Fifteen minutes before the planned reentry, Borman engaged a pyrotechnic sequence that severed cables and connections between the command and service modules, then blew apart the tendons that kept the two modules connected, a violent jolt that shook the astronauts. The service module had been Apollo 8’s lifeline, housed its SPS engine, made every mile of this historic journey. Its built-in jets fired to thrust it away from the command module, lighting the sky in a final goodbye.
Only six minutes remained until reentry. Even now, the astronauts didn’t wear their space suits or helmets, and wouldn’t the rest of the way, a decision NASA had allowed so that the crew could equalize their eardrums manually as the pressure in the spacecraft rose during its descent through the atmosphere.
Inside the cabin, the crew was pointed backward and upside down, the windowed nose of the module facing back out toward space as they hurtled, still weightless and strapped in, at more than 20,000 miles per hour toward Earth’s atmosphere. At launch, six days and two hours earlier, Apollo 8 weighed 6.2 million pounds. Now just 12,000 of those pounds remained. Looking out his window, Borman got a send-off from an old familiar face.
“Look who’s coming there, would you?” he said.
“What?” Lovell asked.
“The Moon.”
A minute later, Borman checked his indicators.
“Well, men, we’re getting close.”
“There’s no turning back now,” Anders said.
“Old Mother Earth has us,” Lovell said.
Two minutes later, Anders noticed a change in the view outside his window.
“What is that?” he asked.
Borman and Lovell, the old spaceflight pros, decided to have a little fun with the rookie.
“That’s right, you’ve never seen the airglow. Take a look at it,” Lovell said.
“You can’t get your [astronaut] pin without seeing the airglow,” Borman said.
Apollo 8 plunged, blunt end first, toward Earth at more than 24,750 miles per hour, breaking below one hundred miles altitude and pushing its crew faster than any humans ever had traveled. On board, the astronauts, seated with their backs to the direction of travel, began to feel the first drag from the atmosphere and could see the dark sky begin to ionize and glow around them. Borman and Lovell might have experienced reentry before, but never at these speeds. They weren’t kidding with Anders anymore.
“That’s the airglow we are starting to get, that’s what it is, gentlemen,” Lovell said.
The three men braced themselves.
“Goddamn,” Borman said. “This is going to be a real ride. Hang on!”
THE WORLD OUTSIDE THE SPACECRAFT LIT up even before the astronauts expected it.
“I’ve never seen it this bright before!” Borman told his crewmates. “You got zero point oh-five g yet?”
“Zero point oh-five g!” Lovell answered, checking a readout on the console.
“Okay, we got it!” Anders called.
The spacecraft neared 25,000 miles per hour.
“Hang on!” Borman yelled.
Out his window, Lovell could see a pink glow turning brighter by the second, and he felt the g-forces building. Temperatures rose fast around the command module as it collided with the atmosphere. The crew could only hope the heat shield would do its job; no manned ship had ever endured the heat loads Apollo 8 was about to experience.
A second later, Houston lost contact with the spacecraft as Apollo 8 became enveloped in ionized gas. On CBS, Walter Cronkite narrated over an animated rendering of the command module entering a fiery atmosphere. At their homes, the astronauts’ wives watched the broadcasts, willing their husbands home in these hand-drawn capsules.
Inside the spacecraft, the g-forces increased fast.
“They’re building up!” Lovell called.
“Call out the g’s,” Borman told him.
“We’re one g,” Lovell answered.
The men’s labored breathing could be heard on their intercom system as the forces multiplied.
“Ohhh!” Lovell groaned. “Five!” he called, straining to speak. “Six!”
Cronkite explained to the nation what the astronauts were enduring.
“Seven g’s is seven times their weight on Earth, so these one-hundred-fifty-pound astronauts weigh something like one thousand fifty pounds, would be the effect as they are pressed against their couches.”
