Nearly fifty years later, the United States seemed torn apart again. As candidates launched their presidential campaigns in 2015, the country stood divided by a world of political and cultural differences, some of which manifested in violence or ugly public displays. Many people had never seen their country so fractured, their fellow citizens so furious with one another, and it only got worse as the election approached and then a new president was elected. But to those old enough to remember, it all looked so much like 1968.
There was one significant difference between 1968 and modern-day America, however. In 1968, there was Apollo 8. When Borman, Lovell, and Anders returned from the Moon, few could argue—no matter their age or political leaning or background—that they hadn’t seen something important and beautiful happen, that these three men had helped the country, and the world, to heal. So far, there has been no Apollo 8 for our time.
I knew right away that I wanted to tell the story of Apollo 8. But I also knew that I couldn’t do the story justice without interviewing the three crew members. At the time, Borman and Lovell were 87 years old, Anders was 83. I wasn’t certain that any of them would want to talk to me.
I found Lovell’s email address and wrote to him. A few days later, his assistant called and said he would be pleased to meet with me at his office, just a 15-minute drive from my home. When I arrived, Lovell told me that years earlier he’d listened to Shadow Divers as an audiobook and found himself so engrossed he’d circled in the parking lot at his office, unwilling to leave the car until a chapter had ended. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a thrill like that—envisioning an Apollo astronaut going into orbit so he could finish my book.
For hours, Lovell told me about Apollo 8, his childhood growing up in Milwaukee, attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Even better, he agreed to meet with me again, and passed along contact information for Borman and Anders. Soon I was in Montana, spending several days with Borman, and in Washington State, on an extended stay to interview Anders and his wife, Valerie, then back to Montana. In Chicago, I began a series of interviews with Lovell and his wife, Marilyn, at their home, where I got to see astonishing space memorabilia and pet their golden retriever, Toby, while asking my questions.
All of the men, and their wives, were extraordinarily generous with their time. (Susan Borman was too ill during my visits to Montana to sit for interviews.) And all of them were excellent storytellers, forthcoming and vivid in their recall. It was lucky for me that each of the astronauts understood how to explain even the most technical information in a way that a layperson could understand.
As informative as the astronauts were during my visits, they were equally down to earth and kind. Borman and Anders each took me for a ride in their small airplanes; I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced a feeling like I got while being flown over the American countryside by the first men to see Earth from another world. (By the time I met Lovell, he’d given up flying for health reasons.) And it was moving to hear, through my headset, the admiration paid to Borman by a young flight controller in Montana, who seemed in awe that he was giving clearance to the first man who’d ever reached the Moon.
On my behalf, Borman called Chris Kraft, one of the titans of NASA, and a man as responsible as anyone for the success of the American space program. A few weeks later, I was in Houston meeting with Kraft, already in his nineties and possessing enough energy to go back and run Mission Control (which he invented). Kraft gave me two full days of interviews, and helped me reach other NASA veterans who lived in and around Houston. My week there was immensely rewarding in the company of these pioneers.
On my last day in Houston, I took my thirteen-year-old son to the Johnson Space Center to see the Saturn V rocket, still the most powerful machine ever built. Everyone I’d spoken to, from astronauts to NASA personnel to technical experts, warned that the immensity of the Saturn V couldn’t quite be described, that one had to be in its presence to believe it. We paid our admission, admired the Space Shuttle, took turns in a simulator that twisted and shook. Then, we found the rocket.
It was laid on its side, 363 feet long end-to-end, bursting out of its own building. A decade-and-a-half into the twenty-first century, it’s near impossible to find a piece of technology from the past that can impress a thirteen-year-old who owns an iPhone, an Xbox, and a quad-core computer. My son stood beside the five F-1 engines at the base of the rocket. He didn’t look at his phone or check his texts. He didn’t take a picture. He just kept staring at the nozzles of these engines, each more than twelve feet tall, and after staying still for several minutes, he asked if we could stay some more.
I made one more trip to Montana after that, to see Borman. After several days, we wrapped up by going to dinner at one of his favorite barbeque restaurants. We’d been seated only a few minutes when a bartender rushed up to him holding a newspaper. “Frank, the paper says you’re one of Montana’s most famous residents!” she said. The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. It wasn’t clear she had any idea who Borman was or why he was famous, but he smiled and said “Thank you very much” all the same.
