Rocket Men

by Robert Kurson

  As before, a display flashed 99, the crew pushed a button to proceed, and the engine lit. Eleven seconds later, it stopped. By the calculations of the onboard computer, Apollo 8 was now in a circular orbit about 69 miles above the Moon. And it would stay there, long after the astronauts were dead, unless the SPS engine fired again, an event scheduled in sixteen hours, and about which Borman was growing increasingly apprehensive.

  As Apollo 8 orbited the Moon, Borman was in charge of piloting the craft. In an airplane on Earth, that meant steering, turning, changing altitudes, and a host of other operations. At the Moon, where Apollo 8’s path was locked in by orbital mechanics, it meant keeping the spacecraft oriented so that his crewmates could carry out their duties. Until now, the ship had been flying backward, necessary in order for the SPS engine to slow the craft enough to put it into lunar orbit and then to circularize that orbit. But now, following the flight plan, Borman began to pitch the spacecraft downward until Apollo 8 pointed nose down and vertical to the Moon. With the new view, Anders could begin shooting a series of vertical stereo photographs—two photos of the same object from slightly different positions—that would aid NASA in constructing detailed topographic maps of the lunar surface, including the approach path for future landing missions. He continued to concentrate on photography whenever there was light to shoot, as well as on monitoring the spacecraft and its systems.

  Lovell continued to study the lunar terrain and take sightings and photos of lunar landmarks. After centering an important place or feature (many of which NASA had preselected) in the optics of his sextant, he would push a button on a control panel in front of him that recorded the spacecraft’s location and the exact angle to the landmark. Collecting the precise coordinates of these places would help NASA build more detailed maps of the Moon, refine their knowledge of its shape, and chart variations in its gravity field that might draw future missions off course.

  By now, the flight was just over three days old, and none of the crew had found much rest, another problem in Borman’s file cabinet of concerns. Apollo 8 was scheduled for just ten orbits, and the third one had already started. And that was the rub. How could a man come to the Moon for just twenty hours and spend any of it snoring in his hammock? And yet Borman believed that if the crew didn’t rest, mistakes would be made, some of them potentially catastrophic. But when he looked around the cabin, all he could see was Lovell and Anders busily at work.

  Anders was immersed in his cameras when Apollo 8 came around for its third pass across the lunar near side. It was difficult for the astronauts to estimate the dimensions of the craters and mountains they were seeing, or even gauge that the spacecraft was at an altitude of 69 miles. When flying in an airplane, an observer sees familiar reference points—a city block, a river, an automobile—that help determine altitude, distance, even speed. Flying over the Moon, the astronauts saw only craters and more craters, and mountains in between. Without their knowing the size of those craters and mountains, any sense of distance or altitude was short-circuited. By reasoning, the men knew they weren’t, say, one mile above the Moon, because the surface wasn’t whizzing by beneath them. But much beyond that, it was hard for them to be certain of anything by means of the naked eye.

  Two hours, and a full revolution, later, Borman still had the spacecraft pointed nose down. The position gave the astronauts their clearest view yet of the lunar surface. To each of them, the Moon appeared a place of sameness and loneliness, an expanse of blacks and whites and grays.

  With four minutes remaining until Apollo 8 emerged from the eastern limb and reestablished contact with Earth, Borman fired his thrusters and put the ship into a 180-degree roll to the right, just as the flight plan dictated, so that Lovell could take sightings of lunar landmarks. The spacecraft was still pointed nose down, but for the first time since arriving at the Moon, the windows faced forward, in the direction of travel.

  In the distance, the astronauts could see the arc of the lunar horizon, and beyond it, the pitch-black infinity of space. As Apollo 8 continued to roll, Anders saw something appear in his window, just over the Moon’s western horizon.

  “Oh, my God!” he called out. “Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!”

  A shining sphere of royal blues, swirling whites, and dabs of sunbaked browns rose over the rough, all-gray Moon. And now Borman and Lovell saw it, too.