Apollo 8 crashed even harder into the atmosphere. Despite the g-forces making it difficult to move, or even breathe, the ride was smoother than on lift-off, and the astronauts could still look out their windows and see the pink gases of the ionizing atmosphere turn a deeper reddish-blue; to Anders, he and his crewmates looked like flies caught in the middle of a blowtorch flame. In the distance, a Pan Am pilot flying in the darkness from Hawaii to Fiji watched the fireball created by Apollo 8 and estimated its cometlike tail to be more than one hundred miles long. Moments later, at maximum g-force load, the inferno surrounding the astronauts turned pure white as the temperature at the surface of the spacecraft rose to half that of the surface of the Sun. Out his window, Anders saw a terrifying sight—baseball-sized chunks of the heat shield flying off, many times larger than the grain-sized pieces NASA expected—and he waited for the heat to sear through the spacecraft and melt the crew.
But Apollo 8 did not melt. Instead, after about a minute of this peak intensity, the onboard computer automatically began to roll the spacecraft. Though the ship had no wings, its designed shape and offset center of mass made it capable of lift if positioned correctly, and now it began to climb a bit back out of the atmosphere, lowering the g-forces and cooling down in the process.
“Cabin temperature is still holding real good,” Anders called to his crewmates, sounding a bit astonished and relieved. “Quite a ride, huh?”
“Damnedest thing I ever saw,” Borman said.
Three minutes after losing contact with the spacecraft, Houston began calling to the ship, but CapCom Ken Mattingly couldn’t get through. Apollo 8 had swooped back down for its second grind into the atmosphere. The crew held on.
“How much will this one go up, do you think?” Anders asked of the building g-forces.
“Three!” Lovell called.
Twenty seconds or so later, the spacecraft had been slowed by the atmosphere to suborbital speeds and began rolling one way, then the other, as the computer steered them toward the recovery ships. It had been nearly five minutes since the crew lost contact with Houston, but now Lovell began calling home.
“Houston, Apollo 8. Over.”
Mattingly made out the voice through the static.
“Go ahead, Apollo 8. Read you broken and loud.”
Borman jumped in.
“Roger. This is a real fireball.”
One hundred thousand feet below, the USS Yorktown found Apollo 8 on its radar. A minute later, the spacecraft was at an altitude of just 40,000 feet and plummeting at a speed of about 680 miles per hour.
At around 30,000 feet, an altitude sensor fired explosives to jettison the top of the heat shield at the pointy end of the spacecraft. A moment later, two drogue parachutes shot out of the ship, making a giant thwack that Borman heard as they streaked up into the sky. The ship jolted when their lines went taut. These were not the chutes that would lower the craft to the water, but rather the smaller ones designed to stabilize Apollo 8, to keep it from wobbling and make it ready for the primary chutes. By the time they were out, the spacecraft was just 20,000 feet above the Pacific, but now its descent rate had slowed. Inside the cabin, an air vent opened to equalize inside and outside pressures.
Falling at a speed of 300 miles per hour, Apollo 8 rode gravity until an altitude of 10,000 feet, when the three main 80-foot parachutes were deployed. When their lines pulled tight, the spacecraft jerked hard. Anders worried that he’
d felt only one jerk, not three. He knew that the Soviets had experienced trouble with their parachutes and that the technology, in general, was unreliable. Neither he nor the others could see the parachutes in the dark, but when Borman and Lovell checked their instruments, they could tell that the craft’s sink rate had declined significantly, indicating proper functioning of all three chutes.
With the red-and-white parachutes fully blossomed, Apollo 8’s descent rate fell to just 19 miles per hour. On board, thrusters were ignited and their tanks purged of propellant to prevent harmful substances from polluting the splashdown and recovery area. The fire spitting from the burning thrusters lit the still-dark sky, giving the astronauts their first view of their parachutes, and good reason to believe they were floating down as planned. Under the chutes’ risers, the capsule was tipped on an angle to allow it to knife into the water rather than belly-flop onto its blunt base. At an altitude of just 8,000 feet, Apollo 8 was less than five minutes from scheduled impact with the water.
Moments later, one of the recovery aircraft made radio contact with the spacecraft.
