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The three astronauts are going not merely into Earth orbit, or even beyond the world altitude record of 853 miles. They intend to go a quarter of a million miles away, to a place no man has ever gone. They intend to go to the Moon.
Beneath them, the United States is fracturing. The year 1968 has seen killing, war, protest, and political unrest unlike any in the country’s history, from the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy to the unraveling of Vietnam to the riots in Chicago.
But Slayton meant exactly what he said. He wanted Borman to change missions and fly to the Moon. At a distance of 240,000 miles. In just sixteen weeks.
“Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.”
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
And that’s what Congress seemed to hear as Kennedy kept talking and their applause began to build: that landing a man on the Moon and bringing him back safely might be the single greatest scientific and technological challenge mankind had ever faced, but doing it by the end of the decade was impossible, and it was only by attempting something impossible that a nation could truly know who it was.
Goddard responded by saying, “Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace.”
“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.”
In heaping quantities, the astronauts’ personal chef served filet mignon and scrambled eggs (steak and eggs was the traditional send-off meal for astronauts), toast, coffee, and tea—a deliberately low-residue meal, and the last real, hot food that the astronauts would consume for the next six days.
In the morning light, the view from the spacecraft became clearer. For several minutes, Anders watched a mud dauber wasp build a nest on the capsule window.
There was no failure. Each engine was erupting and functioning just as von Braun had envisioned, producing a combined 7.6 million pounds of thrust, or 160 million horsepower—enough energy to power the entire United Kingdom at peak usage time—as the rocket began to inch upward.
One minute into the flight, Apollo 8 reached the speed of sound—767 miles per hour—and an altitude of about 24,000 feet. At that point, the roar and crackle generated by the interaction between engine exhaust and air could not move fast enough to catch up to the spacecraft, and the cabin grew quiet, the hum of its instrument panel the only noise Borman could detect. To him, it now sounded as if he was flying an unpowered glider.
And then he felt something go wrong. The rocket beneath him started to shake furiously—a pogo—a problem similar to the one that had afflicted the unmanned Apollo 6 on the Saturn V’s second and most recent test flight.
To pull it off, Apollo 8 needed to accelerate from its current speed of about 17,400 miles per hour to nearly 24,250 miles per hour. That boost would be accomplished by the single J-2 engine on the Saturn’s third stage, which would be reignited and burned for nearly six minutes. Doing this would not, as many believed, cause the spacecraft to leave Earth orbit; rather, it would simply change the shape of Apollo 8’s orbit around Earth from a near circle into a highly elongated ellipse, one that would stretch all the way from Earth to the Moon and back.
“Apollo 8, Houston.” “Go ahead, Houston,” Borman replied. “Apollo 8. You are Go for TLI. Over.” And that was it. Shit! Collins thought. Here we are at this instant in history that shall forever be remembered, and it’s just some guy saying “You are Go for TLI.”
The Moon’s gravitational pull on Earth is equally important; without it, Earth would wobble on its axis and lose its moderate climate. Summer temperatures could exceed 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Much of Earth could sink beneath water. Spinning faster without the Moon’s grip, Earth days might last just eight hours, winds would reach hurricane strengths, and life would be difficult, if not impossible.
Earthrise was the most beautiful sight Borman had ever seen, the only color visible in all the cosmos. The planet just hung there, a jewel on black velvet, and it struck him that everything he loved—Susan, the boys, his parents, his friends, his country—was on that tiny sphere, a brilliant blue and white interruption in a never-ending darkness, the only place he or anyone else had to call home.
As Apollo 8 came around the limb of the Moon and readied to reconnect with home, it seemed to Anders so strange—the astronauts had come all this way to discover the Moon, and yet here they had discovered the Earth.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
