The NASA mission that broadcast to a billion people
The Apollo programme was on a knife-edge when Apollo 8 blasted off 50 years ago. Its success paved the way for the Moon landings months later – and it captured the imagination with a Christmas message from orbit.
It is 21 December 1968, 7.50am, Cape Kennedy, Florida. The Apollo 8 crew – Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders – are strapped into their couches, some 110 metres above the ground at the top of the first manned Saturn 5 rocket – the most powerful machine ever built. As the final seconds tick down to launch there is little to say and little more they can do. Some four million litres of fuel is about to ignite beneath them. They are, as the watching BBC TV commentator helpfully put it, “sitting on the equivalent of a huge bomb”.
There is every reason to be concerned. During the previous unmanned test of the Saturn 5, a few months earlier, severe vibrations and g-forces shortly after launch would have likely killed anyone on board. Although the rocket has since been modified, Borman’s wife has been discretely warned by Nasa that her husband has about a 50/50 chance of surviving the mission.
The performance of the Saturn 5 rocket isn’t the only thing worrying Nasa management. Apollo 8 is a mission of firsts – a giant leap forwards in the race to land a man on the Moon. It will be the first manned spacecraft to leave Earth orbit, the first to orbit the Moon and the first to return to Earth. The mission is a calculated gamble by the space agency to beat the Soviet Union to our closest neighbour.
“It was a very, very bold decision,” says Teasel Muir-Harmony, Apollo Curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. “Everyone within the agency knew it was an extraordinarily risky mission and there was a lot of criticism of the United States putting human life at risk.”
Apollo 8 was never intended to be so ambitious. It was originally planned as the first test of the Apollo lander in Earth orbit, but production of the lander was running late. On top of that, the CIA warned that intelligence suggested the Soviets were about to attempt their own manned flight around the Moon. Everyone forgets that the Apollo programme wasn’t a voyage of exploration or scientific discovery, it was a battle in the Cold War.” Borman says.
Despite the qualms of his bosses, and after only four months of intensive training, Borman, a former military fighter pilot, says he was never in any doubt the mission would succeed. “We were obliged to change the mission to accomplish the Moon landing before the end of the decade, that President Kennedy had promised,” Borman says.
With the engines lit and countdown at zero, the Saturn 5 slowly lifts from the pad and accelerates into the clear blue Florida sky. “I felt like we were on the point of a needle,” says Borman. “The noise gave the impression of enormous power – I had a feeling of being along for the ride, rather than being in control of anything.”
“It gets very hard to breathe, almost impossible to move and your eyes flatten out so you get tunnel vision,” he recalls. Some eight minutes later they are in orbit. After one and a half orbits, they fire-up the rocket’s third stage engine and blast away from the Earth towards the Moon. Then, two days and 402,000 kilometres later, at 8.55 GMT on Christmas Eve, Borman performs the crucial engine burn on the Apollo service module that will put the spacecraft into orbit around the Moon. “I think we fired the engine something like four minutes to slow down enough to get into lunar orbit,” Borman recalls. “I’m about three quarters of the way through that and we looked down and there was the Moon.”
The crew were the first humans to ever see the far side of the Moon with their own eyes. “I don’t think anything I’d studied prepared me for the really troubled nature of the lunar surface – it was messed up beyond belief,” says Borman. “It was terribly distressed with holes, craters, volcanic residue, so it was a very interesting first view of a different world.”
And it isn’t only the view of the Moon that catches them by surprise. Some 75 hours and 48 minutes into the mission, Anders spots the blue marble of the Earth rising above the lunar horizon and scrambles for colour film to capture the moment.
“The contrast between the distressed Moon and beautiful blue Earth was remarkable, the Earth was the only thing in the entire Universe that had any colour,” says Borman. “You could see the white clouds, the brownish pink continents…we’re very fortunate to live on this planet.”
A mission that had been conceived as a risky test of human technological ingenuity and astronaut bravery is being transformed into an unexpectedly emotional experience for those involved. The Earthrise image wouldn’t be published until Apollo 8 returned to Earth but for Christmas 1968 the crew have another gift for the planet.
“Before the flight, the Nasa public affairs officer told Borman that they expected about a billion people to be tuning into their Christmas Eve TV broadcast from lunar orbit,” says Muir-Harmony. “More humans would be hearing their broadcast than any other human voice in history and he was just told to say something appropriate.”
“That is one of the most remarkable moments of a free country,” says Borman. “Can you imagine if the Soviets had been up, we’d be talking about Lenin and Stalin.” But coming-up with “something appropriate” proved far from easy. “The three of us and our wives tried to figure it out,” Borman says. “We couldn’t.”
He turned to a friend of his, who in-turn asked veteran war correspondent Joe Layton. “As I understand it, he was sitting up all night throwing crumpled-up paper away when his wife, a former French resistance fighter, suggested why don’t you start at the beginning?” With the TV cameras rolling, and as the spacecraft approached lunar sunrise on Christmas Eve, the crew start to read from the Book of Genesis. “In the beginning…” begins Anders. Borman concluded the broadcast with “good night, good luck, a merry Christmas and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”
“We were quite convinced it was the most appropriate thing to do because there is a sense of awe on my part, at least, that the Universe is bigger than all of us,” says Borman. “It’s too orderly and too enormous not to have some sort of divine creation.”
(Courtesy BBC)