Rocket Men

by Robert Kurson

  Anders lost his balance for a moment when the astronauts finally made their way down the stairs, not an unexpected result after more than six days of weightlessness. Watching at home, Valerie thought that her husband looked skinny. It was the smiles that convinced the women that their husbands really were home safe. By now, Marilyn was so spent from the stress of the past week that she had little voice left and even less energy, but she couldn’t remember ever feeling so happy. “He’s beautiful,” she did manage to tell reporters. “I know that’s no way to describe a man, but he looks just beautiful.”

  At a nearby microphone, the Yorktown’s commander, Captain John Fifield, welcomed and congratulated the men. Taking the microphone, Borman addressed the ship. Millions of people watched around the world.

  “We’re just very happy to be here and appreciate all your efforts, and I know you had to stay out here over Christmas and that made it tough…We can’t tell you how much we really appreciate you being here, and how proud it is for us to participate in this event, because thousands of people made this possible, and I guess we’re all just part of the group. Thank you very much.”

  Surrounded by sailors, the astronauts made their way across the flight deck, then down an elevator to the hangar deck and into the ship’s sick bay for a medical evaluation. For his part, Anders was in no shape for an inspection. As part of his plan to avoid defecating in space, he’d asked NASA doctors to prescribe a low-residue diet before and during the flight, and his plan had worked so well that he hadn’t had a bowel movement during the entire mission. Now he needed to find a toilet.

  He located a cabin just in time. As nature began to have its say, there was a pounding on the bathroom door.

  “Major Anders! Quick! You’ve got to come to flag bridge. The president is going to call in five minutes. Move it!”

  Anders was torn between his duties. He could only answer to the higher power.

  “I’m not going!” Anders yelled to the man. “Tell him I’m on the toilet and I’m not going.”

  There was no way Anders could risk losing control of himself while talking to the president of the United States. A minute later, one of the ship’s doctors ran in with a portable telephone and passed it through the bathroom door to Anders. Borman and Lovell picked up their own extensions, likely in sick bay, surrounded by physicians, stethoscopes, and syringes.

  Less than a month remained in Johnson’s presidency. Five years earlier, he’d taken over from his slain predecessor, a president who’d made an impossible promise: to land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. Johnson might have been forgiven for backing off Kennedy’s commitment. Instead, he’d charged forward.

  “You’ve seen what man has really never seen before,” Johnson said to the astronauts. “You’ve taken all of us all over the world and into a new era. And my thoughts this morning went back to more than ten years ago…when we saw Sputnik racing through the skies, and we realized that America had a big job ahead of it. It gave me so much pleasure to know that you men have done a large part of that job.”

  And it gave Borman, especially, the same kind of pleasure. He’d gone to the Moon because of his love of country, and because he felt it was important to beat the Soviets in the race to get there. He’d always told himself his mission wouldn’t be done until he and his crewmates were standing on the carrier deck. Putting down the telephone after speaking with President Johnson, he knew he’d made it.

  After the call, seventeen doctors, researchers, and medical technicians inspected the astronauts, taking blood, conducting tests, making sure all was well. Even a psychiatrist got his turn, looking for signs that such profound separation from home and family and Earth might have disturbed the men’s psyches. Other than some stiff legs—and Lovell’s lingering tendency to let go of things in midair and expect them to float—everyone checked out fine. Following their medical examinations, the crew were allowed to phone their wives; even from a distance of several thousand miles and through the thick static, these women never sounded so close.

  The astronauts made their way back to the flight deck to thank the crew of the Yorktown and to meet with the swimmers who’d made the recovery. While shaking hands, Anders recognized the man who’d first opened the hatch of the spacecraft.

  “That was really great, Corporal,” Anders said. “I noticed, though, that when you poked your head in you fell backward. Was it the way we looked?”

  “No, sir,” the man replied. “It was the way you smelled.”

  The astronauts had a good laugh about that one.

  By now, it had been several hours since splashdown. In Houston, Susan, Marilyn, and Valerie tried to adjust to the idea that they needn’t worry anymore, that today was now just a regular Friday. At Mission Control, it was finally time to celebrate. Consoles were unplugged and data secured, and many of the controllers and managers returned to the haunts that had been bridges for the endless nights and years they’d spent working to get to the Moon. Some went to the Singing Wheel, some to the Flintlock, others to the Holiday Inn across from NASA in Houston. Most everyone drank and smoked cigars and raised toasts. At the Flintlock, John Aaron and Rod Loe, who’d worked with Anders to write mission rules and procedures, stood at the bottom of the stairs, not yet ready to go up and join the party.

  “What are you guys doing?” a friend asked. “Why aren’t you upstairs?”

  Loe thought it over for a moment.

  “We’re just standing here thinking how proud we are to be Americans,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Borman, Lovell, and Anders dined on lobster tails and roast beef that evening with Captain Fifield, then collapsed in comfortable beds made up with crisp, fresh sheets, getting their first good sleep in more than a week. The next morning, they enjoyed steak and eggs with some of the Yorktown’s officers.

