Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon

by Robert Kurson

If NASA could meet Kennedy’s deadline, it would be a statement—to the American people, the Soviets, and the world—that there was nothing the United States could not do if pushed hard enough, that even after losing round after round in the Space Race, falling behind in missiles and bombs, and suffering a humiliation like the Bay of Pigs, the United States could rise in a way no other nation could rise and pull off a miracle.

No man had ever flown more than 853 miles above Earth’s surface. Now Low was proposing to send three astronauts a quarter of a million miles away, and to do it half a year sooner than anyone at NASA had planned. As if that weren’t enough, Low was proposing to skip not one but two preparatory Apollo flights, violating one of NASA’s foundational philosophies: that missions be incremental to assure mastery and success.

On Lovell’s arrival home, his wife, Marilyn, made a happy announcement: She’d scored several bargains on clothes for the family’s upcoming Christmas vacation in Acapulco. It was hard for her to believe it was happening; she couldn’t remember if they’d even attempted a vacation since he’d joined NASA six years earlier. Jim smiled as Marilyn held up her brightly colored beach buys, but she could see his mind wasn’t on Mexico. “Are you all right?” she asked. He motioned her into his study. “I can’t go on vacation,” he said. “I can’t believe it!” Marilyn replied. “I’ve already made all these plans for Acapulco!” “I’m going somewhere else. Somewhere special.” “Where are you going?” Jim grinned. “Would you believe, the Moon?” Looking into Jim’s eyes, Marilyn still saw him as the boy she’d met in high school, who talked about stars and planets, and as the first-year Naval Academy midshipman who’d asked her to type up his term paper that predicted men would someday ride rockets into space. She knew that this was what her husband had been seeking all his life.

If Apollo 8 survived reentry and if its heat shield succeeded in preventing its incineration in temperatures that would reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit—half that of the surface of the Sun—the triple canopy of parachutes would deploy and the capsule would splash down in the Pacific Ocean about forty-five minutes before first light. The astronauts would stay inside until a Navy recovery crew reached them. By that time, Apollo 8’s historic voyage would have ended, after a little more than six days.

After scoring high on admissions exams, Frank enrolled at the United States Military Academy at West Point in the fall of 1946. Cadet Borman was all baby face and golden hair compared to his classmates. Many had already attended college, and at least half were veterans of World War II. In early fall, Borman tried out for the plebe (first year) football team. He’d been a star high school quarterback, but at this level he didn’t have the necessary arm strength. He joined anyway, as the varsity team’s assistant manager, in charge of gathering dirty socks and sweaty jockstraps. It was thrilling for Borman, who got to observe head coach Earl Blaik’s legendary intensity and to watch one of the young assistant coaches, Vince Lombardi, develop his own military coaching style.

Anders flew more missions in Iceland, many of them risky, both for the dangerous flying conditions and for the potential conflict with Soviet bombers. Three or four months after Anders flipped off the Russian crew, another pilot in his squadron intercepted a Soviet bomber. This time, the Russians had a response to their American pursuers, and they held it up to their window—a sign printed in English—for the Air Force pilots to see. American intel had a good laugh when they heard the story. To them, it represented the layers of bureaucracy that constituted the Soviet socialist system. It had taken more than one hundred days for the first bomber crew to report Anders’s middle finger, for word to travel through channels to the Kremlin, for analysts to decipher it, for committees to formulate a response, for other committees to approve it, for translators to put the Soviet answer into English, for orders to be given to a new bomber crew, and for the Soviet pilots to deliver it. Their message to the Americans flying alongside: WE FUCKED YOUR SISTER.

Anders spent long stretches away from home during training. Valerie was raising their five children (the family had welcomed another son, Eric, after Anders joined NASA) in El Lago, a small town near Houston where many astronauts lived, making Bill’s paycheck go seven ways. One day, Anders calculated the amount of time he spent with each of his kids: eleven minutes per week per child. He regretted it, and didn’t consider himself to be a good father because of all the time he spent away. But for now, beating the Russians was more important than being an ideal family man.

