Apollo missions and capturing the spirit of the ages.

On Friday, at 7:51 a.m. Eastern time, we shall strike the 50th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 8, the first manned mission to lunar orbit. By the time I was a 1970s Apollo enthusiast child, the Apollo 11 mission that was the first to land men on the moon had already become the supreme moment in the mythology of lunar conquest. Everybody has always been able to name Neil and Buzz. The only Apollo 8 crew member whose name may be a household word is James Lovell, and that is mostly because he was played by Tom Hanks in a movie about a different mission.

But Apollo 8 was the first time men “went to the moon,” and that is how it was thought of at the time. The adventure of Lovell, Frank Borman and Bill Anders created a global impression we cannot recapture, knowing the ending of the whole story. Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the Apollo program, viewed from today, is how quickly the whole thing came together under the pressure of Soviet competition and a martyred president’s end-ofdecade deadline. The various golden anniversaries we are now observing have helped to throw this into relief.

The testing disaster we now refer to as the “Apollo 1” fire happened on Jan. 27, 1967. In the setting of 2018, one has to imagine that this would annihilate the hopes of landing humans on the Moon by New Year’s Eve of 2019. The full-stack Saturn V vehicle was still almost a year away from its first flight, but lives were already being taken on the ground. The victims of Apollo 1 weren’t killed by an exotic fuel or a spectacular explosion: they were done in by bad wiring and thoughtless use of pure oxygen.

The Apollo bureaucracy could have hit the pause button, even with the Russians possibly breathing down the neck of the United States. It is hard to talk about the space race without using dismissive, misleading words like “prestige” or “publicity.” This was a serious moral contest with genuine effects on history. But American government could probably still have insisted on a relaxation of the pace of Apollo — as it would now, in a period when manned space “exploration,” at least in its public-funded form, is more obviously a matter of conspicuous consumption and cultivating approved attitudes.

The capitalist party line could have been that the space race is not, after all, a war. Hell, we don’t take orders from John F. Kennedy’s ghost. Go ahead, Ivan. Have the lunar real estate if you can put your slave son it.

But, of course, the people in charge of all this were of a species different from ourselves. It is not just a matter of war and depression: even the Apollo astronauts, who had mostly been in school during the Second World War, are separated from us by pre-antibiotic, pretelevision childhoods. The American response to the Apollo 1 tragedy, accepted by an eager public with minimum unease, was not to question the haste or the necessity of the project. It was “Well, now we’ve REALLY got work to do.” The fire did not make things safer, overall, for the other astronauts: the tightening timeline only made things more dangerous.

This is especially true of Apollo 8. Grumman, the builder of the lunar landing module, was supposed to have it mission-ready before the end of 1968. In June the firm delivered a defective LM to Cape Canaveral for an unmanned test, and had to admit defeat. NASA’S reaction was to improvise. NASA manager George Low concluded, or guessed, that the Apollo command module and the Saturn rocket were good enough to fly to the moon while Grumman was perfecting the lander.

This decision was officially made on Aug. 19, 1968

APOLLO 8 WAS THE FIRST TIME MEN ‘WENT TO THE MOON.’

— and only then was the crewing sorted out: James Mcdivitt’s group was next in line for a mission, but they had trained for LM testing, and so Mcdivitt let Borman, Lovell and Anders skip ahead and tour the moon. Flying with a lunar module mockup, essentially a hunk of ballast, meant that the trio didn’t have a second engine to work with in the case of an emergency. They had only the service module engine — and if you have seen that Tom Hanks movie, you know how that engine went kablooey on Lovell in April 1970.

On the earlier mission, that same fuel-tank defect would have condemned Lovell and his shipmates to death. The Apollo story is full of lucky breaks such as this — close shaves or missed bullets whose uncanniness we can only appreciate in hindsight. As for the spirit which led men to defy those chances, I wonder if we can recognize that at all, or even accept it. We sometimes seem more concerned with revising the Apollo myth to serve as a fable of the importance of STEM education, or proof of the moral superiority of scientists. And, in truth, we cannot be denied this privilege: generational tailoring is part of what myths are for.