lunar journey in real time. Any mistakes and they’d know it. And they wouldn’t be the only ones.
Seated outside the simulator were a set of NASA employees who served as instructors. They were the ones who programmed scenarios into the simulator, and who watched the astronauts’ every move on their consoles, ready to make critiques and corrections.
Leading the team of instructors was the Simulation Supervisor, or SimSup. One of his jobs was to teach the astronauts the correct sequences and procedures for every part of the flight, from liftoff to lunar orbit to splashdown. His other job was to kill them.
Space flight was inherently complex and unpredictable—crews were nearly certain to encounter problems with the rocket and spacecraft during their mission. To give them a fighting chance, the SimSup would unleash an arsenal of emergencies, failures, malfunctions, and conflicts into the simulation, forcing the crew to learn to survive, showing them the consequences of every wrong move. It would do no one any good to take it easy on them. Only by theoretically endangering the lives of the men inside the simulator could the SimSup hope to save them during actual flight. In this way, the best SimSups had a streak of the devil inside them.
Flight controllers and others involved in the mission would also work with the SimSup and instructors. Astronauts in the simulator at the Cape would be able to talk to controllers in Houston, to launch specialists in Florida, even to ground stations in Australia. The simulation was nearly as elaborate as the actual flight. The crew of Apollo 8 knew they had to be ready.
* * *
—
Borman, Lovell, and Anders ate a predawn breakfast together, joking about how close they’d have to sit in the simulator, threatening whoever dared show up without brushing his teeth. The Sun was just rising when they arrived at the command module simulator at Cape Kennedy. It was Monday, September 9, 1968, less than fifteen weeks before Apollo 8’s scheduled mission. Despite the early hour, the room was crowded with flight controllers and technicians, many of whom were in their twenties, some just out of college. At age forty, Borman and Lovell were nearly twice as old as some of the men gathered around the simulator; even Anders, at thirty-four, seemed an elder statesman here.
As test and fighter pilots, the astronauts had flown cutting-edge machines, but even they needed time to process the sight of the Apollo simulator. Standing about twenty feet high, it was a hodgepodge of sharp-cornered modules that appeared jammed together by cubist painters, jazz musicians, and mad scientists. There seemed no front or back, or even up or down, just shapes. Hundreds of cables dangled from the contraption like dreadlocks, while two narrow staircases—one circular, the other straight—led inside, or at least somewhere. Bracketing the structure were consoles of computers, instruments, and monitors for the instructors. Fluorescent white light bathed the room.
After a briefing, a technician directed the crew to the straight staircase, a steep incline of fourteen carpeted steps with spaghetti-thin handrails that led to the simulator’s hatch. For the most part, the astronauts would not need to wear their flight suits in the simulator, which was good news on this day, since their flight suits still hadn’t been made.
Once inside the cabin, the crew lay back in their seats (also called couches, since they supported the men’s bodies from head to toe), Anders on the right, Lovell in the center, Borman on th
e left. Anders stared at the panels of lights and indicators that were flickering to life, knowing it would take the entirety of his focus over the next hundred days to learn to ride the real thing out of this world.
Borman looked at Lovell and Anders. He’d always been a sharp student of character, and as he sat there, he believed he had the best crew ever assembled by NASA.
The closing of the hatch echoed inside the cabin.
“All right,” Borman said to his crewmates. “Let’s learn how to go to the Moon.”
* * *
—
A week later, on September 14, the Soviet Union launched an unmanned spacecraft toward the Moon. Both the Americans and Soviets had sent probes to the Moon in the past, but this one, called Zond 5, was different, because the Soviets intended to get it back.
No spacecraft had ever come near the Moon and returned safely to Earth. If the Soviets could pull it off, it would represent a major leap forward, and a clear signal they intended to send men to the Moon in early December, their best launch window, and two weeks before Apollo 8’s scheduled lift-off.
Streaking out of Earth’s atmosphere, Zond 5 carried tortoises, wine flies, mealworms, and other living organisms. Strapped into the pilot’s seat was a five-foot-seven, 154-pound mannequin, its sensors absorbing radiation data. With modifications, the same ship could carry two cosmonauts.
The day after Zond launched, NASA chief James Webb announced his resignation, effective October 7. (Earlier in the year, upon learning that President Johnson wouldn’t seek reelection, Webb had decided to step down.) Until then, Thomas Paine would continue as deputy administrator, then assume the reins in Webb’s place. Word of Webb’s resignation surprised the NASA brass. Most considered him a giant, as responsible as any person, Kennedy included, for making the American space program world class. But there was a silver lining. Webb had never been fully on board with the plan to send Apollo 8 to the Moon in December. Paine always had been.
A day later, good news arrived for Apollo 8. The Saturn V rocket had passed its design certification review, meaning the fixes and modifications made by von Braun and his engineers after the booster’s troubled test flight on Apollo 6 in April had been judged to be effective. Even the violent pogo problem seemed to have been tamed. Pending a few final checkouts, the rocket looked ready to launch three astronauts to the Moon.
The crew of Apollo 8 spent much of the next day, September 18, in the command module simulator in Florida. They were joined, as they often would be during training, by their backup crew, Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Fred Haise. By Slayton’s assignment scheme, backup crews became primary crews three flights later. That meant Armstrong, Aldrin, and Haise would be prime crew for Apollo 11.
Late that night, while the astronauts slept, the famed British astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell (no relation to Jim Lovell) reported that a massive radio telescope in England had tracked a Soviet spacecraft (Zond 5) as it passed within a thousand miles of the Moon. Further, it appeared that the ship was now making a return journey to Earth. Lovell concluded the Soviets intended to recover the craft. “Once they have achieved this,” he said, “we can anticipate that they will put a man in one.”
