At the Borman home, Susan still couldn’t eat. Her sons began to worry. “You’ve gotta have something,” they said, but Susan couldn’t stomach it. Fred took up a forkful of potato salad delivered by some good soul.
“Open up for the airplane!” he said, making the food swoop and loop with engine sounds, which was just what Susan had done for him when he was a little boy. If the method had been good enough for Fred and Ed, now it had to be good enough for their mother. She laughed, opened up, and took a bite.
That morning, the Borman boys threw on some camouflage gear, grabbed their shotguns, and left the house to go duck hunting. The embedded Life magazine photographer sensed a great shot and asked Susan to pose with the boys before they hit the road. She did, reaching somewhere for the smile that had earned her an offer from the Ford modeling agency when she was in college, and finding it, if just for the moment.
The boys sneaked out through the back fence, where they rendezvoused with Fred’s car, which he’d parked near a neighbor’s house. They intended to go to a friend’s farm in the country, but by that time the press had gotten wise to the teenage Houdinis and gave chase. Fred mashed the gas pedal to the floor, making several tight turns and leaving the reporters in the dust. Two days earlier, Frank Borman had become the fastest man in history. Yet the boys knew that their father would have reached an arm down from space and strangled them if he’d known they’d been speeding.
In Timber Cove, Marilyn Lovell’s concern had shifted to her son, Jay, who had begun to complain of stomach pains. Spiriting him to a neighbor’s car and hiding him under blankets to avoid being trailed by the media, she drove to NASA, where doctors attributed his symptoms to the excitement that comes from having a father on his way to the Moon. While Marilyn and Jay were gone, two-year-old Jeffrey did his best to stand in for his mother, opening the door and answering questions from reporters while wearing a plaid jumper and his toy astronaut helmet, occasionally looking skyward in case his dad flew by. Now 186,000 miles above him, Apollo 8 was at precisely the distance at which it took light (and radio transmissions) one full second to reach Earth. If Jeffrey had seen his father flying by, the image would have come from history, not the present.
By the looks of things, Apollo 8 was in cruise mode, so Valerie Anders decided to visit Mission Control—for a change of scenery, and to feel closer to Bill. There she took George Low’s hand and told him how grateful she was that Bill and his crewmates were being looked after so well. Low’s blend of intellect and calm had made him a favorite of Valerie’s, and his was the perfect hand to hold while she watched the green blip on the distant screen inch closer to the Moon.
A few minutes later, she heard Bill announce that he was going to “take a little snooze here for a while” and then sign off. She smiled and whispered something to a NASA official, who walked over to the public affairs officer, who in turn walked over to Collins. Shortly after that, Collins radioed to Borman aboard Apollo 8.
“Paul tells me Valerie is over here and wishes Bill a happy nap.”
“Okay, thank you,” Borman answered. “Tell her that he makes us tired sometimes, too, will you?”
Collins laughed.
“Roger. I will deliver a modified version of the message.”
* * *
—
At 53 hours into the flight, the guidance and trajectory specialists in Houston were delighted by the precision of the journey. After Apollo 8 left Earth orbit, Houston had planned for up to four midcourse corrections for the coast to the Moon. But the first, accomplished during the brief test of the SPS engine about eleven hours into the flight, had been so accurate that the next two were dispensed with. Now, as they neared the Moon, only one tiny adjustment would be required, and that would use the spacecraft’s small control thrusters.
The second live television broadcast was scheduled to begin in an hour. Despite the best advice from experts—on filters, lenses, switches, brackets, interior lighting, and exposure levels—Borman remained skeptical.
“I bet the TV doesn’t work,” he told Collins.
Just before 3:00 P.M. EST, with Apollo 8 at an altitude of 200,000 miles, the crew got ready to transmit. A few seconds later, a rounded edge appeared on television screens across America, then disappeared. Collins radioed instructions to the spacecraft, but the screen stayed gray.
