Rocket Men

by Robert Kurson

  The training program at Pax River lasted for six months. At graduation, Lovell ranked first in his class. His gift from Marilyn was a new daughter, Susan, making them a family of five. Soon after, in 1958, Lovell and some other pilots at Pax River received a telex from a new government agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, ordering them to a meeting in Washington, D.C. They were to dress in civilian clothes and not tell anyone, including family, where they were going, or even that they were going at all.

  When he arrived, Lovell joined dozens of other military pilots for a briefing in a government office. Robert Gilruth, head of NASA’s Space Task Group, explained that the agency was looking for astronauts for Project Mercury, a program designed to put a manned spacecraft into orbit around Earth and recover it safely. He laid out NASA’s vision, talking of rockets and capsules and head-spinning speeds. Think things over tonight, Gilruth told the men, then report back tomorrow for more.

  Some participants questioned the wisdom of abandoning a Navy career to enroll in an astronaut program that hadn’t yet started and might not even exist in a few years. As for Lovell, he could hardly believe his luck.

  Several days later he was in New Mexico, enduring six days of torturous physical exams. At the end, doctors failed him—or rather, his body—for having a bit too much bilirubin, a pigment produced by the liver and found in bile. They didn’t think the level dangerous, but that didn’t matter; what they seemed to demand was physical perfection. “You’re finished,” they told Lovell, and no matter how forcefully he explained their mistake, the doctors wouldn’t reconsider. “I could spell ‘rocket’ before these guys ever heard the term,” Lovell muttered as he walked away. Back at Pax River, Marilyn couldn’t remember having seen her husband so discouraged.

  A short time later, Lovell received orders to report to the next phase of astronaut testing. He knew he’d been rejected, and that the orders had been issued by mistake, but he seized his chance to get back in the game, even if by clerical error. He flew to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and took the last bed in quarters. The next morning, just as the miracle seemed complete, an Air Force test pilot named Gus Grissom showed up and apologized for being late. Lovell was again heading back home with nothing to show for his dreams but a little extra pigment in his liver.

  For the next three years, Lovell continued testing aircraft and teaching students at Pax River. It was there that the nickname Shaky was bestowed upon him, not just because no decent pilot would want such a moniker, but because the easygoing Lovell was among the least shaky men around.

  By 1962, Project Mercury was nearing its end and NASA needed new astronauts. That summer, the Navy asked if Lovell would like to apply. No one seemed to remember that he’d been medically disqualified, and Lovell could find no good reason to remind them.

  Again, Lovell went through the testing. As a teenager, he’d seen the engine of a Nazi V-2 rocket designed by Wernher von Braun. As a young pilot, he’d watched von Braun tell the nation how America would go to the Moon. After what seemed like forever, Deke Slayton called and asked if Lovell would like to ride the great engineer’s newest rockets for himself, and Lovell’s answer could be heard all the way to Milwaukee. He was officially one of NASA’s New Nine.

  * * *

  —

  Lovell was introduced to NASA’s eight other new astronauts at the Rice Hotel in Houston. After dinner, he gave his first comment as a spaceman, telling his hometown newspaper, the Milwaukee Sentinel, that America would be first to the Moon, “and I want to be on the first team.”

  In Houston, Lovell took up residence in old World War II barracks at Ellington Air Force Base, where residents lived four to a unit and had bedsheets for walls. His family soon followed and before long, Marilyn found a house to rent in a nearby suburb. For seven-year-old Jay Lovell, that was the perfect setup: Ellington was just a few minutes away, and his dad was only too happy to take him along to the airfield to watch the training he and the other astronauts were doing in their T-38 jets. Jay loved it when his dad retracted the landing gear and kept flying just a few feet off the ground, but he stood awestruck when his father once did something radically different. On that day, Lovell pointed the jet straight up after takeoff, and as Jay watched asphalt fly and ground crew scurry, he could see that his dad was aiming right for the Moon.

