Around nine and a half hours into the flight, Apollo 8 was more than 52,000 miles from Earth and weighed just 63,295 pounds—less than 1 percent of its launch weight, thanks to all of the spent propellant and discarded stages. Soon it would weigh a bit less than that, as the crew got ready to do something many at NASA thought it should not do.
To enter and exit lunar orbit, Apollo 8 would rely on its Service Propulsion System, a single engine designed to slow down or speed up the spacecraft as needed. It was one of the most important pieces of equipment on the vehicle, and the only major source of propulsion remaining on Apollo 8. If it did not function properly, the results could be catastrophic for the crew.
Engineers and controllers had confidence in the SPS engine, because it had been tested repeatedly on the ground and had worked well aboard Apollo 7 just two months earlier. But to Chris Kraft, that wasn’t enough. Despite its track record, the engine had never been tested in deep space. And it was, after all, a rocket, and rocket engines were complicated, and never one hundred percent propositions.
So when the flight plan was devised for Apollo 8, Kraft wanted the engine tested in flight, a confidence burn for just a few seconds, when the spacecraft was about 60,000 miles from Earth. That way, if anything malfunctioned, either with the engine or with the computers that ran it, the problems could be fixed or the flight aborted.
Some controllers protested Kraft’s proposal. Test-firing the SPS, they argued, could screw up Apollo 8’s trajectory, fouling its path to the Moon. But Kraft wouldn’t back down.
“Fire that thing and I’ll get it back on trajectory for you,” he assured them. “But I want that engine to run before we get to the Moon.”
And that was how the flight plan stood until about an hour before the test was to run.
Now controllers doubled down on their concern that the spacecraft would be thrown dangerously off course by the two-and-a-half-second burn. They urged Kraft to abandon the plan. Doing so would have been highly unorthodox—NASA’s practice was to preplan flights down to the minutest detail in order to avoid surprises and unknowns. Kraft held firm, and he was the boss.
“We’re going to do it, so let’s do it,” he said.
The astronauts spent the next hour preparing for the burn. Inside the spacecraft, Lovell was singing random songs to himself. (Borman was accustomed to Lovell’s singing from their time together aboard Gemini 7; for his part, Anders seemed too busy to notice.) When the moment came, Borman began his countdown. At five seconds, the computer’s display flashed 99—a request to go ahead with the test. Lovell reached forward and pressed the Proceed key.
The SPS engine lit, and the crew felt a gentle push forward as the spacecraft gained speed. After 2.4 seconds, the engine cut off, just as programmed.
A few minutes later, the Public Affairs Officer made a happy announcement.
“The burn was completely nominal in all respects.”
And for a minute or two, even Kraft believed it.
IT WAS SATURDAY EVENING IN HOUSTON, eleven hours after launch, and Valerie Anders needed to get out of her house. With squawk boxes still chirping, she asked the family’s au pair to watch her five children, then slid out the back door, careful not to make a sound lest the swarm of media camped out on her front lawn discover the subterfuge and follow her on her mission.
She arrived at her destination about ten seconds later—the neighboring home of astronaut Charlie Duke, whose family was hosting a Christmas party that night. The eggnog was flowing, and best of all, CapComs Mike Collins and Jerry Carr were in attendance, and they gave Valerie the skinny on the flight. Everything, they assured her, looked smooth so far.
Five miles away, at Mission Control, Chris Kraft was pacing.
The SPS engine had not worked properly.
Thrust buildup had been slow, and overall thrust had been too low. These were results NASA had never seen in tests, and they presented big problems for Apollo 8. An explanation, and a fix, had to be found soon, or lunar orbit might be impossible. One thing Kraft did not intend to do was inform the crew, at least not yet. There was nothing the astronauts could do about it anyway.
Several minutes later, Borman turned in for the first sleep shift of the flight. He was scheduled for seven hours, after which Lovell and Anders would rest. In Houston, engineers were studying the poor results from the brief burn of the SPS engine. No one had a clue as to a cause or a fix. Despite its being a Saturday evening, and right before Christmas, experts flowed into Mission Control to analyze the problem as Apollo 8 continued with its lunar intentions.
