In late January, President Nixon sent Borman and his family on an eight-country goodwill tour of Europe. At each stop, Borman was greeted as a hero, and people listened with rapt attention as he described his adventure around the Moon. In Rome, he and his family met the Pope and stood on the same piece of ground where Galileo had been condemned for heresy in 1633 for advocating Copernicus’s argument that the Earth travels around the Sun. Of the crew’s reading from Genesis, Pope Paul VI said, “For that particular moment of time, the world was at peace.”
Flush with confidence and shot full of momentum from the success of Apollo 8, NASA entered its final push to land men on the Moon. It would require two flights—Apollo 9 and Apollo 10—to prepare for a landing mission sometime in the summer of 1969, but after Apollo 8, the space agency believed there was virtually nothing it couldn’t do.
It was around this time that NASA asked Borman to talk about the space program and Apollo 8 at American colleges. Some welcomed him. Many more did not. Often, he was shouted down by protesters who resented the presence of a military man on campus. At Columbia University in New York, he was pelted by marshmallows, then overrun onstage by students dressed in gorilla costumes. In Boston, a helicopter had to deliver him past the mobs that blocked access to his speech. But the worst experience came at Cornell University, where astronomy professor Carl Sagan invited Borman and Susan to his home for a roundtable with students. The Bormans accepted, then were treated to an evening of attacks on America and its conduct in Vietnam, all of it encouraged by Sagan, whom Borman would never forgive for the treatment.
After Apollo 9 and Apollo 10 flew successful missions in March and May 1969, Borman and his family boarded a plane for another goodwill trip, this one to Russia. The Soviet ambassador to Washington had extended the invitation, and President Nixon thought it a positive step toward easing tensions between the two nations. With the president’s permission, Borman and Susan brought their sons. As the first astronaut ever to visit Russia, Borman was given first-class treatment and shown some of the Soviet Union’s proudest sites. He was given a tour of the highly secret “Star City” near Moscow, where cosmonauts lived and trained; laid wreaths at the resting places of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin; sampled wines in Yalta; and met with a top Soviet physicist. One night, he and his family were honored at a crowded dinner at the regal restaurant in Moscow’s famed Metropole Hotel. One of the cosmonauts in attendance, Alexei Leonov, was struck by a piece of Borman’s attire—in place of a traditional necktie, he wore a bolo tie set with a bright blue stone. “Everyone wanted to stand near to him,” Leonov would later write of the evening. “To touch him.”
Borman congratulated Leonov on his 1965 spacewalk and described how the Moon had appeared close up, then showed slides of his lunar journey to a rapt audience. Although Borman had considered the Soviet Union an enemy, he liked the Russian people and held the cosmonauts in the highest regard—no westerner better understood the rigors of their training, or the great risks they took for their country. Susan took a ring from her finger and gave it to a cosmonaut, a gift from her family to theirs. By trip’s end, Borman saw the cosmonauts as he saw the astronauts—a group of test and fighter pilots, all of whom wanted more than anything else to help their country succeed. And he admired their candor—to a man, they seemed generous in acknowledging that America had won the race to the Moon.
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On July 16, 1969, NASA launched Apollo 11 from Cape Kennedy. On board were astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins. Orbiting the Moon, Armstrong gave a shout-out to Apollo 8.
“We’re over Mount Marilyn at the present time,” he radioed to Houston.
A day later, July 20, Apollo 11’s lunar module set down on the lunar surface, at one of the sites at the Sea of Tranquillity scouted by Apollo 8. “The Eagle has landed,” Armstrong radioed to Mission Control. Six and a half hours later, Armstrong exited the spacecraft, climbed down its ladder, and set foot on the Moon.
“That’s one small step for [a] man; one giant leap for mankind,” Armstrong told the world.
Aldrin followed onto the lunar surface several minutes later.
Just eight years after a young president had pledged to do the impossible by decade’s end, America had made good on his promise. Men had landed on the Moon.
