Rocket Men

by Robert Kurson

  It took Apollo 8 less than eleven minutes more to cross the United States. In Houston, Flight Director Cliff Charlesworth told Mission Control that the S-IVB, the Saturn’s third-stage booster, looked good for translunar injection, the maneuver that would propel the spacecraft out of its orbit around Earth and on to the Moon.

  To pull it off, Apollo 8 needed to accelerate from its current speed of about 17,400 miles per hour to nearly 24,250 miles per hour. That boost would be accomplished by the single J-2 engine on the Saturn’s third stage, which would be reignited and burned for nearly six minutes. Doing this would not, as many believed, cause the spacecraft to leave Earth orbit; rather, it would simply change the shape of Apollo 8’s orbit around Earth from a near circle into a highly elongated ellipse, one that would stretch all the way from Earth to the Moon and back.

  The exact moment of the engine’s firing, as well as its thrust, direction, and duration, depended on complex mathematics designed to put the spacecraft at just the right point where it could slingshot around the far side of the Moon and make a free return to Earth if necessary, all while accounting for the movements of Earth, the Moon, and the spacecraft itself. Row after row of controllers in Houston, in shirtsleeves and ties, seated at consoles crowded with monitors, buttons, levers, and dials, needed to analyze data pouring in from the spacecraft, trying to determine whether Apollo 8 looked ready to go to the Moon.

  “How does it feel up there?” Collins radioed to the crew.

  “Very good, very good,” Borman replied. “Everything is going rather well. The Earth looks just about the same way it did three years ago.”

  Mission Control got a kick out of that one.

  Meanwhile, in Hawaii, NASA had made it known that the translunar injection burn would occur almost directly over the islands. If the night stayed clear, locals might see Apollo 8’s third-stage engine ignite as it hurled the spacecraft toward the Moon.

  Just twenty-five minutes remained before the scheduled burn. Borman could picture Chris Kraft as he prepared for the historic maneuver, chewing on a stale cigar, watching a console over a controller’s shoulder, processing the flood of information pouring in. Even now, no matter how far along things were, no matter how many things kept going right on board, Borman still couldn’t quite accept that Kraft, or Flight Director Charlesworth, would really go through with this. As Borman began to stow equipment, Charlesworth put out his Lucky Strike cigarette and began to “call the roll,” going console by console to ask his men at Mission Control for a “Go” or “No Go” verdict on translunar injection.

  One by one, they gave him the same answer: “Go.”

  Charlesworth looked to CapCom Collins.

  It was up to Collins to pass along Houston’s decision to Apollo 8. For the first time, mankind was about to leave its home planet in search of a new world. To Collins, a man to whom history mattered, the event required words worthy of the moment, a statement that not only captured this cutting of the cosmic umbilical cord but would remind future generations that humankind understood the magnitude of what it was about to attempt.

  He radioed the spacecraft.

  “Apollo 8, Houston.”

  “Go ahead, Houston,” Borman replied.

  “Apollo 8. You are Go for TLI. Over.”

  And that was it.

  Shit! Collins thought. Here we are at this instant in history that shall forever be remembered, and it’s just some guy saying “You are Go for TLI.”

  And yet that was the way men who lived faster than sound communicated—just enough to give direction and then get out of the way.

  “Roger,” Borman replied. “We understand. We are Go for TLI.”

  Twenty minutes remained before the third-stage engine would reignite and begin the translunar injection burn. At home in Houston, Susan Borman stayed attached to her squawk box. She wished for privacy at this moment; instead, documentary filmmakers had their cameras trained on her, along with microphones placed around the house. Susan had protested the invasion, but Frank told her it was part of NASA’s plan and couldn’t be helped. Valerie Anders faced the same scrutiny before the cameras but seemed less put off, at least for now.

  The astronauts spent the next several minutes making final checks, strapping back into their seats, and preparing for the translunar injection burn. (They wouldn’t need their helmets, since they didn’t expect a breach in the cabin and a loss of pressure.) About ninety seconds before the engine was to fire, a light came on in the command module indicating the final countdown to ignition. In the Soviet Union, many in the space program still could not believe what was occurring. We could have done this first, one cosmonaut thought. Only the indecisiveness of our chief designer caused us to fall behind.

  Just sixty seconds remained, but the crew could still cancel the burn by throwing the Inhibit switch if things didn’t look right. At eighteen seconds, they’d have no choice but to allow the engine to light.

  Eighteen seconds now remained.

  Kraft’s heart pounded. He well remembered the second and most recent test flight of the Saturn V, when the third stage had flat-out failed to restart. If that happened again, Apollo 8 would be fated to an orbit around Earth—and the lunar mission would have failed.

  Eight seconds before ignition. Liquid hydrogen began to run through opened valves and to the engine as Borman counted down.

  “…Four…Three…Two…”

  Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen flooded into the engine’s combustion chamber. An indicator in the cabin lighted up brightly, telling Borman and crew ignition was imminent.

