THEY GAVE US OUR 1ST LOOK AT OURSELVES
Apollo 8 went to the moon – and showed us the Earth
AS Frank Borman trained for the Apollo 9 mission in August 1968, he and crew members Jim Lovell and Bill Anders had seven months to prepare to orbit the Earth. Then their plans changed. According to Time magazine journalist Jeffrey Kluger’s new book, “Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon” (Henry Holt and Co.), NASA officials informed Borman they wanted to switch his crew from Apollo 9 to Apollo 8, altering the mission in two critical ways. For one, they would now have only 16 weeks to prepare. And instead of orbiting the Earth, they would now become the first human beings to travel to, then orbit, the moon.
Borman’s wife, Susan, was well aware of the danger, and wanted a straight take. She asked Chris Kraft, NASA’s director of flight operations, to level with her.
“Chris,” she said, “I really want to know what you think their chances are of coming home.”
“You really mean that, don’t you?” he asked. She said yes.
“‘Okay,’ he said directly. ‘How’s 50-50?’ ”
WHILE the Mercury and Gemini missions flew virtually disaster-free from 1958-1966 — Gemini saw some failures, but no loss of life — the Apollo missions had not been so fortunate.
On Jan. 27, 1967, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed in an electrical fire during a test of the Apollo spacecraft. Caused by a poorly insulated electrical wire, the tragedy brought the Apollo program to a halt as the craft was redesigned, with everything aboard made fireproof.
Borman, Lovell and Anders lifted off in a Saturn V, then the most powerful rocket ever used on a space mission, on Dec. 21, 1968. Despite their training and experience — Borman and Lovell had flown on Gemini 7 — none of the crew had experience with this level of force.
Mission regulations required the commander, Borman, to keep his hand on an “abort” handle throughout liftoff, in the event that something went wrong. He complied, despite strong misgivings.
“His fear,” Kluger writes, “was that the powerful vibrations of the rocket could cause him to turn the handle by accident, ending an intended lunar mission just a few miles above the Atlantic.”
But the shaking subsided after a few minutes, and the men were safely underway.
America was transfixed by the six-day excursion. NASA had a direct line to the craft, hearing every word the astronauts said, and much of this feed was broadcast live across the world.
Walter Cronkite telecast many of the mission’s key moments. Set up three miles from the launch site, he declared, as soon as the ship left Earth, “This building is shaking under us! Our camera platform is shaking. But what a beautiful sight.”
Almost three hours into the flight, a planned acceleration from 17,500 mph to just under 25,000 mph took them out of our planet’s orbit, making them the first people in human history to not be subject to Earth’s gravity.
Sometime after, they enjoyed another first, as Borman caught a glimpse of Earth from one of the spacecraft’s windows. Astronauts aboard earlier missions had seen portions of Earth from space, but never from enough distance to have the entire planet in view.
But now, rocketing toward the moon, the astronauts saw the Earth as a globe, their view of Africa as clear as the sight of Florida. Borman said, “What a view!”
What he said he thought was: This must be what God sees.
Soon after, they faced a potentially significant problem. All three men had felt a bit queasy once they hit space, but Borman’s nausea didn’t subside, leading to fears he had caught a virus. If so, that meant the other crew members were almost certain to catch it, and the mission would have to be aborted.
At first, Borman ordered his crewmates to keep silent. But when he was still sick after 12 hours, they informed NASA, where the cause of his illness was debated. NASA’s flight surgeon, Dr. Charles Berry, recommended cancelling the mission.
Borman, hearing the news, smirked, calling it “pure, unadulterated horses--t.” He laughed off the recommendation, saying he was fine, “or at least I’m feeling better.” The first part was a lie, but the second part wasn’t. Luckily, Borman’s illness turned out to be a longer-than-normal bout of motion sickness, and he recovered soon after.
IN the midst of concerns and revelations, there were moments of levity. Given that communications between the craft and Mission Control were largely public, NASA’s public-affairs office was unhappy with some of the crude discussion — in particular, that the astronauts used the word “balls” as lingo for “zero,” leading to jargony sentences such as, “Star difference angle was four balls.”
“A female reporter at a NASA press conference raised her hand and said, ‘I don’t understand about the balls,’ ” Kluger writes. “All of the male reporters laughed until they cried.”
A few slips aside, the astronauts agreed to change “balls” back to “zero.”
There were other issues — including questions about the possibility that their urine, which they would vent out of a port on the ship’s side, might alter the flight’s trajectory — but they were relatively minor and paled in comparison to the series of firsts the astronauts racked up for humanity.
On Dec. 23, 1968, during a scheduled broadcast, TV viewers around the world saw our planet from afar for the first time. Anders held the camera, and Lovell narrated, pointing out Baja California, Cape Horn and the North Pole, all in his sights simultaneously.
“What I keep imagining,” Lovell told the world, “is if I am some lonely traveler from another planet, what would I think about the Earth from this altitude — whether I would think it would be inhabited or not . . . I was just kind of curious if I would land on the blue part [water] or the brown part [land] of the Earth.”
The next day, the three men became the first to enter lunar orbit, requiring a nerve-wracking 35-minute communications blackout that left them “disconnected from the rest of humanity in a way that no one ever had been before.”
Then, shortly after, Lovell became “the first human being in history ever to see the far side of the moon.”
The sight left the three distinguished astronauts as giddy as schoolboys.
“‘Is it below us?’ Anders asked excitedly, pressing close to his window. “‘Yes, and it’s —’ Lovell began. “‘ Oh, my God!’ Anders exclaimed . . . ‘Look at that!’ he said. ‘I see two—’ He waved his hands to fill in the word ‘craters,’ which, in his excitement, was eluding him. ‘ Look at that!’ he repeated. ‘ Fan . . . fantastic.’ ”
Anders took pictures of the Earth and the moon throughout the trip. At one point, they realized they had, for the first time, a full-on, straight-ahead view of Earth. They were mesmerized by the sight.
“‘ Oh, my God!’ Borman suddenly said. ‘Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!’ ”
Stunned silent, Anders “shook himself from his reverie first,” and rushed to remove the black-and-white film from his camera to replace it with color. The three men scrambled, with Anders screaming, “Quick! Hurry!”
The process took long enough that the view disappeared from their window, before Borman noticed they could see it from another window.
“Hey, I got it right here!” he screamed, and Anders rushed to take several shots. One, which showed the moon’s surface up close and the Earth from a distance, came to be known as “Earthrise” and became one of history’s most famous photographs.
In the years to follow, “Earthrise” would be “reproduced hundreds of millions of times on postage stamps, wall posters, T-shirts, coffee mugs and more. Both Time and Life magazines ranked it among the 100 most-influential photographs in history, and the image would be widely credited with animating the environmental movement.”
THE Apollo 8 craft landed safely back on Earth on Dec. 27.
There were celebrations in the mission’s immediate aftermath, including a ticker-tape parade in New York and a salute before both houses of Congress.
And through the collective merriment, NASA’s mission continued.
The Houston Chronicle’s James Schefter noted that, for all the joy at its milestone, the organization’s vision remained focused on the universe at large.
After describing scenes of drunken frivolity at various parties, Schefter wrote, “Over in Mission Control, a team of flight directors missed it all. Reporting for duty at 3:30 p.m. [on the same day as splashdown], they went into a 10-andone-half-hour simulation for Apollo 9. And the cycle began anew.”