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

by Robert Kurson

Second, if the crew had any doubts or worries during the mission—with how the flight was progressing, with the function of the spacecraft or systems, with anything—he should feel free to abort the mission and bring the ship back early, and Paine would guarantee a seat on a subsequent flight as soon as possible. No one, he told the astronauts, would lose his chance to go to the Moon for ending a flight in the name of safety.

The Lindberghs were interested to hear that one’s sensation of altitude decreased as one flew higher, until it hardly seemed to register in space (where the familiar scenery that helped people judge distance from the ground all but disappeared), and to learn that in space there was no up or down.

Now fully kitted up, with pure oxygen flowing into their suits from portable ventilators, Borman, Lovell, and Anders were already separated from Earth, the only three men on the planet who needed the planet no more.

the equigravisphere, the point at which Earth and Moon exert an equal pull of gravity.

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.

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.