  That day, December 28, the astronauts boarded a carrier plane and flew from the Yorktown to Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. From there, they transferred to a C-141 transport plane for a flight of more than eight hours to Houston. For Anders, it would be the longest flight he’d ever endured other than the one aboard Apollo 8.

  The plane reached Ellington Air Force Base after 2:00 A.M. on Sunday, December 29. Hundreds from NASA, and three thousand well-wishers, many holding banners with congratulatory messages, were there to greet the astronauts, who were clean-shaven, dressed in blue coveralls, and wearing baseball caps. Under a half Moon, Borman, Lovell, and Anders found their wives and children, gave them red and purples leis from Hawaii, and pulled them close. Eight-year-old Gayle Anders gazed at her father, grateful to have him back and not sure she should ever let go. The Borman boys wore ties and beamed at their dad. The Lovell kids orbited their father, pushing close for his attention, never staying on his far side for too long.

  Borman stepped up to a microphone, his wife’s red lipstick smudged across his face. “Thank you for coming out so early in the morning to welcome us,” he said. Lovell added, “At two in the morning, I expected to get in my old blue bomb and go home.” (Lovell’s “blue bomb” was the family’s no-frills 1962 Chevy Biscayne.) The astronauts thanked the crowd and their families at a microphone, greeted NASA’s managers and controllers, and smiled for photographers. One boy in the crowd told his friend, “I know they didn’t have radiation because I just shook their hands.” Then it was time for the astronauts to go home.

  But that wasn’t proving so easy. The crowd pushed forward, surrounding the crewmen and their families, thrusting dollar bills to be autographed. In the surge, Bill Anders became separated from Valerie; NASA staff scurried to reunite the couple, but no one seemed to mind such a short separation, least of all the two of them.

  Each of the families finally climbed into their car and drove off. In their rearview mirrors, the astronauts could see throngs of people waving goodbye until they’d pulled out onto the Houston r
oads and there was only black night behind them.

  None of the men said much about his trip as he drove home. They just said how happy they were to be back, that all had gone as perfectly as could be imagined, and that they felt lucky. None of them was inclined to philosophize about the trip—not yet, anyway. Over the years, these men had become expert at coming home from missions, forgetting about the risks they’d just undertaken, getting on with their day. No other kind of men could have climbed into such unproven flying machines. These were the kind of men NASA had always wanted.

  When Borman, Lovell, and Anders opened their front doors, they found Christmas trees still glowing and presents waiting for them, and they knew that this was just how their homes had looked on Christmas Eve when they had been 240,000 miles away at the Moon, and they knew that this was how their homes would have looked no matter how long it might have taken them to return.

  The next morning, as the Bormans sat down for breakfast at the kitchen table, Frank asked the boys about football and hunting, and demanded to know why dog food had been left in the bowl while he was gone. As for Edwin’s broken thumb—by the look on their dad’s face, they knew there had better be a good explanation for that. When the family opened presents, Susan found a new dress Frank had bought for her before he’d left for the Moon. He’d always loved shopping with her, and knew her style and size.

  In the days that followed, it seemed the world talked only about Apollo 8. A New York Times editorial called it “the most fantastic voyage of all times.” The Washington Evening Star announced that “Man’s horizon now reaches to infinity.” The Los Angeles Times said the mission “boggles the mind.” And Time magazine rushed to change its iconic Man of the Year cover from THE DISSENTER to ASTRONAUTS ANDERS, BORMAN, AND LOVELL.

  Even the Soviet Union could not hide its admiration. Apollo 8, the nation said, “goes beyond the limits of a national achievement and marks a stage in the development of the universal culture of Earthmen.” In a congratulatory note, several Soviet cosmonauts lauded their counterparts for “the precision of your joint work and your courage.”

  Telegrams for the astronauts poured in by the thousands. One, however, stood out from the rest. It came not from a world leader or celebrity or other luminary, but from an anonymous stranger.

  It had traveled over whites-only lunch counters in the South, through jungles in Vietnam where young men fell, over the coffins of two of the America’s great civil rights leaders. It had blown across streets bloodied by protesters and police, past a segregationist presidential campaign, into radios playing songs of alienation and revolt. It had made its way through ten million American souls who didn’t have enough to eat, alongside generations that no longer trusted each other, into a White House where a no-longer-loved president slept.

  It read:

  THANKS. YOU SAVED 1968.

  As the world celebrated Apollo 8, most didn’t realize just how successful the flight had been. By NASA’s analysis, all mission objectives had been attained. The command and service modules had performed beautifully at the Moon. Deep space communications had been excellent. Mascons—the anomalies in lunar gravity—were better understood. Navigation over lunar distances was proved with exquisite accuracy. Lunar landmarks were confirmed for future missions. And the Saturn V rocket, which had been so troubled on only its second test, performed almost flawlessly on its third.

  Despite the breakneck pace at which they had been working since August, few at NASA took time off during the last hours of 1968, especially those responsible for analyzing photographs and movies returned by Apollo 8. Experts developed film by hand rather than by machine, a painstaking process that assured the film could be salvaged if mistakes were made.