The next night, observers picked up a different kind of signal being broadcast from Zond 5. This time, they heard a Russian voice.
No one believed a cosmonaut to be aboard Zond 5, but the man calling out the ship’s instrument readings was as real as the spacecraft itself. His voice, and others heard later, belonged to cosmonauts and were being transmitted live from the Soviet Union to Zond 5, then beamed back to Earth by the spacecraft, all by way of practice for the real thing. Soviet intentions were clear. A manned lunar mission was coming very soon.
But Zond 5 wasn’t home yet.
On September 21, the spacecraft collided with Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of 24,600 miles per hour. In seconds, deceleration forces reached between 12 and 18 g’s, a punishing (but survivable) load for properly trained humans (1 g is equal to the force of gravity at Earth’s surface, 2 g’s is equal to twice the force of gravity at Earth’s surface, and so on). For three minutes, Zond 5 raked through increasing resistance until it plummeted through a darkened sky toward the Indian Ocean. At an altitude of about 20,000 feet, its single parachute deployed, leaving the craft, still glowing from the heat generated by reentry, in a final ride to the water. Still alive inside the capsule were the tortoises, just 10 percent lighter for their near-week in space. Several fly eggs had hatched. It had been a rough return, but the bottom line was unmistakable: living creatures had survived a round-trip to the Moon.
In England, Sir Bernard Lovell told reporters that Russia had regained the lead in the race to send men to the Moon and that Zond 5 “makes it highly probable that a Russian will get a close-up look at the Moon quite a long time before an American does.”
* * *
—
At NASA, the preparations for Apollo 8 grew even more intense. While the astronauts trained for twelve or more hours a day, the spacecraft was moved to the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Kennedy, where it was mated to the Saturn V rocket.
Voices of opposition to the Apollo 8 mission began to ring out. In a September 24 editorial, The Washington Post warned, “Our program…ought to move at its own pace. If that pace is sufficiently rapid to bring American astronauts to the Moon first, fine. If it is not, so be it. The Russians will deserve the honor and praise they will win if their men make the first landing. In space exploration, it is more important to do things right than to do them first.” In a letter to Webb, astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s father, himself a former Air Force colonel and an aviation pioneer, wrote, “I do not favor a manned flight of Saturn V until the changes being made have been proven. What is the value of risking lives at this stage? You really need less yes-men in the space program.”
* * *
—
On October 9, a sky-high bay opened at the Vehicle Assembly Building, revealing the gargantuan Saturn V, white with black patches and streamlined to a narrow point at the top, an elegant monster fifteen stories taller and five times heavier than the Saturn IB the crew of Apollo 7 were scheduled to ride into Earth orbit. Only a rocket with that kind of size and power could lift a payload as heavy as an Apollo spacecraft bound for the Moon (although most of the rocket would fall away in the first few minutes of flight, and the rest of it a few hours later).
For several minutes, the Saturn V stood and gleamed in the Florida sun. And then it started to move.
The rocket stood atop NASA’s Crawler-Transporter, the world’s most powerful tractor. Powered by two sixteen-cylinder engines with a combined 5,500 horsepower and sixteen locomotive traction motors, the Crawler-Transporter was the largest self-powered land vehicle in the world. By itself, it weighed 6 million pounds, and it could move payloads in excess of 12 million pounds. The 131-foot-long vehicle rode on eight tank-like tracks—two on each corner, each pair the size of a Greyhound bus—and could deliver its payload to within inches of its target destination. Its top deck was the size of a major league baseball infield. Carrying the Saturn V to the launchpad, it would cruise at one mile per hour.
Engines grinding, the tractor moved the Saturn V and its tower out of the white Vehicle Assembly Building and into daylight. A slender 34-foot-tall launch escape system sat atop the rocket and seemed to scrape the nearly full Moon hanging in the sky. Soon the structure was moving down the road toward Pad 39A, a journey of about three and a half miles, where the spacecraft would undergo exhaustive testing, verifications, and countdown rehearsals until the December launch. A man in white shirtsleeves and a black tie operated the Crawler-Transporter from inside a control cab, while several engineers wearing hardhats rode atop various platforms on the tractor. Like the red fire engine that drove beside them in case of emergency, these men appeared to be toys in the shadow of these machines.
As
the Apollo 8 hardware made its reptilian crawl, it might have been easy to forget that in just two days, Apollo 7 would launch on an eleven-day Earth orbit mission designed to test the Apollo spacecraft and systems. That flight, historic in its own right, and NASA’s first since the fatal fire, had to be near-perfect for Apollo 8 to get its green light for December.
* * *
—
Apollo 7 sat atop its Saturn IB rocket on October 11, 1968, a 20-knot easterly wind blowing against the spacecraft and into commander Wally Schirra’s instinct. Mission rules prohibited launching into winds that could push a spacecraft back onshore during an abort—the ground could be a deadly hard landing spot compared to the ocean—but that was just the kind of wind whistling at Cape Kennedy during the countdown. Lying on his back alongside crewmates Donn Eisele and Walt Cunningham, Schirra grew furious that NASA seemed determined to fly despite the hazard he perceived. He argued against launching until about an hour before lift-off, when he realized it was too late to call things off.
Just after 11 A.M., with the wind still howling, Apollo 7 launched successfully. All went well until the second day, when Schirra came down with a head cold—a condition made even more uncomfortable given that noses don’t run in zero gravity. To make matters worse, the crew struggled with their biomedical equipment, strained to see out their windows, and were forced to pump waste water manually from the spacecraft. When Mission Control asked about the live television broadcast scheduled for that day, Schirra made it clear where he stood.
“You’ve added two burns to this flight schedule, and you’ve added a urine water dump, and we have a new vehicle up here, and I can tell you [at] this point TV will be delayed without any further discussion until after the rendezvous.”
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