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In early August 1969, the atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair and her affiliated group brought a lawsuit against NASA and its chief, Thomas Paine, for allowing the reading of the first lines of Genesis by the crew of Apollo 8 during lunar orbit. That action, O’Hair claimed, abridged her First Amendment right to be free from religion and violated the First Amendment by establishing Christianity as a state religion. Further, she alleged that NASA had chosen Christmas for Apollo 8’s mission for religious reasons. She asked the court to prevent NASA, a public agency, from future religious displays or readings. A United States district court judge threw out the lawsuit; the United States Supreme Court refused to hear O’Hair’s appeal.
By the time Apollo 11 had returned from its historic mission, some shuffling had gone on with Apollo crews. Anders, who believed he’d never be given the chance to walk on the Moon, accepted a job at the National Aeronautics and Space Council, in Washington, D.C., a body chaired by the vice president of the United States and devoted to establishing the country’s space policy. (Anders took the job on one condition: that he retain his astronaut status in case a miracle occurred and Deke Slayton gave him a walk on the Moon.) Lovell had been advanced in the cycle to command Apollo 13. For his part, Borman had become a special adviser to Eastern Airlines.
Following a successful landing mission by Apollo 12 in November 1969, Apollo 13 launched, with Lovell as its commander, on April 11, 1970. That flight, however, never made it to the lunar surface. Near the Moon, an oxygen tank exploded, severely damaging the service module and disabling the command module’s power and oxygen supply. Two hundred thousand miles from Earth, and unable to safely fire the SPS engine, Lovell and his crewmates, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, were in grave danger of being stranded in space forever.
Tapping wells of ingenuity, creativity, and courage, Mission Control and the crew cobbled together a solution. They would use the lunar module for electrical power and thrust, repurposing it to keep themselves alive and to regain a free-return trajectory that would whip them around the Moon and return them to Earth. The world prayed for the astronauts as they sped home in their freezing spacecraft, while Lovell used the experience he gained from restoring Apollo 8’s disrupted orientation during its own return to nurse the disabled Apollo 13 back to Earth. No one knew whether the command module’s heat shield had been too severely damaged by the explosion to survive reentry.
In the end, Apollo 13 made it back safely, one of the great rescues in history. No one at NASA, least of all Lovell, failed to recognize that the crew had been saved by the lunar module’s secondary role as a lifeboat. It was this lack of a lifeboat that had haunted so many who’d feared flying Apollo 8 to the Moon. If the explosion aboard Apollo 13 had occurred during Apollo 8, Borman, Lovell, and Anders would never have come home.
Five days after Apollo 13’s return, the first Earth Day observance was held, a series of demonstrations, celebrations, and rallies to protect the environment. Apollo 8’s Earthrise photo was used as the movement’s symbol. Some suggested it was Apollo 8 itself—man’s first look at his home planet, and at its thin, fragile atmosphere—that launched the environmental movement.
NASA made four more manned trips to the Moon after Apollo 13, all of which successfully landed crews on the surface. Collectively, the astronauts on the Apollo missions returned almost 842 pounds of lunar soil and rock, samples that continue to form the bedrock upon which our understanding of the solar system’s origins is based. In all, twelve Americans walked on the Moon between 1969 and 1972.
/> And that was it.
Since Apollo 17, humankind has never returned.
* * *
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It has been fifty years since Apollo 8 flew to the Moon.
Many of the key managers at NASA who made the mission happen have since died, including former administrators James Webb and Thomas Paine; Director of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center Robert Gilruth; Chief of Astronaut Division Deke Slayton; Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight George Mueller; Director of NASA’s Apollo Manned Lunar Landing Program Samuel Phillips; and rocket mastermind Wernher von Braun.
All three astronauts who served as CapComs during Apollo 8—Mike Collins, Ken Mattingly, and Jerry Carr—are still living. Collins went to the Moon as part of Apollo 11, Mattingly on Apollo 16, both as command module pilots. Carr became a commander on Skylab, America’s first space station, in 1973–74.