  Anders was at home in Houston on December 29 when some of the pictures were developed—pictures unlike any mankind had seen before. Shots he took of Earthrise showed the bright blue-and-white marble of Earth rising over the Moon’s gray horizon, the only color in an all-black universe—a tiny, shining oasis in the cosmos.

  NASA selected the best one of Anders’s Earthrise photos, and on December 30, it appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the globe. Days later, it would run in full color in magazines and Sunday supplements. (Most everyone published the photo with the Moon’s surface horizontal, though Anders and his crewmates had witnessed Earthrise with the lunar surface both horizontal and vertical. To Anders, both perspectives were correct—there was no real up or down in space.) In the following year, the United States Postal Service would issue a new stamp featuring the Earthrise image. In a year of historic photographs—of the street execution of a Vietnamese prisoner; of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s associates pointing in the direction of his assassin; of Robert F. Kennedy lying mortally wounded in a busboy’s arms; of the Black Power salute at the Summer Olympics—the image of Earthrise captured the world’s imagination.

  In case anyone had missed it, President Johnson sent a print of Earthrise to every world leader. Grateful for the attention the photograph produced, the Hasselblad company, which made the cameras used by the astronauts aboard Apollo 8, offered a brand-new one to Anders. A stickler for regulations, he declined; by his reading, government rules made it illegal to accept gifts.

  As America rang in the new year, NASA continued a series of debriefings with the crew of Apollo 8. Borman, Lovell, and Anders were together for these meetings with agency officials, where they provided comments on every aspect of Apollo 8 and made recommendations for future missions. Some remarks were matter-of-fact, as when Anders suggested better light control settings on television cameras. Others reflected excitement, as when Lovell said, “There are a tremendous amount of craters that are not picked up in Earth-based or Earth-orbital-based photography. There are many more new craters to be seen in lunar orbit,” or when Borman described reentry: “The whole spacecraft was lit up in an eerie iridescent light very similar to what you’d see in a science fiction movie. I remember looking over at Jim and Bill once and they were sheathed in a white glow. It was really fantastic.” As fascinating as these descriptions were, the agency wanted to complete their investigations into the flight as soon as possible, as the astronauts had a busy January on their hands.

  It began at the White House on January 9, where the astronauts each received NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal from President Johnson. From there, Borman, Lovell, and Anders rode in their motorcade through flag-waving throngs to Capitol Hill, where they provided an informal briefing to a joint session of Congress and the Supreme Court (and received a two-and-a-half-minute standing ovation). Lovell told the distinguished audience that a few days after returning from the flight, he’d walked outside his home in Houston and gazed up at the Moon. “I could scarcely believe I was there,” he said. The men then moved to the State Department, where they held a press conference. Before opening the floor to questions, a NASA spokesman announced that Borman had been named deputy director of Flight Crew Operations, an administrative position that would ultimately involve advising the White House on NASA affairs.

  One reporter asked: “Was there any moment during the mission in which you were a little bit scared or frightened?”

  “I was scared or frightened during a lot of the phases of the mission,” Anders said. “But I think that fear is a normal human reaction and one that is not detrimental to the flight as long as you keep it under control.”

  Another reporter asked, directly, when America would land on the Moon.

  “This summer,” Borman said.

  “Can you be more precise?” the reporter asked.

  “Apollo 11,” Borman said.

  What Borman didn’t say was that he, Lovell, and Anders might have been the crew for Apollo 11—if only Borman had wanted it. Deke Slayton, who assigned crews, thought that the Apollo 8 astronauts were best positioned to train for the first Moon landing, since they’d already made a lunar orbit flight. Bu
t given Borman’s decision that Apollo 8 would be his last trip in space, Slayton didn’t need to further consider Borman and his crew. In the end, Slayton decided to stay with the planned rotation, with Neil Armstrong as commander of Apollo 11.

  The day after the press conference, the astronauts were honored with a ticker tape parade in New York City, an appearance at the United Nations, and a party at the Waldorf Astoria with Mayor Lindsay and Governor Rockefeller. Celebrations and parades followed that week in Newark, Miami (at the Super Bowl), Houston, and Chicago, where more than a million people turned out.

  During the festivities, the astronauts never forgot that there was a war going on in Vietnam in which their friends and colleagues continued to risk their lives and die for the United States. To Borman, Lovell, and Anders, countless men were doing more for their country in Vietnam, and elsewhere, than the astronauts had done by flying Apollo 8, men that no one would ever know about, brothers the crew of Apollo 8 tried to remember every day.

  * * *

  —

  On January 20, following Richard Nixon’s inauguration, NASA announced that Lovell and Anders would be on the backup crew for Apollo 11, the mission expected to make the first lunar landing. That meant if the primary crew—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins—made the trip, Lovell and Anders likely would be primary crew for another lunar landing, Apollo 14. However, Slayton had made Anders the backup command module pilot for Apollo 11, which meant Anders would be the one who stayed with the orbiting spacecraft while his two crewmates flew the lunar module to the Moon’s surface and back. To Anders, the writing was on the wall just as he expected; he’d mastered the spacecraft so beautifully on Apollo 8 that no one would ever let him leave it.