  Anders reached for his camera.

  “Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled,” Borman joked.

  But no one could take his eyes off the scene.

  “Hand me that roll of color, quick, will you?” Anders said.

  “Oh, man, that’s great!” Lovell said.

  “Hurry, quick!” Anders said, as Earth continued to rise above the horizon. In a few moments, he knew, it would be gone.

  And then Earth disappeared.

  “Well, I think we missed it,” Anders said, his voice soft, his disappointment palpable.

  “Hey!” Lovell cried several seconds later, looking through the hatch window. “I got it right here!”

  The spacecraft was still rolling. The scene had shifted windows. Earth was still rising, and it looked brighter than ever.

  “Let me get it out this window,” Anders said, looking through his rendezvous window. “It’s a lot clearer.”

  By now, Anders had swapped out his black-and-white film for color. Armed with his Hasselblad 500 EL still camera and Zeiss Sonnar 250 mm telephoto lens, he fired off the first color shot of Earth, now clearly above the lunar horizon.

  “You got it?” Lovell asked.

  Anders confirmed it.

  “Well, take several of them,” Borman said.

  Lovell could hardly contain himself—Earth was retreating from him as the spacecraft continued to move.

  “Take several of them! Here, give it to me.”

  “Wait a minute,” Anders said. “Let’s get the right setting here now. Calm down, Lovell.”

  “Well, I got it right…Aw, that’s a beautiful shot,” Lovell sighed.

  Anders adjusted the exposure on his camera, then took another color picture.

  “You sure we got it now?” Lovell asked. He still could not quite process what he’d seen.

  “Yes,” Anders replied, smiling. “We’ll…it’ll come up again, I think.”

  A moment later, the spacecraft rolled so far that Earth finally vanished from its windows.

  The men were due to reestablish contact with Houston in just one minute. For now, no one said a word.

  Earthrise was the most beautiful sight Borman had ever seen, the only color visible in all the cosmos. The planet just hung there, a jewel on black velvet, and it struck him that everything he loved—Susan, the boys, his parents, his friends, his country—was on that tiny sphere, a brilliant blue and white interruption in a never-ending darkness, the only place he or anyone else had to call home.

  Lovell was overwhelmed by the smallness of Earth, home to three and a half billion people who, from this vantage point, all wanted the same things—a family to love, food to eat, a roof over their heads, children to kiss. From this distance, he could scarcely comprehend the fragility of Earth’s atmosphere, a layer no thicker than the skin on an apple, the only thing that protected those lives, and life itself.

  To Anders, Earth appeared as a Christmas tree ornament, hung radiant blue and swirling white in an endless black night. From here, it was no longer possible to pick out countries or even continents; all a person could see was Earth, and it occurred to Anders, in this last week of 1968, this terrible year for America and the world, that once you couldn’t see boundaries, you started to see something different. You saw how small the planet is, how close all of us are to one another, how the only thing any of us really has, in an otherwise empty universe, is each other. As Apollo 8 came around the limb of the Moon a
nd readied to reconnect with home, it seemed to Anders so strange—the astronauts had come all this way to discover the Moon, and yet here they had discovered the Earth.

  AS APOLLO 8 MOVED THROUGH ITS fourth pass over the near side, NASA’s public affairs officer provided sundry statistics for the media, as he did periodically. The spacecraft was traveling at 3,560 miles per hour; Anders’s recent average heart rate had been 68 beats per minute, with a high of 69 and a low of 67; cabin temperature was 79 degrees Fahrenheit, two degrees warmer than an hour ago; cabin pressure was 4.9 psi. All of this looked normal to Mission Control.

  One statistic that did concern Houston was sleep. When CapCom Mike Collins radioed for a status report, Borman acknowledged that the crew had managed only a couple of hours’ rest over the last sixteen hours or so.

