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

by Robert Kurson

The United States was the most technologically advanced nation in the world; twelve years earlier, it had helped end World War II in dramatic fashion when it used the nuclear bomb it developed in strikes against Japan. It should have been the first to put a satellite into orbit. Instead, on the same night that Sputnik launched, CBS aired the debut episode of Leave It to Beaver, a sitcom about a squeaky-clean family living in picket-fenced suburbia with all the modern conveniences.

The bomb was America’s effort to end the war in the Pacific Theater, but the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin saw it as more than that: To him, it was a sign of America’s intention to dominate the world.

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.

Project Gemini, designed to perfect techniques the Apollo flights would use to land men on the Moon, opened a floodgate of progress. In the Soviet Union, the skies darkened. Its space program had managed a few interesting missions, but nothing close to the game changers that had put them so far ahead for so long. By the end of 1966, the Soviets were panicked. For the first time since the Space Race began, they were losing.

The question then became at what altitude to orbit. Kraft and his men wanted Apollo 8 to fly just 69 miles above the lunar surface, the same altitude at which the command and service modules would operate during a future landing mission. That required almost unimaginable precision, equivalent in scale to throwing a dart at a peach from a distance of 28 feet—and grazing the very top of the fuzz without touching the fruit’s skin. If that weren’t daunting enough, the Moon would be barreling through space at nearly 2,300 miles per hour. Toss a peach in the air at 28 feet and now hit the top of the fuzz with a dart. That’s what these trajectory experts were proposing to do. And soon everyone agreed to do it.

Borman looked at the other men in the room. Each wore the same expression: We know this is impossible, but we still think it can work.

The new astronauts became instant celebrities. As with the Original Seven, each received a contract with Life magazine and Field Enterprises that paid him $16,000 a year for exclusive access to his and his family’s personal stories. For her part, Susan would be obliged to speak at luncheons and urge young mothers to buy World Book encyclopedias (published by Field Enterprises) for their families.

As November rolled in, Kraft found himself facing a new problem: Even if Apollo 8 went perfectly, there would be no one in the Pacific to pick up the crew after splashdown, since the Navy’s Pacific Fleet had already been given a reprieve for Christmas. Someone had to appeal directly to Admiral John McCain, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, to ask for special dispensation. The timing wasn’t ideal; McCain’s son, John McCain III, a Navy pilot, had been shot down over Hanoi and was being held as a prisoner of war by the North Vietnamese.

As Anders stood on the bridge, a piece of shrapnel pierced his throat, causing heavy bleeding and making it impossible for him to speak. Using his own blood as ink, Anders scrawled out directions to the crew on a chart, and the fight continued.

Early in his assignment, a Soviet bomber penetrated the eastern edge of Iceland’s Air Defense Identification Zone. Anders and his wingman scrambled into the air, afterburners blazing, and caught up with the Russian plane. Anders positioned his wingman to shoot down the bomber if its pilot gave the Americans any trouble, then flew his F-89 so close he could call out the eye colors of the Soviet crew. The Russians smiled and waved. Anders offered his own American greeting—a middle finger.

His eleven-year-old son, Alan, told how a classmate brought his fireman father to school one day, and everyone thought that kid had the coolest father of them all; in this neighborhood, it seemed every old dad was an astronaut.

“How’s fifty-fifty?” he said. To Kraft, that seemed a hopeful number, given that the crew would be accomplishing so many new things at once: the first to fly the Saturn V, the first to journey to the Moon, and the first to confront the other myriad new challenges involved. In fact, Kraft had misunderstood Susan’s question. He thought she was asking about the odds of a successful mission, in which its objectives were met and the spacecraft and systems performed as designed. He and Low had figured those odds to be about 56 percent. If he’d understood that Susan was asking about the crew’s chances of surviving the mission, he would have placed the odds higher. And yet Susan, who believed her husband had no chance of coming home alive, was happy with a fifty-fifty shot that Frank would live.

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.”

The astronauts were equally interested to learn of a conversation Lindbergh once had in the 1930s with Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocket engineering. 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.