  As Lovell learned his way around his new job and his new city, Marilyn settled the family into their new home in a small Houston subdivision called Timber Cove. The sudden celebrity that came with being an astronaut startled both of them. People even recognized Marilyn around town. Lovell understood the slight resentment he and some of the other new astronauts detected from the Original Seven; the new guys hadn’t even entered a spacecraft yet, so who were they to soak up America’s adoration?

  Soon enough, though, the veterans warmed to the rookies. Once, when Lovell needed a ride, Alan Shepard told him to jump into his brand-new 1963 Corvette, a car that had come complete with the astronaut’s name engraved on a plaque. Shepard had the top down and opened the throttle on I-45 in Houston, showing Lovell what speed really meant. “Boy, how much do these things cost?” Lovell asked. “If you gotta ask, you can’t afford one,” Shepard replied. Lovell made a mental note: Get one.

  In 1964, Lovell got his first assignment, as one of the two-man backup crew for Gemini 4. His partner would be Frank Borman, whom he’d met during medical exams of astronaut hopefuls. Slayton had named Borman the commander, Lovell the copilot. To Lovell, that didn’t seem quite fair; they were about the same rank, and he couldn’t see why Borman was any more qualified to assume responsibility for a flight than he. But no matter who was commander, there was wonderful news in the assignment. By Slayton’s scheme, Lovell and Borman would be the primary crew for Gemini 7, a two-week Earth-orbital flight, the longest mission ever planned by the space agency. In a matter of months, James Arthur Lovell, Jr., would be going into space.

  To some, the pairing of Borman and Lovell might have seemed curious—even doomed. Borman didn’t bother with space dreams, spent no energy imagining the heavens. He’d come to NASA for a single purpose—to help America defeat the Soviet Union. In meetings or in training, he could come off as brash or bullheaded if he believed you to be impeding the mission; sometimes he’d walk out on a discussion, even over drinks after work, if he sensed bullshit in the air. That kind of directness earned Borman almost universal respect, but not everyone liked him for it.

  Lovell seemed Borman’s opposite. He had ridden a dream—of exploring the cosmos and flying rockets to new worlds—from childhood all the way to NASA. And while it would please Lovell to beat the Russians, he mostly thrilled to the idea of going places forever thought unreachable and reporting back to the world about what he’d seen. Few could deny Lovell’s abilities as a thinker or a pilot, but it was his warmth and friendliness that people remembered most.

  And yet, from the day they began working together, Borman and Lovell seemed a natural match. Each respected the other’s abilities, work ethic, intellect, and piloting skills. And they made each other laugh. To many, it seemed the men had been friends since boyhood.

  In early June 1965, Lovell packed Marilyn and their three kids into the car and drove from Houston to the Cape to watch one of the Gemini launches in person. Asleep in bed one night at the Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn, Lovell was awakened by the sound of his wife munching saltines.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I hate to tell you this,” Marilyn said, “but I think, I mean I know…I’m pregnant.”

  It was great news but could not have been more awkwardly timed. Marilyn was due around the time Lovell was scheduled to fly on Gemini 7 in early December 1965. Many at NASA believed the agency would remove an astronaut from a flight if his wife was pregnant, so Lovell and Marilyn had to figure out what to do. To him, the answer was simple—silence. He would keep training and
say nothing; she would angle to be photographed from the neck up. By the time it became obvious that Marilyn was carrying, NASA would—hopefully—think it too late to change crews.

  Training consumed all the astronauts’ lives. By now, some of them were struggling in their marriages; the demands of the job, and the easy availability of women on the road, put a strain on their relationships. For Lovell and Borman it was different. Neither man caroused or stayed out late—not just because it wasn’t the right thing to do, but because neither had the impulse to do it. They were in love with their wives—their best friends—women who’d loved them since the days when they were nothing but dreams, their lives just a blur of military base transfers.

  At home in Houston, a very round Marilyn watched on television, eight months pregnant, as the Gemini 7 countdown neared zero. She didn’t worry—she trusted in NASA and her Episcopal faith, and she trusted in Jim. When he’d left for the Cape, he hadn’t given her any if-I-don’t-come-home speeches or recited any I’ve loved you forever goodbyes. Instead, he swept the garage, balanced the checkbook, and painted the cradle in case the baby came while he was in space.

