Rocket Men

by Robert Kurson

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  As November rolled in, Kraft found himself facing a new problem: Even if Apollo 8 went perfectly, there would be no one in the Pacific to pick up the crew after splashdown, since the Navy’s Pacific Fleet had already been given a reprieve for Christmas. Someone had to appeal directly to Admiral John McCain, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, to ask for special dispensation. The timing wasn’t ideal; McCain’s son, John McCain III, a Navy pilot, had been shot down over Hanoi and was being held as a prisoner of war by the North Vietnamese. But Kraft said he’d do it, and in person.

  A few days later, he walked into an amphitheater-style conference room in Honolulu, surrounded by a hundred military captains, admirals, and four-star generals. At 10:30 A.M. sharp, an order sounded—Attention!—and McCain entered the room.

  “Okay, young man,” the fifty-seven-year-old McCain growled at the forty-four-year-old Kraft. “What have you got to say?”

  Kraft described Apollo 8’s mission, its benefits and risks, and explained that America’s greatness was about to be tested in space. Then he laid out NASA’s request. This part he’d rehearsed and memorized down to the word.

  “Admiral, I realize that the Navy has made its Christmas plans and I’m asking you to change them. I’m here to request that the Navy support us and have ships out there before we launch and through Christmas. We need you.”

  For several moments, there was silence in the room. Finally, McCain got up from the table and slammed down the supporting documents Kraft had provided.

  “Best damn briefing I’ve ever had. Give that young man anything he wants.”

  And with that, the Navy’s aircraft carriers belonged to NASA for Christmas.

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  In Washington, Mueller continued to worry about Apollo 8. In a November 4 letter to one of NASA’s top managers, he wrote, “you and I know that if failure comes, the reaction will be that anyone should have known better than to undertake such a trip at this point in time.” Mueller also asked the man to fill out a Mission Risk Assessment Form. To Kraft, that was a portent of things to come—Mueller intended to make him and other top managers at NASA sign in blood that Apollo 8 was the right thing to do, and that they would be responsible if things went wrong.

  On November 5, 1968, the American people elected Richard Nixon as the country’s next president. During his campaign, Nixon had promised to support the space program, as Johnson had done. “I don’t want the Soviet Union or any other nation to be ahead of the United States,” he’d told voters a few weeks before the election. “Let’s emphasize the Moon shot and others where we can make a direct breakthrough.”

  NASA managers continued to debate the Apollo 8 mission into November. As they went from meeting to meeting, an unmanned Soviet spacecraft lifted off from the launchpad in Kazakhstan. Zond 6 represented the final piece of the Soviet plan to send a crew on a circumlunar mission. Two months earlier, Zond 5 had made a successful loop around the Moon, only to experience a violent reentry that might have injured or even killed a crew. This time, Zond 6 had been designed to loop around the Moon, then execute a complex, guided reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, reducing g-force loads to manageable levels. If the Soviets could pull that off, the next Zond flight would go to the Moon with two cosmonauts in early December—and beat out Apollo 8.

  On November 11, NASA chief Thomas Paine made a final decision on Apollo 8. He phoned President Johnson, who was meeting with President-elect Nixon, and informed the men of the agency’s decision. It was determined then that Paine would announce NASA’s verdict on Apollo 8 to the American public at a press conference from NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

  Early the next day, as Zond 6 headed on a perfect course for the Moon, Paine spoke to members of the media. “After a careful and thorough investigation of all the systems and risks involved,” he said, “we have concluded that we are now ready to fly the most advanced mission for our Apollo 8 launch in December, the orbit around the Moon.”

  The press conference lasted more than three hours. When it ended, reporters rushed their stories to their respective outlets. America was shooting for the Moon at Christmas.

