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

by Robert Kurson

Training consumed all the astronauts’ lives. By now, some of them were struggling in their marriages; the demands of the job, and the easy availability of women on the road, put a strain on their relationships. For Lovell and Borman it was different. Neither man caroused or stayed out late—not just because it wasn’t the right thing to do, but because neither had the impulse to do it. They were in love with their wives—their best friends—women who’d loved them since the days when they were nothing but dreams, their lives just a blur of military base transfers.

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.

Lovell was overwhelmed by the smallness of Earth, home to three and a half billion people who, from this vantage point, all wanted the same things—a family to love, food to eat, a roof over their heads, children to kiss. From this distance, he could scarcely comprehend the fragility of Earth’s atmosphere, a layer no thicker than the skin on an apple, the only thing that protected those lives, and life itself.

To Anders, Earth appeared as a Christmas tree ornament, hung radiant blue and swirling white in an endless black night. From here, it was no longer possible to pick out countries or even continents; all a person could see was Earth, and it occurred to Anders, in this last week of 1968, this terrible year for America and the world, that once you couldn’t see boundaries, you started to see something different. You saw how small the planet is, how close all of us are to one another, how the only thing any of us really has, in an otherwise empty universe, is each other. As Apollo 8 came around the limb of the Moon and read...

As of this printing all three of Apollo 8’s astronauts were still married to their wives. They are the only crew that flew in either the Gemini or Apollo programs whose marriages all survived.