After the meal, Borman dropped me off at my hotel, then went to visit his wife at the nursing home where she lives. As he drove away, it seemed to me strange—I felt I’d come to know Susan as well as I had Frank, despite having met her for just a few minutes, despite the fact that she had been too ill to speak. When I returned home and transcribed the tapes of my interviews, I understood why. Borman spoke of Susan constantly; there didn’t seem an aspect of his life he could explain without discussing how much she meant to him or how much he loved her. I’d heard the same from Lovell and Anders about their wives. When I discovered that Apollo 8 was the only crew in which all the marriages survived (astronaut careers were notoriously hard on marriages) it didn’t surprise me. In a singularly beautiful story, it seemed only fitting that the first men to leave Earth considered home to be the most important place in the universe.
A Note on Sources
The heart and soul of this book come from extensive interviews I conducted with Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, the three astronauts who flew on Apollo 8. I met with each man over the course of several days at his home, and followed up repeatedly by phone and email, compiling dozens of hours of recorded conversation. Despite their ages (Borman and Lovell were born in 1928, Anders in 1933), all three of them seemed to have as much energy, and were just as sharp, as when they became the first men ever to fly to the Moon fifty years ago. It was I who often struggled to keep up with them.
Equally important to the book are the interviews I conducted with two of the astronauts’ wives, Marilyn Lovell and Valerie Anders. Both sat for several hours over many days, and made me feel welcome in their homes. By the time I undertook this project, Susan Borman was too ill to talk, but I met her, and Frank supplied me with much background information from a private journal he kept about her life and times. Quotes from Susan that appear in the book are from interviews she did when she was well, along with accounts from Frank, her two sons, and others who knew her.
It’s difficult to imagine having written this book without the extraordinary generosity of Chris Kraft, one of the most important figures in NASA’s history. At age ninety-one, Kraft welcomed me to his home in Houston for two full days of interviews about the flight of Apollo 8 and the bold series of decisions that led up to it. Like the astronauts, Kraft was in peak form and recalled details and events as clearly—and cared about them as much—as if they’d happened yesterday.
During the course of reporting for this book, I also interviewed several other astronauts and NASA personnel who were ringside for Apollo 8. I would have loved to talk to more of them, but by the time I began work on the project, many had already passed away. Still, I was lucky. Over the decades, NASA and other organizations had the foresight to record interviews with a great number of people involved in the American spac
e program. I made use of eighty or more of these oral histories, including those with astronaut Neil Armstrong (who was on the backup crew for Apollo 8) and NASA giants including Robert Gilruth, George Mueller, Samuel Phillips, and James Webb. In addition, I benefited greatly from the generosity of Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox, who supplied me with more than a dozen transcripts of interviews they conducted in the 1980s for their classic book Apollo: The Race to the Moon. Among other gems, it was their interview with Judy Wyatt that provided the detail about George Low’s subjects and verbs agreeing; and it was their interviews with Mission Control personnel that revealed that some NASA managers—only half jokingly—remained concerned that Apollo 8 might smash into the Moon even as the spacecraft closed in on the lunar surface.
Every aspect of the Apollo 8 story—the conception, planning, and execution of the mission, the American space program, the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cold War—was exhaustively documented as it unfolded. Even papers once secret have now been declassified. I benefited from all of this.
For my purposes, the single most important documentary source on the flight of Apollo 8 was the Apollo 8 Flight Journal, a Web-based transcript of the available recordings from the mission, along with corrections and a running series of astonishingly clear commentaries and explanations. The Flight Journal was created by David Woods, with help from Frank O’Brien, based on the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal by Eric Jones, who saw the power of the Internet to host these massive, ever-changing documents. Hosted with the kind assistance of the NASA History Division, the Apollo 8 Flight Journal was essential to my understanding—on a minute-by-minute basis—of the historic six-day mission. I was also extremely fortunate to work with David Woods during the research and writing of my book, as he helped to clarify and confirm my understanding of the flight. The Apollo 8 Flight Journal can be accessed online at history.nasa.gov/afj/ap08fj/index.html. In addition, I benefited greatly by my consultation with space historian Dr. David M. Harland, who has written extensively about the Apollo program, including a masterwork, Exploring the Moon: The Apollo Expeditions.