  In Hawaii, hundreds of people gazed upward. All they could see was a pinpoint of light.

  “Ignition!” Lovell said.

  The J-2 engine fired, pushing the astronauts gently back into their seats. In Hawaii, observers saw the tiny point of light explode into a giant streak of flame, a man-made comet glowing bright across the dark veil of sky. This was the acceleration that would be necessary to extend the spacecraft’s orbit out to where the Moon would be in about sixty-six hours’ time. At the moment, the Moon was farther back in its orbit around Earth and nowhere near where Apollo 8 was pointing. But if everything went right, the Moon, itself streaking through space at an average speed of 2,288 miles per hour, would arrive just in time to rendezvous with the little spacecraft.

  While the astronauts monitored systems and prepared to fly the vehicle manually in case the engine or steering system failed, Apollo 8 began to pitch up from its orientation parallel to Earth and climb higher away from its home. G-forces increased from 0.7 past 1.0 as Lovell watched the digits on the cabin’s velocity indicator, which seemed to spin upward like the wheels of a slot machine.

  Just over two minutes into the burn, Lovell reported a speed of nearly 20,000 miles per hour, faster than humans had ever moved. Over the next three minutes, the craft would need to exceed 24,000 miles per hour to achieve the desired trajectory. The g-forces continued to increase.

  In Houston, everyone from Kraft and Charlesworth to the men in the farthest back rooms hardly breathed. With forty seconds to cutoff, Apollo 8 had reached about 98 percent of its target speed.

  In Maui, spectators at an observatory watched the exhaust plume billow from the base of the Apollo 8 rocket as the engine burned through its last seconds of life. Inside the spacecraft, the crew heard almost nothing and felt little more than an ever-increasing push-push-push as the craft grew lighter with the burning of propellant.

  “All right, fifteen coming up here,” Borman called to his crewmates.

  “Real fine. Ten seconds,” Lovell affirmed.

  “How’s your inertial velocity?” said Anders.

  “Velocity’s looking fine,” Lovell replied.

  The men were now six seconds from leaving Earth.

  “Five,” Lovell called. “Four…”

  The ship was
traveling at more than 24,000 miles per hour. If the engine had one last push, it needed to push now.

  No one moved at Mission Control.

  The third-stage engine cut off. The astronauts and Mission Control looked at their instruments. Apollo 8 was 215 miles above Earth and traveling at 24,208 miles per hour—ideal for translunar injection and a trajectory to the Moon.

  Immediately, Earth answered, using its gravity to pull back on the ship and slow Apollo 8’s speed, but not nearly enough to overcome its momentum as it traveled away from the planet.

  In Mission Control, Gene Kranz, who’d been a flight director for Apollo 7, got up from his seat, left the room, and broke down in tears at the magnitude of the moment.

  Standing in the back row in Mission Control, Chris Kraft watched as the green blip on the screen moved away from Earth. When he’d joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the precursor agency to NASA, in 1944, rockets were still the stuff of comic book covers and science fiction. Today, only twenty-four years later, he was watching men venture beyond their world—not on graph paper with theoretical trajectories, but in real time, in the sky above him. He felt the urge to speak, to say something to the astronauts, to announce something profound, but he was an old pro and didn’t dare step on the CapCom’s role. Rules were essential at a time and a place like this. The CapCom was a fellow astronaut—it was his reassuring, familiar voice the crew should hear during flight. To jump in now would break protocol and might cause confusion, and for that reason alone, Kraft believed it unethical to speak at all.

  He watched the green blip move for a few more seconds, moving farther and farther from Earth.

  Still, he needed to speak to someone, so he spoke to the green blip, and the entire room heard him.

  “You’re on your way,” Kraft said. “You’re really on your way now.”

  STREAKING AWAY FROM EARTH, THE ASTRONAUTS left behind a deeply troubled planet at the end of a deeply troubled year.

  Nineteen sixty-eight had begun on an optimistic note, with a medical miracle. At Stanford University in California, Dr. Norman Shumway performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States. A week after the operation, fifty-four-year-old steelworker Mike Kasperak appeared to be doing fine.

  As America picked up the confetti from its New Year’s celebrations, the country’s presidential campaigns began in earnest. President Lyndon Johnson, who’d won in a landslide in 1964, looked to be the certain nominee for the Democrats. The early front-runner for the Republicans was former vice president Richard Nixon, who’d begun to tour the country and make his case. In Alabama, former governor George Wallace was preparing a third-party run based on a pro-segregation platform that was popular in the deep South.

  Looming over the campaigns was the war in Vietnam. Half a million American troops were in country; since 1965, when official combat units arrived, nearly twenty thousand American lives had been lost in the fighting against North Vietnamese Communist and guerrilla forces. Still, President Johnson and William Westmoreland, the general in charge of U.S. forces in Vietnam, promised the public that the war was going well and that victory was on the horizon.

  On January 21, fifteen days after the operation, the heart transplant recipient in California died despite having made it through “a fantastic galaxy of complications,” according to his surgeon.