The next day, Jerry Lederer, director of NASA’s Office of Manned Space Flight Safety, spoke to a group of aviation enthusiasts in New York. Apollo 8, he said, had one safety advantage over the voyage undertaken by Christopher Columbus in 1492: “Columbus did not know where he was going, how far it was, nor where he had been after his return. With Apollo, there is no such lack of information.” There was, however, the matter of complexity. “Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and 1,500,000 systems, subsystems and assemblies,” Lederer noted. “Even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects.” For that reason, Lederer concluded, Apollo 8’s mission would involve “risks of great magnitude and probably risks that have not been foreseen.”

It was theoretically possible, Goddard had told Lindbergh, to design a rocket powerful enough to reach the Moon, but the money required to build it—as much as a million dollars—would likely keep such a wonder in the realm of science fiction. The astronauts had a good laugh at that one. Lindbergh performed a back-of-napkin calculation after learning how much fuel the Saturn V required to send Apollo 8 to the Moon. “In the first second of your flight,” Lindbergh said, “you’ll burn more than ten times as much as I did flying the Spirit of St. Louis all the way from New York to Paris.”

If the procedure was timed properly, the astronaut could open the valve while urinating and expel the waste into space. If it was not timed properly, he risked exposing his tender parts to vacuum forces. To prevent that, Anders opened the valve too slowly on his first attempt, blowing off the personal end of his condom and sending twinkling golden droplets dancing weightless through the cabin. His timing improved after that, he made sure of it.

A few minutes later, Collins radioed Apollo 8 with an update on their recent television broadcast. “We are having a playback of your TV shows and are all enjoying it down here. It was better than yesterday because it didn’t preempt the football game.” “Don’t tell me they cut off a football game,” Borman said. “Didn’t they learn from Heidi?”

The Moon is approximately 4.5 billion years old, about the same age as Earth. The Moon is not a planet but a satellite, and a unique one in the solar system, much larger than other satellites that orbit solid, rocky planets (usually such giant moons revolve around gaseous bodies).

The far side is often referred to as the dark side, but that is a misnomer. All sides of the Moon receive sunlight and experience days and nights. The Moon’s slow rotation on its axis does mean that areas can stay in sunlight, or in darkness, for nearly two weeks.

In many ways, the story of the Moon is a story of its two sides. The near side, which has been facing Earth for billions of years, is marked by dramatic contrast between light and dark sections, which can easily be seen from Earth with the naked eye. The light areas are the highlands, covered with craters and rolling with hills and mountains that can rise miles above the surface. The dark areas are called mare (mare is Latin for “sea”; the plural is maria). The maria cover about one-third of the near side and are much smoother than the highlands, with far fewer craters, an unusual coda to a violent story. For billions of years, the Moon was bombarded by asteroids, comets, and other debris. The lunar surface is a record of those impacts, each of its round craters, with its sharp rim and rising edges, a snapshot of a collision. Some of the most massive impacts excavated huge basins with fractured floors that allowed molten magma to ooze up from the Moon’s mantle and fill them in, solidifying into a dark, smooth basalt that became the maria. These giant impacts were the climax of an era of bombardment that marked the Moon’s initial evolution. The formation of the maria occurred long after the basins were formed, in some cases perhaps by a half billion years or more, so they are younger than the light-colored highlands. The maria are also relatively free of craters, suggesting that the lunar landscape appears much the same today as it did three billion years ago. The far side ...

Little is known about Earth’s first billion years, the time when primitive life originated on the planet. Earth meteorites preserved on the Moon could provide a window back to that time, giving us a glimpse of the ages from which we came, the stuff from which we are made. But there would be no way to examine Earth meteorites embedded in the Moon without space travelers who could bring them back to us—without humans brave enough to climb into a spacecraft, light an engine with the power of a nuclear bomb below them, and land on our most ancient companion. And one must wonder if, in the future, a similar push by bold adventurers, this time beyond the Moon and into the universe, might bring back another kind of knowledge about ourselves, one that we might not yet have the capacity to imagine but that might transform us fundamentally.

Only a few naysayers popped up, most notably Samuel Shenton, founder of the England-based Flat Earth Society, who said the public was being hoodwinked by NASA. “How does that grab you, Frank?” Carr asked during his report of the headlines. “It doesn’t look too flat from here, but I don’t know, maybe something is wrong with our vision,” Borman replied.

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.

“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.

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.

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.