BORMAN CLIMBED INTO HIS HAMMOCK FOR much-needed sleep, and Anders took control of the spacecraft. He found himself a bit bored; after discovering the Moon, even a swan dive to Earth could pale in comparison. Thousand-mile intervals ticked by as if counted off by metronome. All was steady.
While Anders controlled the spacecraft, Lovell took sextant sightings. Part of how Apollo 8 kept its attitude—the way it was oriented in space—was by aligning itself with the stars. To do that, Lovell would pick out known stars, then mark their positions through the onboard sextant. The computer would calculate the ship’s attitude based on its relative position to those stars and automatically fire the ship’s thrusters in order to keep its position in the desired orientation. It wasn’t just important to be pointed toward Earth; it was important for Apollo 8 to be positioned the right way while it followed that path, especially upon reentry into the atmosphere, when its orientation had to be perfect.
Lovell had become a maestro at this job, “shooting” stars, entering data, and aiming the sextant like a concert pianist playing a Steinway. In fact, Lovell had earned the nickname Golden Fingers for his proficiency at punching these keys. But he was human, and not immune to a bad note. Early on December 25, Houston time, Lovell missed a step. He meant to enter Program 23 and then select Star 01. Instead, he entered Program 01 into his computer.
An alarm rang out. Suddenly, Apollo 8’s guidance system reset itself, losing all memory of how the ship was oriented in space. As a result of Lovell’s mistake, the guidance system now believed Apollo 8 to be back on the launchpad at Cape Kennedy. No one—not the crew, not the computer, not Houston—knew which way was up anymore.
Anders checked the eight ball—the attitude indicator that showed the spacecraft’s orientation relative to the celestial sphere—and saw it moving and thumping in ways it shouldn’t. At the same time, he heard one of the spacecraft’s thrusters fire. Instantly, he was transported back to 1966, when he’d been on duty as CapCom for Gemini 8, the mission that had gone terribly wrong when a thruster could not be shut down, causing the ship to go into a violent and ever-accelerating tumble. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott had fought to stay conscious and regain control, which they finally managed by disabling the primary system and firing a set of reserve thrusters. As Anders saw the eight ball on his own spacecraft spin, he believed the same to be happening to Apollo 8.
To counteract the rotation, Anders used his hand-controlled thruster, but the ball just kept moving, so Anders added more thrust. Soon the spacecraft was in full rotation, and it was anyone’s guess which way the nose was pointing in the cosmos.
By now, Borman had awoken from the commotion.
“What the hell’s going on?” he called out.
“Stuck thruster!” Anders answered. But what to do? Armstrong and Scott had been in Earth orbit when it happened to them, and they barely made it out alive. Here, 185,000 miles farther away, it might be impossible to pull Apollo 8 out of its tumble and get it pointed back toward home.
Anders had stared down Soviet bombers, had landed on sheets of ice in his fighter planes, and always he’d run cool. This scared the hell out of him.
He looked back at the eight ball to assess the spin. Now it had frozen and was therefore useless. Yet the spacecraft was still turning—Anders knew it because he could see the cabin rotating against the pattern of sunlit dust motes floating freely inside it.
By now, Lovell had called to Anders and Borman that he’d made a mistake by resetting the guidance system. That explained why the eight ball had rotated to its launch orientation. And that explained why a thruster was not the problem. The thruster Anders had heard had fired automatically by program, a coincidence.
Furious at Lovell’s mistake, Borman made his way to the control area, but already Anders had begun to fight the spacecraft’s roll. He couldn’t use the seized-up eight ball to judge how to rotate the ship, so he turned to a more ancient instrument the men had on board.
The dust.
Firing his thrusters, Anders turned Apollo 8 just enough to move the cabin back in the direction of the floating dust particles. When the cabin no longer moved in relation to its interior dust, he knew the spacecraft had stopped rotating. Apollo 8 was now in a steady attitude. But no one knew which way it was pointed, and the guidance system still said the ship was on the launchpad.