“Welcome home, gentlemen,” a crewman called to the astronauts, “and we’ll have you aboard in no time.”
At three minutes to splashdown, recovery helicopters spotted flashing beacons from the falling spacecraft. Apollo 8 was almost directly over the Yorktown, a bull’s-eye of almost unimaginable accuracy.
“Stand by for Earth landing!” Borman called from his commander’s seat.
At their homes in Houston, the astronauts’ wives stared at their televisions. For Valerie, it was thrilling to hear that the parachutes had opened—that meant Apollo 8 was somehow reconnected to Earth. But she thought, “They’re heading for a big, dark, rough ocean, and the ships still don’t know where they are.”
At one thousand feet altitude, radio traffic from the recovery forces grew so voluminous that the astronauts couldn’t communicate with one another.
“Turn him down!” Anders told his partners. “Christ, we can’t get anything done.”
Just a hundred or so feet remained. The crew braced themselves, not knowing exactly when impact might come.
Borman called to Lovell and Anders.
“Maybe we better get these—”
At that moment, Apollo 8 came in flat, not on its intended angled knife-edge, and bashed into the Pacific Ocean, its blunt end colliding against the upswell of a wave, just about the most violent impact possible. Inundated by water (and perhaps stunned by the crash), Borman could not flip the switch to cut the parachutes from the capsule, and Apollo 8 was dragged over by its chutes and turned upside down in the ocean. None of the men was ready for an impact that jarring; nothing in simulation had come close. By the time Borman came around a few seconds later and cut the lines, all three men were hanging upside-down in their straps. Garbage that had collected in the cabin streamed down on them, and water poured over their bodies and faces.
Right away, the crew believed the spacecraft had split open from the impact and was flooding with seawater. Anders got ready to pounce on the hatch and open it, then get his crewmates and himself out before the ship sank—they’d trained for that kind of emergency—but a moment later he could see that no more water was running in, and he realized that the crew had been doused not by seawater but by condensation around the various cold parts of the spacecraft’s interior. Anders could only smile at the picture: three conquering heroes returned from the Moon, hanging upside down and dripping in garbage.
Borman reached for a button and inflated three large balloons, which flipped the spacecraft back over, blunt side down. The men were now right side up in their seats, but it was too late. Sickened by the impact, the high seas, and the sudden inversion, Borman vomited all over his crewmates. It had been bad enough on the outbound journey when Borman threw up, but now his crewmates let him have it.
“Typical Army guy!” the two Navy men yelled at their commander. “Can’t handle the water!”
Television cameras showed live images from the recovery ship and one of the rescue helicopters. Cronkite removed his glasses, as if he couldn’t quite believe the journey had ended.
“The spacecraft, Apollo 8, is back, and what a remarkable trip and remarkable conclusion,” he told the nation. “The spacecraft has landed within two and three quarters miles of the carrier…Apollo 8 has ended up to this point as perfectly as it began.”
At home, the astronauts’ wives were overcome by joy, relief, and wonder. Their children hugged their crying mothers. At Mission Control, applause broke out, and a fifteen-foot-long American flag was unfurled, one that eclipsed the giant wall map that had been used for the mission. All three flight shifts were present to experience the moment. “The Star-Spangled Banner” played in everyone’s headsets.
“It is a veritable roar in here,” the public affairs officer announced. “The room is awash with cigar smoke. A number of congratulatory messages are coming across this console…I’ve never seen a degree of this emotional outpouring in any previous mission, including Alan Shepard’s…I’ve seen rallies in locker rooms after championship games, happy politicians after elections, but never, none of them do justice to the spirit pervading this room.”
Some of the controllers and personnel had also brought along triangular flags with a white numeral 1 sewn in, to indicate victory over the Soviets. Someone at NASA, however, suggested that that might not be the most magnanimous of displays, and the men agreed. Instead, they waved American flags, which to many of them said it all.
In Rome, Pope Paul VI, who’d watched the splashdown on television, knelt in a prayer of gratitude. In Communist Cuba, state news covered the return of the spacecraft. World leaders began writing notes of congratulations to America.
