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

by Robert Kurson

“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.”

it was only by attempting something impossible that a nation could truly know who it was.

And Webb added a final point. “If these three men are stranded out there and die in lunar orbit, no one—lovers, poets, no one—will ever look at the Moon the same way again.” No one had considered that. But it was true of Christmas, too. Borman, Lovell, and Anders would be in lunar orbit on December 25. If they died then, Christmas would never be the same in America. Or maybe in all the world. Every year, it would be a tragic reminder of a mission gone horribly wrong.

“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.”

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.

Almost four minutes had passed since the ground station in Australia had picked up a signal from Apollo 8 from behind the Moon—an unthinkable delay. Then, over the static and hiss of the radio connection, a voice came through to Mission Control. “Houston, Apollo 8, over.” The voice was Lovell’s. “Hello, Apollo 8,” Mattingly answered. “Loud and clear.” “Roger,” Lovell said. “Please be informed—there is a Santa Claus.”

Telegrams for the astronauts poured in by the thousands. One, however, stood out from the rest. It came not from a world leader or celebrity or other luminary, but from an anonymous stranger. It had traveled over whites-only lunch counters in the South, through jungles in Vietnam where young men fell, over the coffins of two of the America’s great civil rights leaders. It had blown across streets bloodied by protesters and police, past a segregationist presidential campaign, into radios playing songs of alienation and revolt. It had made its way through ten million American souls who didn’t have enough to eat, alongside generations that no longer trusted each other, into a White House where a no-longer-loved president slept. It read: THANKS. YOU SAVED 1968.

When I discovered that Apollo 8 was the only crew in which all the marriages survived (astronaut careers were notoriously hard on marriages) it didn’t surprise me. In a singularly beautiful story, it seemed only fitting that the first men to leave Earth considered home to be the most important place in the universe.