At her home, Susan Borman kept entertaining the parade of guests who came to support her, always keeping one ear trained on the squawk box, nodding in conversation without actually hearing what people were saying. Her favorite dialogue between Apollo 8 and Mission Control came when Frank said things like “We noticed on our system test battery vent pressure that when we opened the battery vent valve, we get an immediate drop-off to pressure which nulls out at about two-tenths to three-tenths of a volt”—not because she understood the jargon, but because the sound of his voice proved Frank was still alive.
Down the road, Chris Kraft, Flight Director Glynn Lunney, and several mechanical minds were studying 2.4 seconds’ worth of data, trying to explain the loss in pressure and thrust in the SPS engine. After nearly two hours of frenetic analysis, a contractor from North American Aviation, which built the spacecraft, had an epiphany: A bubble in a propellant line had fouled things up.
Helium, the man reasoned, must have become trapped during launch and remained in the oxidizer line. That’s why the engine didn’t achieve full thrust right away. One could hear the same thing when starting a lawn mower after a period of inactivity. If that was true, it was good news for NASA, because it meant the bubble likely had been purged and the flow of propellant purified. But no one could know for sure. It was now up to Lunney and Kraft to decide what to do with that theory.
As they mulled over how to proceed, Borman radioed Houston. He was supposed to be sleeping but, in the excitement of the flight, couldn’t make it happen.
“We have one request. CDR would like to get clearance to take a Seconal.”
Borman had asked whether he (CDR was shorthand for Commander) could take a sleeping pill. He detested the idea of relying on medication, but it was almost impossible to shut down one’s brain in the middle of mankind’s first trip to the Moon. Borman figured that a single Seconal, a barbiturate often prescribed for sleep, wouldn’t be harmful under the circumstances.
CapCom Mattingly checked with NASA’s doctors, who okayed it, and Borman made his way back down to the sleeping area in the navigation bay. His crewmates were working and talking above him, but it was the best refuge possible in a craft just thirteen feet by eleven feet and filled with equipment.
After much discussion, Lunney and Kraft came to a decision on the matter of the SPS engine. Each of them thought through the theory offered by the man from North American and ultimately judged it to be correct, and they were willing to bet the rest of the flight on it. After consulting with other controllers, who concurred, the men decided to continue with Apollo 8’s flight plan just as it had been written. The next time the SPS engine fired would be when the spacecraft slipped behind the Moon. At that moment, the crew’s lives would depend on its functioning properly.
As midnight approached in Houston, all three of the astronauts’ wives, too, struggled to sleep. It had been a long and exhausting first day, but Susan and Valerie remained attached to their squawk boxes as they lay in bed, each trying to pick out a hint of how her husband was feeling by the tone of his voice. Staying overnight in Florida, Marilyn Lovell had no squawk box; instead, she listened to the sound of the waves by her beachside cottage, wondering whether Jim could see that same stretch of ocean from space.
A few hours after test-firing the SPS engine, Hou
ston got good news. The test burn hadn’t fouled Apollo 8’s trajectory, as some had feared. In fact, tracking analysis showed that if the spacecraft made no further changes and was simply allowed to coast, it would slingshot around the Moon at an altitude of just 80 miles above the lunar surface, then return to Earth, just as the trajectory specialists had designed.
For the first time in a long while, Mission Control grew quiet. It was past midnight and the spacecraft was coasting. And Borman was supposed to be sleeping.
Instead, he tossed and turned in his hammock. Borman had never been sick for a minute on the two-week flight of Gemini 7, or even on the “Vomit Comet,” the zero gravity airplane used to acclimate astronauts to weightlessness. Even when flying in violent thunderstorms as an inexperienced fifteen-year-old student of Miss Bobbie Kroll, he’d not experienced so much as a stomachache.