Apollo 8’s lead flight director, Cliff Charlesworth, died in 1991. The mission’s other two flight directors, Glynn Lunney and Milton Windler, are retired.
At age ninety-four, Chris Kraft remains as sharp and feisty as ever. After a long and distinguished career at NASA, he retired as the director of the Johnson Space Center in 1982, then served as a consultant for several major corporations. He still has strong opinions on the space program, still remembers—vividly—watching Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig hit home runs in the early 1930s.
George Low, the mastermind behind sending Apollo 8 to the Moon, became NASA’s deputy administrator in late 1969. After retiring from the agency in 1976, he became the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 1984, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work with America’s space program. He died the next day, of cancer, at age fifty-eight.
In one of the last interviews of his life, in 2011, Neil Armstrong called Apollo 8 “an enormously bold decision” that catapulted the American space program forward. Harrison Schmitt, one of the two last people to set foot on the Moon as part of the crew of Apollo 17, said of the flight, “It was probably the most remarkable effort that the NASA team down here ever put together.” When asked to compare Apollo 8 to his historic flight, astronaut Mike Collins said, “I think Apollo 8 was about leaving and Apollo 11 was about arriving, leaving Earth and arriving at the Moon. As you look back one hundred years from now, which is more important? I’m not sure, but I think probably you would say Apollo 8 was of more significance than Apollo 11.” Astronaut Ken Mattingly said, “Of all of the events to participate in, you know, I was lucky because I could do Apollo 11 as well as 8 and then 13. But being part of Apollo 8, it made everything else anticlimactic.”
For Chris Kraft, it was simple: “It took more courage to make the decision to do Apollo 8 than anything we ever did in the space program.”
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Weeks after the return of Apollo 8, Frank Borman went to work pumping gas at a local Gulf service station in Webster, Texas. He did it for free, along with his two sons, in exchange for use of the station’s garage bay and lift, where the Bormans could work on their cars. The station was owned by a family friend, Toke Kobayashi, a man who also raised world-class tomatoes for sale to restaurants in Chicago.
Dressed in grimy jeans and a greasy T-shirt, Borman was almost unrecognizable to customers. One man who pulled in for gas began giving Borman a hard time, and for no good reason. Nearby, Borman’s younger son, fifteen-year-old Ed, knew this was trouble—his father never started a fight but wouldn’t take guff from anyone. Soon the men were near blows. Ed ran over and had to separate them, and it took every bit of his two-hundred-pound frame to do it. Even as Ed moved the belligerents apart, he found himself thinking: This guy has no idea he’s fighting with a man who just got back from the Moon.
One day in 1969, as he was trying to figure out his post-NASA future, Borman’s phone rang. On the line was a man who said, “At the behest of Ross Perot, I have invested a million dollars in your name.” Perot wanted Borman to work for him by developing televised town hall forums in which the public could vote from home on issues of the day. The money, as the man said, had already been deposited. Borman was intrigued. Susan was not.
“You will not do that,” she told her husband. “He’ll own you. You don’t know anything about this.”
Borman gave back the money. He’d never made more than about thirty thousand dollars a year. Susan, who always received compliments on her fashionable wardrobe, would keep buying her clothes through secondhand stores and the Junior League thrift shop in Houston. More than ever, Frank was grateful for Susan’s wisdom and good judgment. And he made a lifelong friend of Perot in the process.
After retiring from the Air Force in 1970, Borman joined Eastern Airlines, a position that required him to move to Miami. By now, his son Fred was at West Point, but seventeen-year-old Ed was a senior in high school and still living at home. Eastern wanted Borman to attend a three-month management program at Harvard Business School, a sure sign they had big plans for the former astronaut. Borman believed he needed Susan by his side in order to do his job well, so he asked his parents to stay with Ed for the year in Houston, and asked Susan to move with him to Miami. The prospect of leaving her son during his final year at home was deeply painful to Susan—her boys meant everything to her—but Frank needed her, so she packed up the car and went with him, much as she had done in the early years of their marriage. She was still plagued by depression, and her drinking had grown heavier. As always, she never showed any of that to Frank.
