Rocket Men

by Robert Kurson

  Glynn, you idiot! Jerry Bostick thought. We’ve got Americans behind the Moon and you want to take a break? But in a moment he realized that Lunney was right. There was nothing anyone could do to help Apollo 8 while it was behind the Moon. So it was a good time, indeed the only time, to visit the bathroom, grab a cup of coffee, and come back prepared. Headsets were removed and placed on consoles, and a pilgrimage made to the men’s room (there were no women’s restrooms at Mission Control in 1968 because there were no women). Standing in line, the twenty-eight-year-old Bostick had never felt more helpless. Did we give them the right data? he wondered. Is everything okay? Engineer Aaron Cohen, who’d worked with Borman on the redesign of the command module, felt his body tense up. Dick Koos, one of the SimSups who’d constructed the nightmare scenarios to train the astronauts and controllers during simulations, felt faint and feared he might pass out.

  On board the spacecraft, Anders had a realization: Given the ship’s orientation, he had become the first man ever to reach the Moon, beating his crewmates by a few centimeters. And then it hit all of them.

  They had reached the Moon.

  Since humans first walked Earth, the Moon had been their siren, lighted their way in darkness, remained their companion in the night. It hung at an eternal distance, yet pulled on men and women as it pulled on the oceans, calling to a primal instinct—to journey beyond one’s home and explore the unknown. But the Moon had always been too far, always beyond reach.

  Today, Borman, Lovell, and Anders had changed that. Today, on December 24, 1968, when humankind opened their eyes, three of their own had arrived.

  * * *

  —

  Before firing the SPS engine, the crew had to run through their checklists and position the spacecraft so that the burn would put them into a proper orbit. Even now, they were just 400 miles or so above the lunar surface, yet they couldn’t see anything in the blackness because the light of the Sun and its reflected shine from Earth were blocked by the Moon.

  A few minutes later, the spacecraft emerged into sunlight, at just the moment NASA planners had predicted. With less than two and a half minutes to go before SPS ignition, Lovell called out:

  “Hey! I got the Moon! Right below us!”

  Anders pushed for a closer look, but all he could see were streaks of oil rolling down his window. Then it hit him. Those streaks weren’t oil. They were lunar mountains.

  “Look at that!” Anders said. “See it? Fantastic!”

  It was the first time human beings had laid eyes on the far side of the Moon.

  Borman’s commander instincts kicked in.

  “All right, all right, come on. You’re going to look at that for a long time.” He needed to keep the mission focused. They had a rocket to fire soon, one that had to work.

  “Twenty hours—is that it?” Anders asked, sounding as though he could look forever. Inside, he could only say to himself, That’s the Moon!

  Lovell prepared for the firing of the SPS engine, looking for an indicator from the display panel that signaled all was ready. Five seconds before ignition, he got it—the number 99 began flashing, the computer asking for the go-ahead to proceed.

  Lovell pushed the button.

  The astronauts felt a vibration, then the weight of their bodies pressed against their restraints as the spacecraft began to decelerate. The engine had lit, that much was certain. Now it had to burn against the direction of travel for just over four minutes to slow the ship’s speed from around 5,100 miles per hour to less than 3,700 miles per hour, which would allow the Moon’s gravity to capture the spacecraft for orbit. Inside the cabin, the men could hear the external thrusters firing as the computer worked to keep the craft straight.

  Borman checked the instruments, which indicated the engine looked good. But no one on board seemed reassured.

  “Jesus, four minutes?” Borman asked two minutes into the burn.

  “Longest four minutes I ever spent,” Lovell said.

  The burn seemed never to end; the rocket just kept firing, the crew hyperaware of the fact that if it lasted even a little longer than necessary, it could smash the spacecraft and its crew into the Moon.

  “Forty seconds left in the burn,” Lovell called.

  Anders picked up the countdown.

  “Five…four…three…two…one…”

  The computer was ready to shut down the engine.

  Borman beat the machine to it.