  As photographers snapped her photo, Marilyn watched as Gemini 7’s Titan II rocket spewed billows of orange-tinted smoke, then rose on a narrow, nearly transparent column of flame into the sky. The moment Lovell had waited for since Juneau High School was unfolding in thundering detail. It took seven full seconds before he could no longer contain himself.

  “We’re on our way, Frank!” he shouted to his crewmate.

  At the two-minute mark, the spacecraft reached a speed of 3,600 miles per hour. Until now, the liquid-fuel rocket had lifted them in a kind of slow pull, but now the second stage kicked in, hurtling the ship forward with a new kind of fury. A minute later, Lovell and Borman were traveling at 7,100 miles per hour and picking up speed fast. Just under five minutes into the flight, Lovell caught a glimpse of something outside his window.

  “Look at the Moon, Frank!”

  The rocket pushed past seven g’s and then separated from the spacecraft, sending Gemini 7 into orbit around Earth. For Lovell, the ascent was a wild and wonderful ride.

  For the next several days, Lovell and Borman flew their spacecraft, conducted medical experiments, and, perhaps most astonishing for two men confined to such a tiny capsule, didn’t drive each other crazy.

  Toward the end of its two-week flight, Gemini 7 experienced problems. The craft’s fuel cells began failing and its thrusters faltered. Two days remained in the mission, and Borman’s instinct was to terminate early. But Lovell—privately, without broadcasting a word for the public to hear—urged him to hang in and not worry, that the ship would make it. Along with Chris Kraft’s reassurance, Lovell’s encouragement persuaded Borman to hold on, and the flight finished near perfectly.

  By the time the astronauts were aboard the aircraft carrier USS Wasp, they’d set several world records for space flight, including longest duration. Standing on deck, the scruffy Lovell said of the two cramped weeks spent with Borman, “We’d like to announce our engagement.”

  Back home, Marilyn told reporters, “Jim could come home beard and all, and I would welcome him with open arms.” A month later, in January 1966, Marilyn gave birth to the couple’s fourth child, Jeffrey.

  Less than a year later, on November 11, 1966, Lovell was back on the launchpad as commander of Gemini 12. It was to be the final mission of Project Gemini. Strapped in beside him was Buzz Aldrin, who’d been selected as part of NASA’s third group of astronauts in 1963. Together, the men would spend four days in orbit around Earth.

  In some ways, the pressure on Lovell for this flight was even greater than it had been during Gemini 7. Gemini 12 had to succeed in order for NASA—and the country—to feel confident about launching Apollo, the program that would take America to the Moon. The mission went smoothly, and after a journey of 1.6 million miles, Gemini 12 splashed down in the western Atlantic. As Lovell was hoisted from the ocean by helicopter, he held a distinction that even he couldn’t have imagined twenty years earlier, when he was writing letters to rocket societies and wishing he could afford college. Jim Lovell had now spent more time in space—eighteen days—than any other man in history.

  JUST TWO MONTHS REMAINED UNTIL THE scheduled lift-off of Apollo 8, and even though the Apollo 7 flight had been a success, NASA still hadn’t made the decision to green-light the mission. George Low, Chris Kraft, and others wanted to approve it immediately. George Mueller (pronounced “Miller”), Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight, still had doubts, and remained deeply concerned about the risks and dangers inherent in Apollo 8’s mission. That annoyed Kraft, who believed Mueller was being obstructionist because the idea to send Apollo 8 to the Moon hadn’t been his. Still, Kraft remembered that Mueller had been willing to take risks in the past, ones that had paid off big for NASA. And Kraft couldn’t disagree that the mission was risky.

  As October came to a close, Mueller wasn’t the only one concerned about the dangers of Apollo 8. By now, the media was openly discussing NASA’s plan to send Borman, Lovell, and Anders to the Moon. “As the men in the space program [consider] Apollo 8,” argued The Washington Post, “they must not allow anyone’s desire to beat the Russians, or to get around the Moon by the end of 1968, or to fan public interest in the future of space exploration to enter into their calculations.”