Borman took the controls. In an airplane, a pilot could eyeball the horizon and his runway and his surroundings if his instruments failed. Astronauts far from Earth couldn’t do that. Borman and Anders now worried deeply about their ability to be sure of the spacecraft’s attitude as they approached reentry; it was crucial that Apollo 8 be properly oriented by the time they hit the atmosphere in order to make a safe entry back into the world.
Everyone was angry: Borman and Anders at Lovell, Lovell at himself. It was a life-or-death situation. If they could not figure out how to reorient the spacecraft, Apollo 8 might not survive. The best idea, they agreed, was to use the stars. If they could pick out just a few they knew, they could begin rebuilding the computer’s idea of their orientation.
Out the windows, the Sun shone against an all-black cosmos. Borman, Lovell, and Anders strained to locate stars, but crystals from the ship’s evaporators, along with crystals from their own urine, followed the spacecraft, all of them masquerading as stars. Even when the astronauts thought they could distinguish between these tagalong crystals and a genuine star, it was impossible for them to identify the star, which was necessary for the computer to do its thinking.
It was then that Lovell found help from an old friend.
Looking through the spacecraft’s optical system, he spotted the Moon. Then, locating Earth, he began to form a rough idea of the spacecraft’s attitude with respect to the thirty-seven stars stored in the computer’s database. Now, when he saw a star out the window, he could make an educated guess about its identity. If the crew still didn’t know exactly how they were positioned in the heavens, at least they knew the neighborhood.
On the ground, Collins began to relay the procedures that would help the crew regain an accurate attitude reference for the ship. Mission Control was given access to a part of the computer’s memory that had been corrupted by Lovell’s mistake—in particular, a set of numbers that defined how the guidance platform ought to be aligned with the stars. Once Houston had uploaded the correct values, Lovell began a process of righting the ship, rotating it and sighting on stars, until, after about half an hour, the men understood again how their spacecraft stood in relation to the universe around them, and to home.
* * *
—
It was just after nine o’clock on Christmas night in Houston when Mission Control offered another gift to the astronauts, one they’d been planning for some time.
In place of the usual beeps and technical talk, NASA beamed up a recording of “Joy to the World” by Percy Faith and his Orchestra. Anders got a chill when it played; the music seemed to be coming from every direction, almost divine. Then he heard “O Holy Night,” but as the spacecraft turned in barbecue mode, the sound became warped. Anders had become so entranced by the music he’d forgotten to switch over between Apollo 8’s various antennas. Tuned wrongly in space, even Christmas music could become eerie.
A few hours later, Anders reported that the crew had seen the Moon only once during its journey home. They were now 150,000 miles from Earth and 90,000 miles from the Moon. Five hours after that, they were 20,000 miles closer to home, and traveling about 3,800 miles per hour. By now, Apollo 8 had been in flight for more than five full days. Borman jokingly told Houston that they should “spread out one of those banners” in the Pacific Ocean splashdown area, and that Apollo 8 would try to “coast through it.” Twenty-four hours remained until scheduled splashdown.
* * *
—
Around five o’clock Houston time on the aftern
oon of December 26, after almost a full day of uneventful cruising, Apollo 8 reached the halfway point between the Moon and Earth. It had been thirty-seven hours since they left the Moon, but if all went well, it would take just another twenty hours to reach the Pacific Ocean. The astronauts had one television broadcast left, when they would address a nation growing ever more nervous about their safe reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.
Marilyn Lovell was nervous, too. She grabbed her two eldest children, Barbara and Jay, and whisked them to Mission Control, where they could all watch. As they arrived, they heard Jim poke a little fun at himself.
“I tried to hurry up the voyage home by calling up Program 01 to get us back on the pad, but it didn’t work,” he radioed to Houston.
“Well, that’s the best excuse I’ve heard so far, Jim,” Carr replied.
“The best of many,” Lovell said.