Suddenly, an orb drifted dead center into the middle of the picture, and the shape of clouds and continents sharpened into view. For the first time in history, mankind was looking back at itself—at all of itself. Every human culture and language and idea and conflict and difference fit into a single picture.
In Mission Control, in living rooms, in hotels and bars and bus shelters across America, in the astronauts’ homes, people fell silent.
Then Lovell spoke.
“Houston, what you are seeing is the Western Hemisphere. Looking at the top is the North Pole. In the center—just lower to the center is South America—all the way down to Cape Horn. I can see Baja California, and the southwestern part of the United States. There’s a big, long cloud bank going northeast, covers a lot of the Gulf of Mexico, going up to the eastern part of the United States, and it appears now that the East Coast is cloudy. I can see clouds over parts of Mexico; the parts of Central America are clear. And we can also see the white, bright spot of the subsolar point on the light side of the Earth.”
The broadcast was in black-and-white, so Collins asked about the colors.
“For colors, the waters are all a sort of a royal blue,” Lovell said. “Clouds, of course, are bright white. The reflection off the Earth is much greater than the Moon. The land areas are generally a brownish, a sort of a dark brownish to light brown texture.”
Watching out the window, Anders almost forgot the camera in his hand. To him, Earth seemed almost to transcend reality, its color and brightness and clarity beyond what one could see when one was actually on the planet. He could hardly imagine a more beautiful image.
After a few more minutes, Lovell added to his description.
“Mike, what I keep imagining is, if I’m some lonely traveler from another planet, what I think about the Earth at this altitude, whether I think it’d be inhabited or not.”
“Don’t see anybody waving, is that what you’re saying?” Collins replied.
“I was just kind of curious whether I would land on the blue or the brown part of the Earth,” Lovell said.
“You better hope we land on the blue part,” Anders chimed in, causing an eruption of laughter at Mission Control.
Near the end of the twenty-two-minute telecast, Collins asked Borman a question millions of people had on their minds.
“How about the Moon, Frank? Is it visible through one of your other windows? Could you get it visible with a small maneuver?”
“Negative,” Borman answered. “I think we’ll have to save the Moon for another time.”
A few minutes later, the show came to a close. So compelling was the view of Earth that the crew hadn’t once thought to turn the camera on themselves.
“Okay, Earth,” Borman said. “This is Apollo 8 signing off for today.”
And with that, the astronauts disappeared back into the sky.
* * *
—
The astronauts’ younger children dispersed when the broadcast ended, running outside to play, fixing sandwiches in the kitchen, pulling toys from their toy chests. Hearing the clamor of the reporters on their lawns, Susan and Valerie went outside their homes to answer questions from the press. Only Marilyn didn’t move from her spot in front of the television. She just stared at the screen, trying to process the distance between her and her husband.
Focus at Mission Control turned to the giant projection screens at the front of the room. By the estimates of trajectory and orbital mechanics specialists, Apollo 8 was about to cross what some called the equig
ravisphere, the point at which Earth and Moon exert an equal pull of gravity. It had taken until now, about five-sixths of the way to the Moon, to reach the equigravisphere, a testament to the dominance of Earth in its finely balanced relationship with its smaller satellite. There would be nothing to mark the place in space, no bump or jolt to the spacecraft. But in its silence, the crossing would make a thundering announcement—for the first time, man had become captured by the pull of another celestial body.
The men in Mission Control had bet on the event; the winner would be the one who most accurately predicted the moment of crossing. It wasn’t an easy guess, as the line changed depending on the distance between Earth and Moon at the moment, the phases of the Moon, and other factors. But controllers would know it when the moment arrived, because for the first time in more than two days, the spacecraft would stop slowing down and begin to gain speed.
At around this time, Mission Control received a visit from Marilyn Lovell, who’d hitched a ride with a NASA representative. In the viewing area, Robert Gilruth, the director of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center, greeted her and sat down to talk. Perhaps he sensed her apprehension, or maybe he was just being friendly, but he did not rush off to attend to his pressing duties, even at this historic moment.