In the capsule, Borman, Lovell, and Anders were still covered in vomit and garbage. The spacecraft had come through unimaginable heat with almost no effect on cabin temperatures, but now, bobbing on the waves, it began to grow hot inside, likely from retained heat sizzling upon impact with the water. Temperatures soon subsided, however, and Anders began to appreciate how beautifully the heat shield had worked. The huge chunks he’d seen flying off during reentry had really been just granular in size; surrounded by an ionized haze, and streaking by at thousands of miles per hour, they had appeared through his window like fiery baseballs.
The crew worked to remove their straps while helicopters circled above. Recovery forces itched to get to work, but NASA protocol required them to wait for the break of dawn and the onset of natural light, in about forty-five minutes, so all they could do was hover, close in, and shine lights around the bobbing capsule. Men armed with rifles scanned the waters to make sure no sharks were in the area during recovery time.
Just before first light, several swimmers dropped from their chopper into the water. When they reached Apollo 8, they affixed an inflatable collar to the spacecraft, stabilizing it and providing a platform on which to step and work. Through a window, one of the swimmers flashed a thumbs-up to Anders, who returned the gesture. While the Yorktown moved toward the recovery scene, one of the helicopter pilots radioed the astronauts with a question.
“Is the Moon really made of green cheese?”
“No,” Anders replied. “It’s made of American cheese.”
Soon after, the Yorktown called to the capsule asking what the astronauts might like for breakfast. The answer was unanimous: biscuits, steak, and eggs.
As daylight broke, three swimmers worked to open the spacecraft’s hatch. When it lifted, one of the swimmers stuck his head inside, only to recoil as if repelled by a force field. He soon found his feet and, along with the others, helped the crew of Apollo 8 out of the capsule. As they stepped onto the inflatable platform around the spacecraft, none of the three astronauts could imagine a smell sweeter than the fresh sea air—a smell they’d known forever and yet was new to them today.
A helicopter dropped a life raft into the water, and one by one, the astronauts climbed inside. The helicopter then lowered a basket-shaped net for the crew; one at a time, they were hoisted into the chopper. Anders was the last to go. Looking up at the helicopter, it struck him that almost everything on Apollo 8 had been designed with great redundancy, yet here he was, at the very end of his journey, hanging over the ocean by a single wire.
It was 11:14 A.M. Houston time when the helicopter closed its door. Looking back down toward his spacecraft, Borman gave thanks to the scalded machine, an exquisite piece of design and daring. A moment later, the chopper dipped its shoulder into the yellow-pink new sky and headed for the Yorktown. On the carrier, hundreds of crew dressed in Navy whites jammed the decks, eager for a glimpse of the returning pioneers.
On board the helicopter, a crewman handed Borman an electric razor. NASA had figured out how to get three men to the Moon and back again but still hadn’t perfected technology that would allow men to shave without polluting the command module with stubble. When Borman had asked to arrive at the aircraft carrier clean-shaven, a portable electric razor on board the chopper was the best NASA could offer. Soon, Borman was whisker free.
On television sets at their homes, Susan, Marilyn, and Valerie watched as the helicopter slowed to a hover over the deck of the Yorktown and then set down. Ship’s crew ran out, ducking their heads, to secure the chopper to the deck. After the rotors stopped, a short stair platform was brought to the aircraft door, and a red carpet was unrolled at the foot of the stairs.
The door opened and the three astronauts stepped forward, first Borman, then Lovell, then Anders. They smiled and waved, overwhelmed by the roar of the hundreds of sailors on board the ship, each of whom was away from home for Christmas, just as they were. A giant American flag held by the Navy color guard danced in the ocean breeze. In the sound and the moment, Borman’s mind traveled back in time, over all the training and planning that had been done for Apollo 8, over the thousands of people who had worked so hard for this audacious mission, and he thought about how so few of them would ever be recognized like this, and how so many of them deserved to be.
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