A few minutes later, while millions of Americans watched, the crew of Apollo 8 began its sixth and final scheduled television broadcast. For nearly a minute, almost nothing appeared onscreen as Anders tried to frame the shot. But then a planet emerged, half lit, half in darkness, and there was no mistaking the swirls of clouds, the grooves of continents, the scoops of oceans. This was Earth, from 110,000 miles away. This, every person could see, was where they lived.
Lovell pointed to a storm over South America, the waters around the West Indies, and Florida. Looking through his telescope, he said he could see the central and southern United States. He asked Anders to describe his view.
“As I look down on the Earth here from so far out in space,” Anders said, “I think I must have the feeling that the travelers in the old sailing ships used to have—going on a very long voyage away from home, and now we’re headed back, and I have that feeling of being proud of the trip, but still…still happy to be going back home and back to our home port.”
* * *
—
Nineteen hours remained until Apollo 8’s scheduled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. With no major milestones due between now and then, the media was hungry for stories, and they turned to the astronauts’ families to find them.
Valerie Anders reported that she was locked to her squawk box. Her son, Alan, was playing with his dog, Luna, and cat, Dudley, while the other Anders kids concentrated on their Christmas presents. Valerie also noted that ten-year-old Glen had mowed the lawn that morning, a job Bill had given him before leaving.
Marilyn Lovell reported that she was trying to recover from all the excitement of the past several days. She told how daughter Susan had been jumping on her pogo stick.
Susan Borman said she’d spent much of the morning cleaning the house for friends who would join her for reentry and splashdown, and for Frank’s return home. She noted that her two sons, seventeen-year-old Fred and fifteen-year-old Ed, would be helping her with clean-up duties. There was a reason for that.
Earlier that day, away from home, Fred and Ed had gotten into a fight, and Ed broke his left thumb throwing a punch to Fred’s head. The boys knew this would be a problem and swore each other to secrecy. When they returned home, Ed walked around hiding his hand from Susan, but the pain only grew worse. The boys sneaked out of the house, drove to NASA, and found a doctor, who X-rayed Ed’s hand. A short time later, Ed left wearing a giant white cast that reached halfway up his forearm. There would be no hiding that from their mother. When they returned home, Susan was angry that they could even think of fighting as their father plummeted toward Earth. At the same time, she was proud that they’d figured out how to handle the problem themselves. Helping her clean would be light penance.
About three hours after the television broadcast, Susan, Marilyn, and Valerie found rides to the home of astronaut Fred Haise, one of Apollo 8’s backup crew, where a get-together hosted by his wife, Mary, was under way. These gatherings had become a tradition during space flights, and forty other astronaut wives welcomed the Apollo 8 ladies with ice cream and homemade cookies. Reporters dubbed the event a “hen party.”
Several hours after the wives returned home, Apollo 8 was just 35,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean and had increased its speed to 7,700 miles per hour. By now, it was clear to Mission Control that the fourteen-second midcourse correction burn done a day ago had been so accurate that no further trajectory corrections would be needed. Backup recovery forces in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans were sent home. It would now be the Pacific Ocean or bust.
Four hours remained until scheduled splashdown. NASA’s public affairs officer noted “unusually high” traffic in congratulatory messages flooding into the agency. The New York Times proclaimed, “There was more than narrow religious significance in the emotional high point of their fantastic odyssey, their reading of the biblical story of creation while this world watched live pictures of the Moon televised by the astronauts from within a few dozen miles of the lunar surface.” Even acting NASA chief Thomas Paine couldn’t contain himself. As the spacecraft drew closer to Earth, he wrote to President Johnson, “It is apparent that an unprecedented wave of popular enthusiasm for the Apollo 8 astronauts is building up around the world. Laudatory editorials are in every paper.” Many were already calling the mission the greatest adventure in mankind’s history.
But the ship wasn’t home yet. Apollo 8 still had to hit the narrowest of entry corridors, at just the right attitude, moving at speeds faster than humans had ever traveled. To Borman and his crewmates, reentry was one of the three maneuvers on the mission—along with launch and Trans Earth Injection—during which they were most likely to die.