At 55 hours, 38 minutes into the flight, all eyes in Mission Control, including Marilyn’s, turned to the big screens. Controllers checked the numbers—Apollo 8 was 202,700 miles from Earth, but its speed, about 2,200 miles per hour, was no longer dropping. Moments later, a light flashed on the screen.
“My God,” one of the young computer specialists said. “Do you know what we just saw?”
And the room, transfixed, did know. The light meant that Apollo 8 was no longer a part of this world.
SCREENS AND CHARTS AT MISSION CONTROL changed. No longer was the spacecraft 202,700 miles from Earth; it was now 38,760 miles from the Moon. And it was picking up speed, passing 2,700 miles per hour and gaining by the minute.
At their consoles, controllers made printouts of their displays to commemorate the moment. Someday they would show these papers to their grandchildren and tell them what they’d seen.
A few minutes later, Collins radioed Apollo 8 with an update on their recent television broadcast.
“We are having a playback of your TV shows and are all enjoying it down here. It was better than yesterday because it didn’t preempt the football game.”
“Don’t tell me they cut off a football game,” Borman said. “Didn’t they learn from Heidi?”
Just a month earlier, as millions of Americans watched the New York Jets and Oakland Raiders battle into the final minute of a spectacular game, NBC stuck to its strict broadcast schedule, switching over at 7:00 P.M. to Heidi, a film about a young girl who was living with her grandfather in the Swiss Alps. Viewers erupted in protest, flooding the network with irate calls (and threats) and blowing out twenty-six fuses on the NBC switchboard while the Raiders scored two touchdowns in nine seconds to pull off a miracle come-from-behind win. The next day, The New York Times ran a front-page story on the debacle, and David Brinkley addressed it on the evening news—then showed tape of the game’s last minute. Even on this pioneering trip to the Moon, Borman wanted nothing to do with messing with his beloved game of football.
Thirty minutes after she’d arrived, Marilyn left Mission Control with astronaut John Young, who was going to drive her home.
“Have you seen Susan yet?” Young asked, then offered to take her over to the Borman house.
When they arrived, Marilyn found a familiar scene—loads of visitors, trays of food, kids pinballing between rooms, squawk boxes chirping. The only thing missing was Susan.
“She’s in the bedroom,” someone said. “I’ll tell her you’re here.”
Marilyn sat in the living room and waited, chatting with other visitors and fixing herself a drink. She kept waiting, for thirty minutes, an hour. After two hours, Susan still had not emerged.
I’m part of this just as much as you are, Marilyn thought. My husband is on this flight, too.
Marilyn didn’t know how painful things had been for Susan after the Apollo 1 tragedy. She didn’t know how clearly Susan pictured herself as a widow in the coming hours. If Marilyn had known any of this, she would have understood and would have tried to help. But Susan never showed that vulnerability to anyone, not even to Frank. As Marilyn waited, Susan remained curled up on the bed in her bedroom, listening for her husband’s voice on the squawk box. When Marilyn left, she left with hurt feelings.
Back at home, Marilyn found her house oddly empty. She poured herself a scotch on the rocks, sat on a stool at the wood-paneled bar in the family room, and sobbed. In just ten hours, Apollo 8 would disappear behind the Moon. How had she been so confident all this time? Her husband was disappearing behind the Moon. And that meant he might never come home.
* * *
—
At almost exactly two and a half days into the flight, Apollo 8 prepared for just its second—and final—midcourse correction burn of the outbound leg. It would be accomplished by firing four thrusters on the spacecraft, each of which could produce 100 pounds of thrust. That was only the tiniest fraction of the force that had been required to get Apollo 8 off the launchpad, but it was all the vehicle would need for eleven seconds as it refined its line to the Moon.