  In fact, no one had gotten much sleep during the entire flight, which had now lasted three days, four hours, and change. As long as no one was resting, Collins radioed the latest news from Earth:

  “We got the Interstellar Times here, the December twenty-fourth edition. Your TV program was a big success. It was viewed this morning by most of the nations of your neighboring planet, the Earth. It was carried live all over Europe, including even Moscow and East Berlin. Also in Japan and all of North and Central America, and parts of South America. We don’t know yet how extensive the coverage was in Africa. Are you copying me all right? Over.”

  “You are loud and clear,” Borman answered.

  “Good,” Collins continued. “San Diego welcomed home today the Pueblo crew in a big ceremony. They had a pretty rough time of it in the Korean prison. Christmas cease-fire is in effect in Vietnam, with only sporadic outbreaks of fighting. And if you haven’t done your Christmas shopping by now, you better forget it.”

  As Apollo 8 streaked over the lunar surface, newspaper reporters on Earth moved just as fast to feed the public’s insatiable appetite for astronaut stories. One article in The New York Times focused solely on the fact that each crewman was an only child. Another noted that Pan American World Airways had been inundated with requests from customers who wanted to reserve a seat on the first commercial flight to the Moon. (So far, the airline had about a hundred names on the waiting list.)

  Apollo 8 passed behind the Moon in total darkness, just as it had when it arrived. When it came back around to the near side for its fifth revolution, Lovell suggested that Borman get some sleep. The commander was due for three hours of rest, and he tried to take it (though he wouldn’t risk another sleeping pill). Lovell and Anders continued their work but grew frustrated with the limited visibility on account of hazing caused by the Sun. It didn’t stop them, however, from continuing to watch the Moon.

  “It doesn’t seem like we’ve hardly been here that long, does it?” Anders said.

  Lovell recalled his childhood, when he’d dreamed of an opportunity like this.

  “It seems like I’ve been here forever,” he said.

  “You know,” Anders remarked, “it really isn’t all that…anywhere near as interesting as I thought it was going to be. It’s all beat up.”

  “The things that I saw that were interesting were the new craters,” Lovell said. He liked the idea that the Moon remained alive in the heavens, that it was still changing, still becoming.

  A few minutes later, the spacecraft slid again behind the lunar far side. Apollo 8 had now been at the Moon for about ten hours and was halfway through its ten orbits. Just ten more hours remained until Trans Earth Injection, or TEI, the maneuver designed to get Apollo 8 out of lunar orbit and on its way back home. Nothing worried Kraft, and many others at NASA, more than TEI. So much could go wrong, and with such dire consequences. The men back in Houston tried to remain optimistic. Around the time Apollo 8 disappeared behind the Moon (about three o’clock in Houston), a message lit up on one of Mission Control’s large data panels. In red, white, and blue letters, it read MERRY CHRISTMAS APOLLO 8.

  * * *

  —

  By the time Apollo 8 launched, NASA was considering just two possible sites for a future landing mission. Both were located in the Sea of Tranquillity, to the right side of the full Moon as seen from America and other places in Earth’s northern hemisphere. NASA wanted to land during the lunar morning, when temperatures were moderate and low Sun angle would create long shadows that would help a commander discern a smooth spot on which to set down. But those conditions shifted every day on the Moon. By choosing two sites, twelve degrees apart, NASA ensured that if it had to delay launch by a day, the lunar module would still have an optimal landing site when it arrived.

  Both sites also satisfied other important NASA criteria for the first lunar landing. They were accessible to a spacecraft flying a free-return trajectory—a NASA safety requirement—and they existed in areas with ample level terrain, which meant a lunar module wouldn’t have to expend an undue amount of propellant hovering and maneuvering to avoid boulders and slopes before setting down.

  Among Apollo 8’s tasks were to confirm that its own trajectory could be used by future spacecraft to reach these landing sites, and to get a close-up view of the areas under the same lighting conditions as the future landing mission would encounter. As Apollo 8 coasted over the first of these sites during its sixth pass over the near side, Lovell described it for Houston. Even the shadows, a critical element to judging shape, depth, and distances, looked excellent to him.