* * *
—
Reentry into Earth’s atmosphere would officially start at an altitude of 400,000 feet, or 75.75 miles. Nothing magical happened at that point, but it’s where things would start to change in a hurry. By that time, the command module would have shed the service module, leaving Apollo 8 just a cone-shaped wedge about eleven feet tall and thirteen feet wide speeding through space.
Several seconds later, Apollo 8 would have plunged 100,000 more feet, and Earth’s atmosphere would begin acting on the ship and on the crew, exerting just a tiny fraction of a single g-force. The spacecraft would be traveling in excess of 24,500 miles per hour, and the computer would take over flying duties from Borman. At that point, the astronauts could only trust that Apollo 8 was aimed and positioned right. Some had compared NASA’s challenge in finding the entry corridor to throwing a paper airplane into a public mailbox slot—from a distance of four miles. There was almost no margin for error.
If the spacecraft came in too steep, it would grind too hard into the atmosphere, causing massive g-forces that would crush the ship and crew, and generating heat so intense it would incinerate the men and turn Apollo 8 into a burning meteor.
If it came in too shallow, it would bounce off the atmosphere like a stone skipped on water and coast back out into space. Without the service module, Apollo 8 lacked any means of propulsion and could not apply the brakes sufficiently to reenter Earth’s atmosphere. At that point, each astronaut would have a chat with his wife and children before drifting away from Earth in a ship with only a few hours’ life support, to embark on a long elliptical orbit, one that would be fatal.
But even if the spacecraft hit the entry corridor perfectly, the friction created by the drag of the atmosphere on an object moving at almost 25,000 miles per hour would generate temperatures of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. To enable the astronauts to survive it, the command module had been covered by a heat shield made of a reinforced phenolic resin injected into a fiberglass honeycomb. Rather than defeat the heat in combat, the shield was designed to succumb to it and then vaporize away, leaving a new layer of shield beneath to continue the fight, all while keeping the command module cool. Even if it worked and the astronauts weren’t fried to a crisp, they would be undergoing tremendous g-forces as the atmosphere slowed the ship. They would also lose all communications with
Earth as gases around the spacecraft ionized from the shock wave, creating a kind of wall through which radio signals could not pass.
To mitigate the fantastic amount of heat and g-forces caused by reentry, Apollo 8 wouldn’t simply plunge through the atmosphere; rather, it would use its aerodynamic design (its slightly off-center weight distribution turned the spacecraft into a kind of wing), allowing it to achieve lift and dip up and down, extend its path, shed velocity, and diffuse the heat that it had to endure as it aimed for the designated landing site.
The whole process would take about five minutes. If all went well, the spacecraft would have slowed enough to make its final drop to Earth. The astronauts’ lives would then depend on the command module’s parachute system, and the recovery forces that even now moved back and forth in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii like predatory big cats on the hunt.
* * *
—
One hour remained until reentry. It was before dawn at the splashdown site, about a thousand miles southwest of Hawaii. It would still be dark when Apollo 8 arrived.
Traveling at 12,500 miles per hour about 11,000 miles above Earth, the astronauts stowed the last items still loose aboard the spacecraft. Given the huge g-forces of reentry and the jarring of the impact with the water, it was critical for the crew not to allow anything loose that could damage the cabin, or themselves.
Thirty minutes later, network television interrupted regular programming to cover reentry and splashdown. In Houston, it was just past 9:00 A.M. on December 27. All three astronauts’ wives were watching their televisions at home, listening with one ear to the network anchor, the other to a squawk box. Inside the spacecraft, the crew cut off the oxygen flow from the service module, which they would soon leave behind. Their capsule now depended on its own small tanks for oxygen, a supply that wouldn’t last much longer than the time required for a successful reentry and splashdown. Borman checked to confirm that the spacecraft was in its proper attitude.
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