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  Three days after Paine’s announcement, a letter arrived at the office of Bob Gilruth, director of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. It was written by a man named Stewart Atkinson, of Darien, Connecticut. It read:

  Dear Sir:

  I wonder what sort of thinking went into your decision to send three men around the Moon at Christmas-time. This is by no means a sure venture, and the risk of ruining the Christmas Season for millions of Americans is enormous. Christmas is a time for carefree family reunions, for as much happiness as all of us can snatch in this miserable year of 1968. We do not need a space triumph to celebrate our greatest holiday, but a failure will be the crowning blow to a people already punch drunk with the events of the year.

  Along with millions of Americans I have been thrilled by the successes of the Space Program…but I am of the opinion that the American people would much prefer a delay of a month if such is essential.

  Sincerely,

  Stewart Atkinson

  It was around this time, about six weeks before scheduled lift-off, that Borman got a call from the agency’s public affairs mastermind, Julian Scheer. NASA, Scheer said, had decided to have the crew of Apollo 8 make a live television broadcast on Christmas Eve.

  “We figure more people will be listening to your voice than that of any man in history,” Scheer said. “So we want you to say something appropriate. You’ll have maybe five or six minutes.”

  “Great, Julian,” Borman replied. “What are we doing?”

  “Do whatever’s appropriate,” Scheer said.

  Borman was surprised by the response. Scheer, and NASA, were leaving it up to him to decide what to say. No committees. No consensus. No vetting. Just him.

  By this time, the unmanned Zond 6 had already flown around the Moon, passing within 1,500 miles of its surface, and was headed back to home. So confident in the mission were Soviet planners that they took the uncharacteristic step of announcing, during the flight, that the explicit purpose of the mission was to prepare for a manned journey to the Moon. All that remained was for the spacecraft to execute its complex reentry and touch down under parachute in Kazakhstan.

  Execution was near flawless. Zond 6 completed its reentry having endured no more than four to seven g’s. The flight of Zond 6 made it clear to NASA that the Soviets were ready to send men to the Moon ahead of Apollo 8. And the Soviets didn’t intend to stop there. One of their experts said that the flight of Zond 6 paved the way for manned flights not just to the Moon but to Mars, Venus, and other planets.

  What NASA, and even the CIA, did not know was that Zond 6 had experienced two serious problems during its flight. The first, a partial depressurization of the cabin, occurred just before reentry. The second, a failure of the parachute system, caused the spacecraft to plummet into the ground. Both incidents would have been fatal had a crew been on board.

  That meant the Soviets had a decision to make. Given the problems with Zond 6, should they risk sending a crew to the Moon aboard Zond 7 in early December? Or should they make one more unmanned lunar flight to make certain those problems had been worked out? Those who wanted to go, including the cosmonauts, felt certain the problems on Zond 6 could be fixed, and were willing to take their chances. Those who preferred to play it safe couldn’t stand the thought of losing another cosmonaut in flight, as they had in a 1967 accident that still haunted the country. And many of them didn’t believe the Americans crazy enough, in any case, to launch Apollo 8 in December. The Soviets had already sent two flights capable of carrying men to the Moon; the Americans had sent none. NASA, they figured, would soon come to its senses and order Apollo 8 to stan
d down.

  In Houston, many worried that NASA might decide the same. Nervous personnel counted down the number of days until the next Soviet lunar launch window opened. In Kazakhstan, the Soviets moved a new Zond spacecraft to the launchpad, a ship scheduled to lift off for the Moon two weeks before Apollo 8.

  Few in America knew that this spacecraft even existed. All that anyone knew in the West was that the race to the Moon was being pushed to superhuman speeds that could get men killed. A recent newspaper editorial had proposed cooperation between the United States and Soviet Union, a fixing of the race so that the two nations arrived simultaneously, a way to avoid a tragedy. But neither side had come this far to compromise. And neither had Apollo 8’s youngest astronaut, a thirty-five-year-old father of five who’d been born in Hong Kong and came from fighting stock, the kind that would never settle for a tie.