  By this time, the astronauts were six weeks into their training with the command module simulators. To aid his memory, Anders had affixed small Velcro nameplates to several of the hundreds of switches, dials, and levers, little cheats that reminded him what was what. “Goddammit, Anders, it looks like a bunch of mayflies mating in here!” Borman said one day at the sight of all those plates. Anders used them anyway.

  Before long, simulations advanced to incorporate various phases of the mission, all designed with problems built in. Some could be expected to occur on a complex mission like Apollo 8; others seemed million-to-one shots. Many of the most challenging scenarios came during highly critical parts of the mission, such as launch, exiting lunar orbit, and reentry, and those were practiced with particular intensity. But every part was worked through—over and over again.

  But no matter how much practice and simulation, no matter how ingenious the scenarios run by the SimSups, astronauts could not be trained for everything. During the highly successful Gemini program, three of the ten manned flights had nearly ended in astronaut fatalities. And even if simulator training could cover the most complex and unlikely scenarios, the most basic malfunctions still could kill men in space. So Borman, Lovell, and Anders just practiced more.

  * * *

  —

  As the weeks passed, the Apollo 8 astronauts got to know not just the spacecraft and the mission, but also one another. Borman and Lovell already knew they flew well together. Anders was the newcomer—and a revelation to the other two men.

  In his six years at NASA, Borman had never seen a harder worker, or a man of deeper integrity, than Anders. It was true that Anders had his own ideas about what was important, and didn’t always agree with Borman on mission priorities, but he never went around Borman’s authority or took a shortcut to anything. To Borman, character and competence counted more than most anything else, and Anders had plenty of both. Borman could think of no other astronaut in the entire program, longtime veterans included, he would have chosen over Anders for systems engineer.

  Lovell, too, thought the team lucky to have Anders, and for many of the same reasons. He admired the way Anders had handled his initial disappointment with Apollo 8’s change in assignment, one that likely meant he’d never set foot on the Moon. And he appreciated that Anders saw adventure and exploration in the chance to make man’s first lunar journey. To both of them, going to the Moon wasn’t just about beating the Soviets. It was a chance to do something incredible.

  For his part, Anders felt
welcomed by this old NASA duo. Like many, he considered Lovell a hail-fellow-well-met, just the kind of easy hand you’d want along on a six-day trip, whether to a fishing hole or to the Moon. Borman was another matter. Anders saw much of himself in the commander—the all-business demeanor, the intensity of approach, the swiftness and certainty of opinion. Sometimes when Borman barked an order at Anders, it was as if Anders was hearing it from himself. But that didn’t mean he always had to sit there and take it, even if Borman outranked him.

  “Look, Frank,” Anders said one day, “my job is to make sure this spacecraft works, and I guarantee you that I’m going to know whether it’s going to work or not. So you spend your time worrying about the mission and the rocket, and I’ll worry about the spacecraft.”

  Borman respected that. Character and competence. The crew only got better after that.

  Despite the synergy and good teamwork, it seemed to Lovell and Anders that Borman might be dealing with a private stress, one not shared by his crewmates. Borman had a short fuse when planners tried to add superfluous tasks to Apollo 8; he angrily rejected NASA’s idea of opening the hatch in space and adding a spacewalk to the flight. More than anything, Borman seemed willing to die on small hills—a rejection of NASA’s new food, a refusal to allow a TV camera on board the spacecraft. Fighting these battles, Borman argued, was necessary in order to ensure focus on the flight’s basic mission: Get to the Moon, orbit, get your ass home, beat the Russians, win. Add-ons and changes represented additional risk, and Borman wanted none of that.

  It wasn’t that Borman was wrong; on almost every one of these issues, he was right, and when he wasn’t, as with bringing a TV camera so that the world could witness parts of the historic mission live, he eventually heard the good sense in others’ arguments and relented. But Lovell questioned whether there might be an additional dimension to Borman’s near-religious aversion to risk, and he couldn’t help but wonder whether it might have something to do with Susan. Borman hadn’t said anything about it, but Lovell had heard mention from others that Susan was terrified by the idea of Apollo 8’s new mission, and that the memories of the Apollo 1 fire still burned in her mind.