  “I have a beautiful view of it. The first [landing site] is just barely beneath the vertical now, and the second one is coming up—it’s just a grand view.”

  As the spacecraft moved over the second landing site, Lovell yearned to set down there; it seemed as close as the aircraft carriers he’d landed on so many times. He told himself he would come back here, not just to observe the Moon, but to walk on it.

  * * *

  —

  Just before Apollo 8 slipped behind the Moon for its seventh pass over the far side, Lovell began singing to himself, as was his habit, then turned to his crewmates.

  “Did you guys ever think that one Christmas you’d be orbiting the Moon?”

  “Just hope we are not doing it on New Year’s,” Anders replied, his wit growing drier with each orbit. There was a dark truth behind Anders’s humor. If Apollo 8 was still here in a week, it meant the crew was never coming home.

  Susan Borman knew it, too. She cleared her kitchen table, sat, and started to compose Frank’s eulogy. She needed to be ready—not like her friend Pat White, who’d been taken by surprise by the death of her husband in the Apollo 1 fire, and by the swiftness with which government officials moved in to orchestrate funeral arrangements. This time, Susan would be in charge. She would do it the way she and Frank wanted it, and the way that was right for their sons. It seemed to her a better fate for a man like Frank to die in space than to burn up on the launchpad while training, and a better fate for her, knowing Frank was in a place he’d be forever, a beautiful Moon she could see in the night, a place where she could always find him.

  * * *

  —

  Just eight and a half hours remained before Trans Earth Injection. On board Apollo 8, Anders secretly hoped something would go wrong—nothing catastrophic, of course, just enough that he could show Houston, and his crewmates, how beautifully he’d mastered the spacecraft and its systems. But the ship was proving to be a jewel.

  As the spacecraft readied to reconnect with Houston and begin its seventh pass across the lunar near side, Borman called out to his crewmates.

  “Oh, brother! Look at that!”

  “What was it?” Lovell asked.

  “Guess,” Borman said.

  Lovell did some quick computations. The ship was above the far side, at around 120ºE longitude, and at the most southerly part of its orbit. For Borman to react like that, he must have seen Tsiolkovsky, one of the far side’s most impressive craters, 115 miles wid
e, with a peak rising 2 miles out of its sunken center, and 80-foot boulders strewn about. So that’s what Lovell guessed.

  “No,” Borman said. “It’s the Earth coming up.”

  Through his window, Borman had caught another Earthrise, this one as stunning as the first, not just for its beauty, but for how it came to him—unexpected, ascendant, a call from home.

  * * *

  —

  In Houston, Marilyn Lovell felt the need to go to church. Late night Christmas Eve services weren’t scheduled to start for several hours, but Father Raish told her to drop by anyway. When she arrived late that afternoon, the church was decorated with flowers and Christmas trimmings and burning candles. Marilyn was the only parishioner there. While the church organist played, Marilyn took a private communion, then joined Father Raish in prayer—for Jim, for his crewmates, for the mission. In just a few hours, they knew, Apollo 8 would face perhaps its most dangerous and critical test. And it would all happen just a few minutes after midnight on Christmas morning.

  * * *

  —

  Only seven hours remained until Trans Earth Injection. But before the crew could get ready for that, they had to prepare for their second television broadcast from the Moon. It would occur in less than four hours, at around 8:30 P.M. Houston time, on Christmas Eve, before children’s bedtimes in America. By NASA’s estimates, more people around the world would be watching and listening than had ever tuned in to a human voice at once.

  These last few hours demanded the best of the crew. The Apollo spacecraft was incredibly complex to operate, and the SPS engine was no exception. For Trans Earth Injection, there were five pages of switch settings, equipment checks, and adjustments, each of which had to be verified by a second crewman in the knowledge that one mistake could prove fatal.