MISSION MOON
Picture-perfect Apollo 8 mission charts course for lunar landing
Our special anniversary coverage of the July 20, 1969, moon landing continues today as we look at the Apollo 8 mission’s success in setting the stage for Apollo 11’s lunar landing.
Follow the Mission Moon series at houstonchronicle.com/missionmoon.
All NASA wanted for Christmas was a trip to the moon. Or to be precise, a brief voyage to the general lunar vicinity — just close enough for a spin around the block.
As it turned out, the space agency got all it could have hoped for, and more. Earlier plans called for Apollo 8 to be another test flight in Earth orbit. What it became as a result of contractor delays and some bold thinking was the most spectacular event yet in human spaceflight, complete with a Christmas Eve reading of Biblical passages during one of a half-dozen live TV broadcasts.
By the time the mission was history, six days and a halfmillion miles after lifting off, Americans could finally taste the possibility of President John F. Kennedy’s brash promise being realized. Though less remembered today than a similar flight seven months later, Apollo 8 offered a redemptive coda to a year marked by tragedy and strife.
“Thank you, Apollo 8,” an anonymous fan wrote in a telegram to the crew. “You saved 1968.”
That year of turmoil — in Vietnam, eastern Europe and the streets of the United States — ended with a journey where no one had gone before. The dicey mission was picture perfect. Literally. From one of the cameras emerged a photograph, later titled “Earthrise,” that became one of the most famous ever taken. Showing only a portion of the Earth as it rose above the arc of a colorless moon, the image became the signature picture of both the Apollo program and the burgeoning environmental movement.
The three men who flew the mission — Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders — returned home rock stars. Everyone wanted to meet them, touch them, hear them.
Linchpin of Apollo program
When conceived, Apollo 8 was to be a thorough test of the lunar module. Problems with the fragile and finicky lander, however, were turning into an engineering nightmare. A final version of the machine that would lower two astronauts to the surface would not be ready until 1969.
That’s when George Low, head of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, came up with an idea. Rather than use the launch for something that had mostly been done, why not leapfrog the planned sequence of flights and send the astronauts to the moon? NASA needed confirmation that its overall concept had no unseen flaws and that the ground personnel were ready. In essence, that made Apollo 8 the linchpin of the program’s final push, and its best chance of keeping the deadline in play.
Although every mission up to the moon landing was to some degree a test flight, the revised Apollo 8 was an order of magnitude greater than any that had been done to date. It employed a Saturn V rocket and involved a real Trans Lunar Injection burn from the third stage (S-IVB) to put it on a path to the moon. Although all the hardware had been tested successfully except for the Lunar Module (its weight was replaced by a dummy stand-in), this would be the real deal.
When Borman told his wife, Susan, about the redesigned mission, she was frightened.
The rushed training period was not normal for NASA. As a longtime veteran of the spaceflight family, she knew immediately this was not just another test mission. Finally she asked Chris Kraft, NASA’s director of flight operations, about the chances of its success. Kraft asked a question of his own: Did she want a straight answer or simply words of encouragement? The truth, she replied.
“OK,” Kraft said. “How’s 5050?”
For the first time in their NASA lives, Susan Borman started to sense she might never see her husband again.
The fear was not unfounded, even for those who long ago accepted the risk involved. No human had ever left Earth’s orbit.
Magic words: ‘You are go’
The early morning launch on Dec. 21 was perfect. All the modifications to the three rocket stages and the weeks of intensive testing had done the job. The spacecraft was placed into the proper “parking” orbit for about two and a half hours so that the crew could make sure the Command/Service Module was ready to go. Once done, they heard the magic words: “You are go for TLI.”
Moments later the S-IVB third stage fired up. The speed of the spacecraft increased fourfold during the five-minute burn. It passed through the Van Allen radiation belts and was on its way to the moon. With the second hurdle cleared, the crew settled in for an uneventful trip of two and a half days. In their down time, of which there was plenty, they hosted two TV broadcasts that made up in novelty what they lacked in drama. Of course, nobody wanted drama anyway.
The third hurdle came when the CSM engine had to fire up and place it in orbit around the moon. The crew would be out of radio contact with Mission Control when the burn took place, so no one back in Houston would know whether the little spacecraft was in some crazy orbit or smashed into the surface, the likely results of an engine burn too short or long. Borman, Lovell and Anders, each an experienced military pilot before becoming an astronaut, went over their checklist before igniting the engine at 69 hours, 8 minutes and 16 seconds after liftoff.
The astronauts later said it was the longest four minutes of their lives. But at the precise moment, with their fate on the line, the engine shut off. The CSM was now in an elliptical orbit around the moon. Those at Mission Control didn’t know that. For them, the wait was an agonizing 33 minutes before the crackling radio came to life.
Somehow it worked just as drawn up. For the next 20 hours, the little spaceship ovaled around the moon, allowing those on board to take thousands of photographs and do another TV broadcast, this one on Christmas Eve. They described their up-close view of the lifeless lunar landscape, the void surrounding it and the blue planet in the distance.
“The vast loneliness up here … is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth,” Lovell said. “The
Earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space.”
The crew closed by taking turns reading the first 10 verses of Genesis. For those watching back home, it was an emotional moment. But when it was done, the crew had one final, crucial bit of business. The SPS engine of the service module had to fire for about three and a half minutes — the Trans Earth Injection — to pull the craft out of lunar orbit for the return cruise.
“It must work perfectly again,” CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite told his viewers, “because if it fails, Apollo 8 could be caught in that lunar orbit.”
Agonizing silence
Soon the crew was once more out of radio contact. Mission Control again waited anxiously. They should hear something in about a quarter of an hour. It seemed like 10 times that. Around the 12minute mark, Mission Control tried raising them. Nothing. Then 18 seconds later. Silence. Then another 28 seconds, then a longer pause, 48 seconds. Another 48. Nada.
It had been almost 15 and a half minutes. Horrible thoughts whizzed through the heads of various controllers. What would it mean if the silence continued? Could there be another explanation besides the obvious one if communication was down?
Suddenly the silence was broken by the familiar voice of Lovell.
“Houston, Apollo 8, over,” Lovell said.
“Hello, Apollo 8, loud and clear,” came the standard response.
“Roger, please be informed that there is a Santa Claus.”
That message wasn’t as off the cuff as it sounded. It was intended to convey that all was right with the spacecraft and that its passengers were heading home. A couple of days later they arrived, on time and in the right spot — freshly minted heroes who would soon embark on a whirlwind tour of non-stop celebration.
All the accolades came because the three men and their spaceship had done something that no one ever had, something that few even thought doable not so many years earlier. Low’s roll of the dice had paid off. Then again, Apollo 8 had only gotten near the moon. As impressive as that was, the goal was to stand upon it.