Also essential to my understanding of the flight—and to my sense of being there—were two online series of videos about Apollo 8 that included film, audio transmissions between the spacecraft and Mission Control (with time markers), live television broadcasts, animations, press briefings, and other aspects of the mission. Perhaps the most useful was this series of forty-two videos that covers the entire mission: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC1yaZz2qeGogsUbODzdA0-iJ8Qtb6kEB. For another excellent series, see this collection of sixty-one videos of CBS News coverage of Apollo 8: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwxFr1zAEfolhvY0z_lSMAQFuZDqatinX.
As one might expect with an Apollo mission, NASA produced an immense cache of primary source material, including thousands of documents from the agency covering every aspect of Apollo 8, from conception to construction to training to the flight itself and its aftermath. Some of it was far too technical for the purposes of this book, but much of it proved invaluable. Among the treasures I mined from this wonderland of documents: flight plans (which look like hieroglyphics to the untrained eye, but once deciphered become a bible of the mission); NASA memos and analyses; mission rules and procedures; flight evaluations; checklists; public affairs commentaries; transcripts of onboard voice transmissions; press briefings; crew debriefings; photographs and visual observations; and chronologies. I also repeatedly turned to a 448-page document compiled by NASA titled “Astronautics and Aeronautics, 1968—Chronology on Science, Technology, and Policy,” a day-by-day account of the American space program in one of its most critical years.
Whenever there was a discrepancy in a version of events, I used my best efforts to present the most likely and clearest account. Quotations from the flight of Apollo 8 are taken from mission transcripts; in a few instances, when the astronauts were not broadcasting their conversations, I have presented their dialogue as they recounted it for me. Other dialogue in the book comes from the sources listed in this note. Occasionally, I assembled dialogue to reflect stories I was told or that I researched.
I sent a draft of this book to Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders to review for factual accuracy. I did not seek, nor did the astronauts offer, editorial changes. I’m grateful to them for their time and attention to detail, and for helping to make the manuscript as accurate as possible.
In addition to primary sources generated by NASA, I consulted hundreds of books, magazines, newspaper articles, websites, documentaries, films, audio recordings, photographs, and podcasts. I found value in nearly all of them, but I returned to the following time and again for their excellence, clarity, and breadth of information:
BOOKS
Chaikin, Andrew. A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts. New York: Penguin, 2007.
French, Francis, and Colin Burgess. In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965–1969. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
Kraft, Christopher. Flight: My Life in Mission Control. New York: Dutton, 2001.
Murray, Charles, and Catherine Bly Cox. Apollo: The Race to the Moon. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
Siddiqi, Asif. Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974. alc Books, 2015.
Woods, W. David. How Apollo Flew to the Moon. 2nd ed. New York: Springer, 2011.
Zimmerman, Robert. Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
WEBSITES
nasa.gov
thespacereview.com
airandspace.si.edu
airspacemag.com
space.com
collectspace.com
MAGAZINES
Aviation Week & Space Technology (all 1968 issues)
Life (which had exclusive access to the astronauts and their families)
DOCUMENTARIES AND VIDEOS
“Apollo 8 Reunion 2008—An Evening with the Apollo 8 Astronauts” (Annual John H. Glenn Lecture Series)
“Apollo 8 Reunion 2009”
Cold War (24-episode television documentary, originally broadcast in the United States on CNN)
Race to the Moon: The Daring Adventure of Apollo 8 (American Experience—PBS / Indigo Studios 2005)
svs.gsfc.nasa.gov//4129 (a brilliant animated explanation of Earthrise, narrated by Andrew Chaikin)
youtube.com/watch?v=Vn00BvWwke0 (launch of Apollo 8)
Please check my website (robertkurson.com) for a more comprehensive list of sources used to research and write this book, along with copies of NASA documents and links to video, audio, and other multimedia sources.
BY ROBERT KURSON
Shadow Divers
Crashing Through
Pirate Hunters
Rocket Men
About the Author
ROBERT KURSON earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin and a law degree from Harvard Law School. His award-winning stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and Esquire, where he was a contributing editor. He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: Shadow Divers, the 2005 American Booksellers Association’s nonfiction Book Sense Book of the Year; Crashing Through, based on Kurson’s 2006 National Magazine Award–winning profile of the blind speed skier, CIA agent, inventor, and entrepreneur Mike May in Esquire; and Pirate Hunters. His latest book, Rocket Men, tells the story of the Apollo 8 mission to the Moon. He lives in Chicago.
RobertKurson.com
Twitter: @robertkurson
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