  “Shutdown,” he announced, pushing the button. The spacecraft, and the men, settled back into weightlessness.

  In Houston, the controllers weren’t due back at their consoles for another seven minutes, but most of them had already returned and affixed their headsets. On board the spacecraft, the crew checked the delta-v—change in velocity—and could see they’d been captured by lunar gravity. Apollo 8 now belonged to the Moon.

  Onboard readouts indicated that the spacecraft was in an elliptical orbit, ranging from a low point of 69.6 miles at its perigee to a high point of 195 miles at its apogee. Borman was astonished by the accuracy of the specialists who’d planned the flight. They’d predicted radio cutoff perfectly. And now they’d nailed the dimensions of the orbit to within a fraction of a mile.

  Knowing their engine had made good, the astronauts were free to take a look out their windows. Below, they got their first clear view of the lunar surface.

  At the sight, each man forgot his flight plan, even Borman. They leaned forward, pressing their faces against the spacecraft glass. To Lovell, the three of them looked like kids staring through a candy store window.

  “It looks like a big—looks like a big beach down there,” Anders said.

  Despite his training in lunar geology, the far side of the Moon startled Anders. Long, oblique shadows showed the terrain to be much rougher than he expected, and with many more mountains, an impressive sight. He thought to himself that Stanley Kubrick hadn’t gotten it right in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which he showed the Moon’s surfaces to be sharp, angular, and scratchy. In real life, they looked sandblasted.

  The size and number of craters was staggering. There were countless numbers of them, some as small as the eye could discern, others as wide as European countries. For years, scientists had argued about the cause of these impressions—volcanic activity or meteorite impacts? Most experts had come to the conclusion that craters were caused by meteorites. Anders scanned the surface of the far side but found no lava flows or other evidence of volcanic activity. He felt pleased to add his firsthand opinion to the debate: The craters had been made by meteorites, four billion years’ worth, an endless bombardment from the solar system.

  To Lovell, the surface looked like a concrete sidewalk that had been attacked by a man wielding a pickax, each wound rippling sand and particles around the impact point, so many craters they could never be counted. There was a harshness to the terrain, and no color, just grays and whites that went on forever. It wasn’t beautiful, exactly, but to Lovell, the scene was awe-inspiring in its vastness and the story it told—a tale as old and as new as Earth and the Sun—and for that alone, it was beautiful to his eyes.

  To Borman, spacecraft, rockets, and computers were the products of science, the logical advance of mankind. The lunar far side, however, seemed a dreamscape, straight out of science fiction. Nothing was lit like that on Earth, or even in one’s imagination. Nothing was ever that alone. And yet he saw splendor in all of it, in the epochs of violence gone perfectly still.

  The men could have watched the Moon for hours, but there was work to do. Borman would fly the ship, making certain the windows stayed in position for Lovell and Anders to perform their tasks. Lovell would take navigation sightings, confirm lunar landmarks, and assess potential landing sites on the near side for future missions. Anders would pull heavy photography duty while monitoring the spacecraft and its systems. Apollo 8 ha
d ten revolutions to get all its work done, twenty hours total.

  In Houston, the controllers were back at their desks, but they still didn’t know that Apollo 8’s SPS engine had performed well, or even whether it had fired at all. All they knew was that if it had failed to light, the spacecraft would appear just two minutes from now. For once, controllers rooted for their consoles to remain frozen; if any jumped to life now, it would mean Apollo 8 had come out too soon.

  Kraft, Bostick, and others watched a clock that was counting down to the time the spacecraft would reappear if the burn had not taken place. It seemed antithetical at NASA to hope for nothing to happen when a countdown reached zero. But that was exactly the prayer in the church-quiet room.

  When Apollo 8 failed to appear, waves of relief washed over Mission Control.