Now he swallowed hard in his sleeping bag and tried to push away the nausea, but the waves were building and moving fast toward shore.
“I’m sorry, guys,” he called to his crewmates above.
And then the vomit came.
Retching, Borman reached to capture the floating green globules, but there were too many of them, going in too many directions, to corral at once. Even when he caught them, they just split in two or four or eight and made their escape from his flailing hands.
A moment later, the odor of the vomit reached Borman’s two crewmates. Overwhelmed, Anders reached for his gas mask.
“You’re not supposed to use those!” Lovell said.
“To hell with that, I’m using it,” Anders replied. He opened the oxygen supply to maximum, then turned his attention to Borman.
From below, he could see a greenish-brown blob, about the size of a golf ball, moving toward him. For a moment, the physicist in him took over, and Anders followed the object with wonder as it oscillated in three dimensions, a movement impossible on Earth, and quivered toward the ceiling. Anders’s instinct was to find a camera and photograph the alien wonder, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away as it rose higher and then, about eighteen inches from his chest, split like the atoms he’d seen in science films, one wobbling part headed this way, the other wobbling in the perfect opposite direction. Anders thought, That’s Isaac Newton. That’s conservation of momentum. Now one of the pieces was heading toward Lovell, who could do no more than watch it, eyes narrowing as it hit him in the chest and spread like an uncooked egg against the white cloth of his coveralls.
Lovell reached for a towelette and tried to wipe the mess away, but his and Anders’s troubles were only starting. Floating toward them from below were spinning blobs of feces, each turning on its own axis. If they had been solid clumps, Lovell and Anders might have had a chance to dodge or capture them, but Borman had diarrhea.
Lovell and Anders grabbed as many wipes as they could find and began hunting down the fluttering pieces, netting them like butterflies. For several minutes, the three men worked to clean the cabin. After restoring some order, Lovell and Anders could see that Borman was very sick. The situation, Anders thought, needed to be reported to Houston right away.
“Absolutely not,” Borman said.
Anders understood his reaction. Borman was a test pilot in his bones; no one with his instincts or credentials would want the world to know he’d become sick in space. And Anders didn’t blame him—he would have felt the same way himself.
But it was more than that to Borman. He didn’t trust NASA’s doctors, especially the agency’s medical director, Charles Berry, whose judgment he questioned and who he believed to be ever itching to make himself part of the story. And it wasn’t just Dr. Berry who worried Borman. Give any NASA doctor a chance to play the hero, he believed, and you were asking for trouble. Borman could imagine it happening now, some medical guy stepping in and canceling the mission “for the good of the crew.” Borman would rather have died than foul up Apollo 8. News of his illness would remain between him and his crew.
Lovell agreed. He saw NASA’s doctors in much the way Borman did—eager to become major cogs in the wheel of space exploration. He remembered how he’d been rejected on his first application to the astronaut corps on account of a slightly elevated level of bilirubin, a phony excuse if ever there was one. If Borman was too sick to continue, Lovell thought, he and Anders would feed their commander, watch him, take care of him, and finish the mission. What they couldn’t afford now, as they drew closer to the Moon, was to be ordered by Houston to turn back.
Anders wasn’t so sure. What if Borman didn’t get better? What if he got so sick that he and Lovell had to focus entirely on taking care of him, and none of the crew could work? But he could see that it didn’t matter. This wasn’t a request from Borman; it was an order. Lovell and Anders were military men. They understood the chain of command. And Borman, sick and covered in unpleasantness as he was, remained the commander. So nobody said a word to Houston.
Still, Anders knew the flight was at risk. Whether NASA knew about Borman’s illness or not, there was no way Apollo 8 could go into orbit around the Moon with a guy who was vomiting and had diarrhea—and who might be getting worse.
Foul-smelling miniglobules of vomit and feces speckled the cabin as Borman fought his sickness and took control of the spacecraft while Lovell and Anders tried to sleep. Despite Borman’s illness, his crewmates had faith the old fighter pilot could handle the spacecraft. Out his window, Borman watched Earth, now a hundred thousand miles away, grow so small it fit behind his outstretched fist.