“Okay, stand by,” Borman called to his crewmates.
“Burn,” Lovell said.
“Burning,” Anders confirmed.
Eleven seconds later, it was done. Houston analyzed the telemetry—the correction had been nearly perfect, and it was just a matter of riding the ship for another eight hours until lunar rendezvous. Despite such close proximity, the crew still could not see its target. To all of them, it felt like sitting with their backs to the screen in a movie theater during a terrific thriller.
In Houston, the wives began to prepare for when the spacecraft reached the Moon, scheduled for 4:00 A.M. Houston time, when Apollo 8 would attempt a complex maneuver known as Lunar Orbit Insertion, or LOI. Engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and other scientists had spent years developing the calculations and determining how to make the maneuver work. But on its face, LOI was easy to understand.
At 69 hours into the flight, Apollo 8 would pass just in front of the Moon, missing its surface by only 69 miles. That altitude had been chosen for a reason. On future landing missions, it would be close enough so that the lunar module shuttling astronauts to the lunar surface and back wouldn’t require a massive amount of propellant, but far enough away to make it unlikely that the spacecraft waiting in orbit above would crash into the Moon.
If Apollo 8 did not fire its SPS engine—or if the engine failed to ignite—after passing behind the Moon, lunar gravity would cause it to slingshot around the far side and head back to Earth, requiring only minor course adjustments in order to hit its reentry corridor and splash down in the Pacific Ocean. NASA had chosen this free return, figure eight trajectory in case of engine failure or other in-flight problems.
But NASA planned for Apollo 8 to orbit the Moon. To enter lunar orbit, the spacecraft had to slow itself down enough to be captured by the Moon’s gravity. The only way to do that was to fire the SPS engine against the direction of its travel, for just the right amount of time—about four minutes—and with just the right amount of thrust.
If the engine fired for too short a period, or without enough thrust, the spacecraft might still slingshot around the Moon but emerge on an improper trajectory, one that might cause it to burn up on reentry into the atmosphere or miss Earth entirely. Or it might be cast out into space without enough power or propellant to reverse course and come back. Or it might enter a lunar orbit off-kilter enough to cause it to crash into the Moon.
If the engine fired for too long, or with too much thrust, the results might be even worse. That would slow down the spacecraf
t so much that the Moon’s gravity would overcome the ship and cause it to plummet into the lunar surface.
The SPS was the same engine that had failed to build up proper thrust on its test fire eleven hours into the flight, owing to the suspected helium bubble in a propellant line. Kraft and the controllers in Houston believed the problem had worked itself out, but that was just a best guess. They wouldn’t know for sure until the astronauts tried to light the engine again behind the Moon.
No aspect of the Lunar Orbit Insertion maneuver was easy. In training, the crew and controllers crashed into the Moon time and time again. Sometimes controllers became so anxious that they aborted prematurely or took needless emergency action, fracturing their confidence and planting doubts about their ability to work as a single cohesive unit. So shaken did some controllers become that they sometimes denied they’d made a mistake. To Kraft, that was even worse than the error. When denials happened, he’d stop the session, take the controller aside, and say, “I don’t want any bullshit from you anymore. If you make a mistake, you say you made a mistake.” Kraft demanded truth, and he demanded that everyone perform the maneuver again and again and again. With a few hours to go, he believed his team was ready.
Lunar Orbit Insertion involved an emotional component, too. After flying past the leading hemisphere of the onrushing Moon, the spacecraft would disappear behind its far side and lose contact with Earth, as all signals to and from the ship would be blocked by the Moon. For about thirty-five minutes, no one at Mission Control would have any idea whether the SPS engine had fired or performed well; no one would be able to monitor the spacecraft or its systems, no one would be able to talk to the astronauts. Controllers could only watch their clocks and hope Apollo 8 emerged from the far side exactly when it was supposed to. If it came out any earlier or later than that, something had gone wrong.
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