  WILLIAM ALISON ANDERS FIRST WITNESSED AN attack from the sky by foreign invaders in 1937, when he was four years old. He was living with his parents along the Yangtze River in Nanking, China, when his father, a United States Navy lieutenant, sensed that Japanese forces would attack nearby Chinese boats. Arthur Anders told his wife, Muriel, to take their son and evacuate. After a two-day trip by train to Canton, mother and son found a hotel room, and it was there that Bill watched Japanese airplanes streak overhead and bomb ships in the Pearl River just two hundred yards away.

  The next day, Bill and his mother boarded a boat and made their escape. Bill’s father stayed, manning the American gunboat USS Panay, on which he was second in command. A few days later, on December 12, 1937, Japanese aircraft attacked the Panay as it moved up the Yangtze. The United States was a neutral party in the conflict between Japan and China, and the boat, marked by American flags, was attempting to move people to safety. A bomb struck the boat’s bridge, wounding and disabling the captain. That left Arthur Anders in charge.

  Despite America’s neutral standing, he ordered the Panay to open fire on the attacking aircraft. Badly injured in sickbay, the boat’s captain wanted the crew to abandon ship, but Anders wouldn’t have it. “He’s not in charge anymore, I am,” Anders said. The Panay was not outfitted to engage attacking aircraft, but Anders directed the fight nonetheless. Soon dive-bombers appeared from the smoky skies, unleashing a second attack on the damaged American boat. Still Anders ordered the crew to continue to defend, even as the Panay slowly began to sink. Realizing that crew had been injured, Anders attempted to man one of the boat’s guns himself, taking shrapnel wounds to his hands.

  As Anders stood on the bridge, a piece of shrapnel pierced his throat, causing heavy bleeding and making it impossible for him to speak. Using his own blood as ink, Anders scrawled out directions to the crew on a chart, and the fight continued. Eighty minutes after the attack started, desperate men made their way to small escape craft. Anders was last off the boat and then lost consciousness. By the end, two Americans and an Italian journalist from the Panay had died, dozens had been wounded, and the sinking became an international incident. Realizing that it had committed an act of war against the United States, Japan apologized.

  Arthur Anders received the Navy Cross, the highest honor bestowed by that branch for a peacetime action. The orders he wrote in blood are preserved in the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington. The prelude to the fight would remain one of young Bill’s earliest memories.

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  Bill’s parents, both Americans, had met in the Philippines during Arthur’s tour of duty there.

  Muriel’s father was the civilian in charge of the Cavite Navy Yard, which repaired American ships. Bill, the couple’s only child, was born in Hong Kong. The family moved often when Bill was young, eventually returning to America in 1938. Through his childhood, Bill absorbed the Navy life, and he expected to attend the Naval Academy, as his father had.

  When he was fourteen, Bill moved with his family to Weimar, Texas. As Arthur drove Bill to school one day, father and son spotted a biplane in a field, along with a banner hanging from a fence: AIRPLANE RIDES—FIVE DOLLARS.

  A few minutes later, Bill and the pilot were soaring over open fields.

  “Want to do a loop?” the man asked.

  Bill nodded.

  The pilot was low for that kind of maneuver, no higher than two thousand feet, but he pulled up, looped over, and managed to just miss the ground as he righted the plane.

  Bill had a hard time concentrating in school that day; no matter how hard he tried to focus, his mind kept looping over Texas.

  Driving home that afternoon, Bill and his father came upon the field where Bill had flown. The plane was still there, but this time it was jammed nose down into the ground, a terrible crash. When Arthur inquired, he was told two people had been killed during a ride. Bill looked at the seat he’d occupied in the now-fractured craft, and remembered how close he’d come to the ground on his loop. On airplanes, it seemed, the difference between life and death could come down to a few feet.