  Now Houston had to jiu-jitsu its mindset. In ten minutes, Apollo 8 had to appear, right on time, or it likely meant disaster. A new countdown began, one that could be heard not just at Mission Control but also on the squawk boxes inside the homes of the three astronauts. While Marilyn Lovell remained surrounded by family and friends (and her priest), Susan Borman sat alone in her kitchen, lips pursed, trying to divine good or bad in the radio silence. Valerie Anders, teetering on the edge of sleep (it was not quite four thirty in the morning), believed the crew would appear right on time, a confidence that her nervous friends, who’d gathered to support her this predawn morning, must have appreciated.

  As the countdown to predicted signal reacquisition reached one minute, Mission Control fell silent. CapCom Jerry Carr began to call to the spacecraft, broadcasting into a silent vacuum.

  “Apollo 8, Houston. Over.”

  “Apollo 8, Houston. Over.”

  “Apollo 8, Houston. Over.”

  Finally, a voice came through the headsets at Mission Control.

  “Go ahead, Houston, Apollo 8.”

  It was Lovell.

  “Burn complete,” he told his colleagues on Earth.

  Mission Control exploded in cheers and applause. Apollo 8 had come around to the near side of the Moon. The contact had occurred within one second of NASA’s estimate.

  Chris Kraft’s eyes began to mist over. He could see Bob Gilruth, the director of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center, wiping away his own tears, hoping no one would see him cry. The two men embraced but couldn’t speak; their throats were too swollen with emotion to talk.

  Cheers also erupted in the astronauts’ homes. Marilyn Lovell felt proud of her husband—his voice had been the first one broadcast from the Moon. To Valerie Anders, Lovell’s simple statement—“Burn complete”—sounded like an ebullient “We’re still here!” Susan Borman was happy that her sons were happy, but she felt no sense of relief. She’d seen this movie a thousand times in her head, and it always ended the same way.

  * * *

  —

  Sixteen minutes after appearing on the lunar near side, Apollo 8 passed over the Sea of Fertility, an expanse roughly the size of France, visible with the naked eye to observers on Earth as one of the prominent dark patches on the Moon’s eastern limb.

  “What does the ol’ Moon look like from sixty miles?” Carr asked the astronauts.

  Lovell took the question. For the first time, man was about to hear man describe the Moon, not as a distant observer, but as an eyewitness.

  “Okay, Houston,” Lovell said. “The Moon is essentially gray, no color; looks like plaster of Paris, sort of a grayish beach sand. We can see quite a bit of detail. The Sea of Fertility doesn’t stand out as well here as it does back on Earth. There’s not as much contrast between that and the surrounding craters.”

  He paused for a moment, taking in more of the expanse beneath him.

  “The craters are all rounded off. There’s quite a few of them, some of them are newer. Many of them look like, especially the round ones, look like [they were] hit by meteorites or projectiles of some sort. Langrenus is quite a huge crater; it’s got a central cone to it. The walls of the crater are terraced, about six or seven different terraces on the way down.”

  A few minutes later, the spacecraft passed over one of the sites NASA had identified as a potential landing area for future missions.

  “It’s very easy to spot,” Lovell said. “You can see the entire rims of the craters from here with, of course, the white crescent on the far side where the Sun is shining on it.”

  A few seconds later, Borman jumped in. He still couldn’t believe the accuracy with which planners had calculated the flight.

  “Houston, for your information, we lost radio contact at the exact second you predicted. Are you sure you didn’t turn off the transmitters at that time?”

  “Honest injun, we didn’t,” Carr replied.

  “While these other guys are all looking at the Moon, I want to make sure we got a good SPS,” Borman said. Without the properly functioning SPS engine, Borman knew, Apollo 8 could never leave lunar orbit.

  “And we want a Go for every rev, please,” Borman added. “Otherwise, we’ll burn in TEI-1 at your direction.”

  It was the request of a conservative commander. Before every new orbit, Borman wanted Houston to confirm that everything—the spacecraft, its systems, its computers—was working well. If not, he was prepared to fire his engine, leave lunar orbit, and head home—Trans Earth Injection, or TEI—at the first opportunity. In Borman’s voice, even from a distance of a quarter million miles, Kraft could hear he had the right commander on board.