Anders climbed into his hammock, which he found too big for his small frame. Worse, he had nothing to cuddle up to—no extra pillow, no covers, no Valerie. Whenever he dropped off to sleep, he suddenly felt like he was falling, as people do in dreams, and it would jar him back to consciousness. He tied a knot in his sleeping bag—something to press against—and that helped prevent the feeling of falling, but when he drifted off to sleep, the primitive level of his brain shouted “What the hell is going on here? Where are you?” and he’d wake again.
Lovell couldn’t sleep either. Every few minutes, he saw tiny novas of white light exploding in his field of vision, which was odd since his eyes were shut. Holding his hands over his face did nothing to stop the fireworks. Lovell didn’t know it, but his optic nerve was being bombarded by (mostly harmless) cosmic rays. Shielding his face did nothing, as the rays just danced on through. And if either man was lucky enough to find a few minutes’ sleep, intermittent radio noise would shake him from it.
Twenty-four hours into the flight, Apollo 8 crossed the halfway point on its journey to the Moon. Owing to its continued decrease in velocity since leaving parking orbit around Earth, the spacecraft was traveling more slowly now, and it was still forty-five hours from its destination.
Soon Lovell and Anders were awake and back in their seats. To both of them, Borman looked a bit healthier, a condition the commander confirmed.
“I think it was the sleeping pill,” Borman said.
But Anders wasn’t so sure. A Seconal might explain vomiting, but not diarrhea. He still thought Borman should report that he’d been ill. There was a chance the commander was still sick and might get worse. And there might be an easy antidote, if only they would give Mission Control the chance to suggest one.
By now, however, Anders realized that even if Borman had been willing to report his condition, the media would hear the broadcast (as they did the vast majority of them) and jump to its usual worst-case conclusions, and a public relations nightmare would ensue. That wouldn’t be good for anyone—not Borman, not their wives, not NASA. So Anders pitched another idea.
Borman could make a tape recording that described his illness, which then could be sent to Houston via an auxiliary channel meant for television, data, and backup voice transmissions. Only a select handful at Mission Control would hear it.
Borman thought it over. He still believed the doctors w
ould leap at the chance to insinuate themselves into the flight. But Anders was right, maybe there was a fix, or at least something to learn, if NASA was informed in a discreet fashion.
“Okay,” Borman said. “Let’s do it.”
Anders engaged the spacecraft’s voice recorder with its built-in voice track, and ensured that there were no downlink communications to Houston. Then Borman started talking, and he spared no details. A few minutes later, Anders pressed some buttons and shot the recording back to Earth.
The crew expected to hear back from Houston in a few minutes. Instead, two hours passed without mention of Borman’s condition by Mission Control. Anders snapped a few photos of Earth, wondering what could be taking Houston so long. Finally, Collins radioed to the spacecraft and said that Houston had received the voice tape and would advise shortly.
When Mission Control listened to the tape and realized what Borman was describing, top management rushed together, including the flight directors, Chris Kraft, and Dr. Berry. Kraft was furious that Borman hadn’t reported his illness right away. While he understood that astronauts didn’t trust doctors or want them mucking around in their domain, he couldn’t abide the test pilot ethos of silence; Mission Control was there to assist the crew. But if no one talked, it rendered Houston helpless.
But Kraft didn’t have the luxury of frustration now. He and the others had to figure out what had happened to Borman in order to determine what to do about it—and what to do with the flight.
Dr. Berry considered that Borman might be suffering from a virus, perhaps even the Hong Kong flu that had struck so many in recent weeks. That was the fate that had worried Valerie Anders when she saw guests coughing and sneezing at the White House during the astronauts’ last-minute send-off. But the most ominous possibility was also the simplest: that there might be something NASA and doctors did not know or understand about humans going to the Moon. In that case, it would be hard even to guess at a remedy, if there was a remedy at all.
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