  Bill began high school in Texas, but he moved with his family to the San Diego area to begin his sophomore year. By then Arthur had been made a Navy reservist as a result of his wartime injuries and was working at the naval training station. He and Bill played catch, took car rides, and went on San Diego Mineral and Gem Society trips; as a boy, Bill had fallen in love with natural history and geology, and he resolved to own a piece of every kind of rock in the world. Sometimes, the men would go high into the Sierras looking for specimens; it was on trips like that when Bill noticed that he was willing to travel almost anywhere as long as there was something new to find.

  Bill became president of his high school’s biology club, largely on the strength of his expertise on snakes. He read books, many on science, often finishing them in one day. Instead of science fiction, Bill preferred to read about old ships from bygone eras, and about pirates and life on the high seas. Those were men who’d undertaken real adventure, who’d pushed themselves into actual, not theoretical, unknowns.

  As the second-smallest student in his class, Bill found it hard to make time with the ladies (his love of science and snakes didn’t help). Despite her son’s size, Muriel encouraged Bill to play football. He suited up and was knocked flat, but he loved the feeling of getting up and realizing he had survived.

  After his junior year of high school, in 1950, Bill transferred to a military prep school in San Diego. Since early boyhood, he’d envisioned a life like his father’s—defending his country on board a ship, fighting back. Military school would give him the best chance for admission to one of the nation’s service academies. In a different time, one in which America had lesser enemies, Bill might have become a geologist. Now, in the teeth of the Cold War, he headed for Annapolis.

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  Bill Anders arrived at the United States Naval Academy in 1951 with the ambitious goal of becoming an officer aboard a destroyer and making four-stripe captain. By Christmas, he was about to wash out. He’d skated through high school on brains alone, but that level of effort wasn’t cutting it at the Academy, even as the son of a Navy Cross recipient. An adviser warned him he wasn’t long for the place unless things changed. Anders straightened up.

  Having survived his first year at the Academy, Anders returned to San Diego for the summer. There he found himself on a double date at the beach, but when he saw his friend’s date, he forgot about his own. Sixteen-year-old Valerie Hoard was about the prettiest young lady Anders had ever seen, and she had a quiet confidence beyond her age. Anders spent the day swimming alongside Valerie as she lounged on an inflatable raft, asking about her life, hearing her descriptions of how her father gave her rides on the back of his California Highway Patrol motorcycle (sirens blaring and red lights flashing). Anders never stopped to catch his breath as they toured all over Mission Bay. This guy has a lot of endurance, Valerie thought. When Anders finally dropped her off
at home, he shook her hand and said goodbye.

  Summer was drawing to a close, so Anders had to make the time count if he hoped to keep seeing Valerie. On their first official date, he took her to the Navy officers’ club, and then to the Starlight Bowl to see the San Diego Civic Light Opera. The next night, he took her to the Old Globe Theater for Shakespeare. It was heady stuff for Valerie, and she was impressed with this serious young man. At home, she asked her mother why Bill shook her hand after dates but didn’t kiss her. The truth was that Anders didn’t have much experience with girls and didn’t want to push his luck. That was fine with Valerie—she had other suitors to keep her company. A few days later, Anders was back at the Naval Academy, and Valerie was back in high school.

  By his second year at Annapolis, Anders was rising up the class rank. He always found time to write letters to Valerie, long ones, every day, about his outlook on life, the challenges of the Academy, how he saw the world. At Christmas, when he was home, they spent every day together. Not once since the day he met her had Bill doubted that Valerie was the one for him. She was poised and gracious, self-assured even in unfamiliar situations, and seemed curious about everything. She was a popular and busy senior who hardly had time for serious romance, yet she was slowly falling in love with Anders, and he was in love with her.

  The relationship did not please Muriel. She’d long thought her son should marry an admiral’s daughter—a higher grade of folk—and took the formal tea dance invitations he’d received and lined them up on her kitchen window. Valerie saw the display when she was at Anders’s house, but she also noticed something else—that he hadn’t attended a single one of these debutante parties. He just wanted to be with her.