  Apollo 8 continued flying, more and more nose-first, over the near side of the Moon. Inside, Anders kept his still and movie cameras firing, trying to record as much of the lunar surface as possible, all according to the photographic plan provided by Houston. Aiming and focusing weren’t easy. The center window had been fogged by sealant fumes. Framing panoramas from the small rendezvous window was like trying to look out over the Grand Canyon through a welder’s helmet. And when Anders did lock on to something good, he might have to interrupt the moment to change lenses or swap out film magazines. Still, as the Moon moved under the spacecraft, Anders began to capture spectacular shots, hundreds of close-up answers to questions that had endured for millennia.

  Lighting conditions stayed good for another few minutes before Apollo 8 flew into darkness. (Generally, the crew would have about an hour of good lighting for photography during each two-hour orbit.) Forty minutes later, the ship slipped around to the lunar far side, where it again lost contact with Earth. Apollo 8 had made its first full revolution; when they next came around, they would be making their first TV broadcast from the Moon. It would be an early morning telecast in the United States, but millions would be watching and listening, there and all over the world. At home, the astronauts’ wives gathered their children in front of their television sets. None of the women had been able to sleep.

  At around 7:30 A.M. on December 24, test patterns flickered on TV screens and a grayish blob wobbled into the picture. When the camera steadied, the blob settled into a perfect sphere, with faint, almost invisible circles etched onto its surface, or maybe they were just lines, or the viewer’s imagination. But when Anders pointed the camera out a window with better visibility, even the youngest viewers knew what had come into their homes.

  This was the Moon.

  “Say, Bill,” Lovell said, playing emcee for the broadcast, “how would you describe the color of the Moon from here?”

  Much of the world might have expected a poetic description. But as Anders looked down, the lunar surface reminded him of the seawall at La Jolla Shores in San Diego, where he and Valerie used to roast marshmallows and play volleyball when they were younger. So that’s how he described it.

  “The color of the Moon looks a very whitish-gray, like dirty beach sand with lots of footprints in it.”

  Flying past various landmarks, Anders worked the camera for a clearer view. Afte
r a time, the picture became sharp. One after another, Anders not only described the craters he was seeing, but referred to them by names that he himself had bestowed. He reported that Apollo 8 had passed over Mueller, Bassett, See (Bassett and See were two astronauts who’d died in an airplane crash in 1966), Borman, Lovell, Anders, Collins, and others.

  In Moscow, when the news emerged that Apollo 8 had made its lunar orbit, the reality of the moment struck cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, who was training to command a Soviet circumlunar mission. Watching the astronauts, he felt his life’s work crumble, his dreams evaporate. He worried that with news of Apollo 8, the Soviet Union might scrap its entire manned circumlunar program. Yet he could not but help respect the Americans, not just for what they’d done, but how they’d done it. To him, the aggressive, last-minute upgrade of Apollo 8 was nothing short of inspired.

  Twelve minutes into the broadcast, Apollo 8 signed off and television screens went dark. Even with the cameras off, the astronauts couldn’t stop describing the Moon.

  “The view at this altitude, Houston, is tremendous,” Lovell told CapCom Jerry Carr. “There is no trouble picking out features that we learned on the map.”

  Moments later, Lovell arrived at a place he’d long been waiting to reach.

  “I can see the old second initial point here very well—Mount Marilyn.”

  “Roger,” Carr confirmed.

  On Earth, Lovell had promised his wife he would name a mountain for her. Now, from the Moon, he’d delivered.

  * * *

  —

  An hour after passing Mount Marilyn, Apollo 8 disappeared again behind the western limb of the Moon to complete its second revolution. The astronauts now had to prepare to fire their SPS engine again, this time for just a few seconds, to circularize their orbit. Until now, they’d been flying an ellipse, one ranging from about 69 miles to about 195 miles above the lunar surface. A successful burn would put them at a constant altitude of 69 miles.