  Just after midnight on the final day of January, tens of thousands of North Vietnamese troops and Vietcong guerrillas launched a coordinated attack on nearly every major city and town in South Vietnam. The action came as a surprise to American troops, who were honoring a two-day cease-fire with the enemy during Tet, the country’s sacred holiday. By sunrise, over 120 population centers and military bases had been assailed by more than 80,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong fighters, an attack now being called the Tet Offensive.

  For the first time, Americans were able to watch news coverage of combat without government control of images or information, thanks to reporters and cameramen embedded with the troops. The United States was supposed to be on its way to victory—the president and his generals had sworn to it—and yet here was an enemy that had stormed the American embassy and damaged nearly every stronghold in the south.

  Night after night, the evening news showed graphic footage from the battle; often, 90 percent of the telecast was devoted to the war. One image sank especially deeply into the American psyche. In a still photograph and on film, it showed a North Vietnamese prisoner, hands tied behind his back, being executed by a single pistol shot to the head, delivered from a distance of a few inches by a South Vietnamese national police chief. There had been no charges, no trial, no last words—just the raising of the gun and a single shot to the temple. The photo ran on the front page of nearly every newspaper in America on the first day of February; no one who saw it, or watched the film of the shooting on the evening news, knew that the prisoner himself had executed, in cold blood, an entire family. All that America knew was that this terrible war was more ugly and brutal than they’d imagined, and that the clean and quick ending they had been promised seemed very far away.

  In Orangeburg, South Carolina, a bowling alley remained one of the few local businesses to refuse service to black patrons, despite civil rights laws prohibiting such discrimination. In early February, black students at South Carolina State University began to protest, first by sitting at the lunch counter at the bowling alley, then by gathering in larger numbers and demonstrating outside. On February 8, a melee broke out during a student rally on the SCSU campus; panicked police fired into the crowd. The gunfire lasted just ten seconds or so, but when it was over, at least thirty people had been shot, and three black teenagers died. One of them, Delano Middleton, was a high school student whose mother worked on campus. At the hospital, Delano told her, “You’ve been a good mama, but I’m going to leave you now.”

  The next day, Governor Robert McNair called the episode “one of the saddest days in the history of South Carolina,” but he blamed the violence on “Black Power advocates.” At a time when hundreds of Americans were dying every week in Vietnam, the Orangeburg Massacre, as it would be called, soon faded from the headlines. But the future it foretold for 1968 was only just starting to crystallize.

  * * *

  —

  During a background briefing ten days into the Tet Offensive, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk erupted at reporters who were pressing him with tough questions. “Whose side are you on?” Rusk demanded. The press was offended that Rusk would challenge their loyalties, but the reality was that the country was deeply divided about the war. Much of the difference in opinion fell along generational lines; older people tended to trust the government, younger people tended to question everything. (In fact, by 1968, a common expression among the counterculture was “Never trust anyone over thirty.” And it was around that age that political opinions seemed to divide.) Thousands of roadside billboards admonished BEAUTIFY AMERICA, GET A HAIRCUT.

  By late February, the Tet Offensive had ended. By all accounts, it was a resounding American military victory. Yet that was not the message delivered by Walter Cronkite to the nation during his February 27 newscast. The CBS anchor had traveled to Vietnam during the Tet Offensive to see things for himself. Cronkite rarely offered his opinion. Now, he spoke candidly, and viewers hung on every word:

  “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion…it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

  “This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”

  When President Johnson saw the broadcast, he is said to have told those around him, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”

  On the same day that Cronkite addressed the nation, t
wenty-five-year-old Frankie Lymon was found dead on the floor of his grandmother’s New York City apartment. Lymon had been a teenage singing sensation, part of the doo-wop group the Teenagers, and had been the angelic lead voice on songs like “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” which he’d helped write at age thirteen. As his boyish voice deepened, he faded from public favor. Depression led to a heroin addiction, but by 1968, he claimed he was clean and hoped America would give him another chance. Police who found his body discovered a needle nearby. When news broke of his passing, people around the country pulled out their old Teenagers records and listened to Frankie ask, “Why do birds sing so gay? And lovers await the break of day?” To so many of them, the nineteen-fifties sounded like a very long time ago.

  * * *

  —

  In 1967, President Johnson had appointed a commission, chaired by Illinois governor Otto Kerner, to study the race riots that had erupted in several American cities since 1965. On the last day of February 1968, the Kerner Commission issued its report, along with this conclusion: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

  By March 1, after a month of news about the Tet Offensive, President Johnson’s approval ratings had dropped by double digits. Infused with new energy, supporters of peace candidate Eugene McCarthy, a quiet, intellectual senator from Minnesota, campaigned almost nonstop in advance of the New Hampshire primary. Most of them were young and fervently antiwar; many even cut their hair and put on smart clothes to be “Clean for Gene.” McCarthy was a long-shot candidate, but some thought he might get enough votes to avoid embarrassment.