Borman rose quickly up the ranks at Eastern. While he impressed management, Susan struggled to adapt to a life in a new city, far away from her children and her friends. After his senior year, Ed followed his brother to West Point. For Susan, Florida felt emptier than ever.
In 1972, an Eastern Airlines jet crashed in an Everglades swamp on a flight from New York to Miami. The site was inaccessible by land, and rescue efforts were slow to mobilize. Unwilling to wait, Borman chartered a two-seat helicopter after midnight and flew with the pilot to search for the downed plane and survivors. The men found a tiny patch of solid ground on which to set down. Borman jumped from the chopper and into the waters of the swamp, which rose to his chest. All around, he heard moans and cries for help.
He worked to unpin victims from wreckage, helped the injured into arriving rescue helicopters, searched with a woman for her missing baby. Working a system of flashlights, he set up a local flight control, guiding choppers in and out of the scene. He departed on one of the last rescue craft out of the area, flying to the hospital to monitor the treatment of survivors. Of the 176 passengers and crew aboard Flight 401, 98 died in the accident.
Borman, who traveled constantly for work, was on assignment in New York in the fall of 1973 when he received a phone call telling him that Susan was very ill and advising him to return home immediately. It was past midnight, but he found an Eastern jet and jumped a ride on the empty plane. He had no idea what was wrong with his wife or how she was doing. It proved the longest and most helpless flight of his life. When he reached Susan’s bedside the next morning, it became clear she’d had a nervous breakdown.
“I can’t live like this, Frank,” she told him. “I’m very sick but I’ll do whatever it takes to get better.”
Borman didn’t know what to do. The doctor at Eastern Airlines did. “If you leave her here she’s never going to get better, because she’ll still be Mrs. Frank Borman of Eastern Airlines,” he told Borman. The doctor had already made arrangements for Susan to go to the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut, for treatment of her alcohol addiction, and for intensive psychotherapy.
On the flight to Hartford, Susan was nearly catatonic and didn’t speak. At the treatment facility, the chief psychiatrist told Frank that Susan would need to be isolated and that Frank couldn’t see or talk to her for a month. Frank couldn’t imagine a more painful fate. Even at the Moon, she’d
been with him every moment.
When doctors finally allowed him to visit, Frank found Susan much improved. They walked hand in hand across the grounds, and they talked. Frank felt a crushing guilt. All these years, he’d been selfish—mission had always come before family—and he’d never realized the toll this had taken on Susan. He, too, attended counseling sessions. He considered resigning from Eastern, changing his hard-charging ways. But he realized, with the doctor’s help, that such a move would run counter to his DNA; it would do no one any good if he tried to become someone he was not. Instead, he promised to himself and to Susan: He would make more time for her, he would do more to communicate with her. And he swore to himself never to let anything like this happen again to the person he loved most.
Susan stayed for four months at the Institute of Living before returning home to Miami. From that day forward, neither she nor Frank touched alcohol again. Susan even brought home a friend from the facility, a young woman with addiction issues who’d been rejected by her family. Susan helped the woman find an apartment and a job, then counseled her for months until she’d settled in to the community. After that, Susan threw herself into volunteer work, helping organizations that fought drug abuse, an effort that would extend to a national scope in later years. Frank had never known a feeling of pride such as he felt for Susan in the months after she came home.
In May 1975, Borman was elected president and chief operations officer of Eastern Airlines. He was beloved by many in the company, from board members to pilots to mechanics. Often, he worked unloading baggage at the airport or checking engine parts on the tarmac, and he drove an old Chevy to work. In a later newspaper profile, another airline executive would say of him, “He kind of preceded all the ‘excellence’ books.” Less than two years later, Borman became chairman of the board at Eastern, and he appeared in several of the company’s television commercials. Even on TV, he couldn’t help but talk straight. “Selling you a seat on Eastern Airlines isn’t easy. It’s not easy to sell you on any airline. You know, they’re all pretty much the same,” he said in one spot.
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