Lovell looked down to the ground 320 feet below. He could see the lights of the press corps as they arrived at their designated sites, and all of a sudden it hit him: These NASA people are serious. They’re going to send us to the Moon. My God, we really are doing this.

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.

Susan Borman forgot for a moment that Frank was going to die on the flight. Instead she sat, still in her fancy cream-colored dress with a string of pearls around her neck, knees up against her chest, hands clasped, awestruck; to her, seeing Apollo 8 launch was like watching the Empire State Building leave Earth.

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.

Anders gestured to the others to hand him their helmets so he could stow them. He was surprised to see that each one had a gouge just like the one he’d made when trying to protect his face during the violent shutdown of the rocket’s first stage. I guess we’re all rookies on a Saturn V, he thought.

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.

To Collins, a man to whom history mattered, the event required words worthy of the moment, a statement that not only captured this cutting of the cosmic umbilical cord but would remind future generations that humankind understood the magnitude of what it was about to attempt. He radioed the spacecraft. “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.” And yet that was the way men who lived faster than sound communicated—just enough to give direction and then get out of the way.

More than eight hours and 45,000 miles into their mission, the time had come for the men to slip out of their bulky space suits. They had been wearing them since long before launch in order to breathe pure oxygen. Doing so helped to purge nitrogen from their bodies, and that had been critical during launch. As expected, the cabin’s internal air pressure dropped rapidly as the spacecraft ascended. If the crew had not purged the nitrogen from their systems, the sudden drop in pressure could have caused the nitrogen to form bubbles in their tissues that could press on nerves, lungs, spine, even the brain—a painful and potentially deadly condition common to deep-water scuba divers who surface too quickly, and known as the bends.

Even when urine was expelled properly from the spacecraft, the crew couldn’t quite be done worrying about it. Just the tiny force necessary to vent the liquid—which turned to gleaming ice crystals in the sunlit cold of space—could have a profound effect on the spacecraft’s trajectory and would have to be accounted for as the ship continued its journey.

While the Moon is one-quarter the size of Earth, its mass is only about 1 percent of that of Earth. Gravity on the Moon acts with just one-sixth the strength that it does on Earth. Every year, the Moon drifts about an inch and a half farther from Earth as a result of the acceleration effects of Earth’s ocean tides. As a result, the rotation rate of Earth is gradually reducing.

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.

“And God said, ‘Let the waters under the Heaven be gathered together unto one place. And let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. And God called the dry land Earth. And the gathering together of the waters He called seas. And God saw that it was good.” Borman paused. “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.”

NASA possessed some of the world’s most powerful computers, but it would be a simple clock that first told them whether their men were coming home.

Some had compared NASA’s challenge in finding the entry corridor to throwing a paper airplane into a public mailbox slot—from a distance of four miles.

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.

Another reporter asked, directly, when America would land on the Moon. “This summer,” Borman said. “Can you be more precise?” the reporter asked. “Apollo 11,” Borman said. What Borman didn’t say was that he, Lovell, and Anders might have been the crew for Apollo 11—if only Borman had wanted it. Deke Slayton, who assigned crews, thought that the Apollo 8 astronauts were best positioned to train for the first Moon landing, since they’d already made a lunar orbit flight. But given Borman’s decision that Apollo 8 would be his last trip in space, Slayton didn’t need to further consider Borman and his crew. In the end, Slayton decided to stay with the planned rotation, with Neil Armstrong as commander of Apollo 11.

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.

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.

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.”

Shortly after Apollo 13’s safe return in 1970, political heavyweights in Wisconsin approached Jim Lovell about running as a Republican for United States Senate in his home state. He demurred, but that didn’t stop Vice President Spiro Agnew, then President Nixon himself, from stepping in to press the recruiting effort. The election was just six months away; even with a war chest from the party, Lovell still had no structure, no party history. He passed. The decision pleased Marilyn. She knew Jim would make a fine senator but also knew that politics could tear a person’s life and family apart. To her, going to the Moon had been a safer bet than going to Washington.