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When he’d left for the Cape, he hadn’t given her any if-I-don’t-come-home speeches or recited any I’ve loved you forever goodbyes. Instead, he swept the garage, balanced the checkbook, and painted the cradle in case the baby came while he was in space.
The Soviets had already sent two flights capable of carrying men to the Moon; the Americans had sent none. NASA, they figured, would soon come to its senses and order Apollo 8 to stand down.
And neither had Apollo 8’s youngest astronaut,
Predictable transition.
But for now, beating the Russians was more important than being an ideal family man.
Susan believed, with one hundred percent certainty, that Frank was going to die aboard Apollo 8.
but for how it must feel to be a man in the final days of his standing, knowing that soon he would never again matter in the way he once had.
the only three men on the planet who needed the planet no more.
How does it feel to sit atop a vehicle built by the lowest bidder?
Orbital mechanics—the way the universe ordered and moved itself—worked. And man had figured it out to the split second.
Today, Borman, Lovell, and Anders had changed that. Today, on December 24, 1968, when humankind opened their eyes, three of their own had arrived.
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.
He liked the idea that the Moon remained alive in the heavens, that it was still changing, still becoming.
On board Apollo 8, Anders secretly hoped something would go wrong—nothing catastrophic, of course, just enough that he could show Houston, and his crewmates, how beautifully he’d mastered the spacecraft and its systems.
It was a conversation many would be having in their own households this night, Christmas Eve.
