Apollo 8 dared to save America
‘Rocket Men’ is a story of triumph amid tumult
You may not remember the mission, but you’ve seen the iconic photo — and the U.S. postage stamp — of the blueand-white Earth over a gray lunar landscape. The mission was Apollo 8, and the photo, known as Earthrise, was taken while the crew was orbiting the moon.
Apollo 8 came at the end of 1968, a year of horrifying news: the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the My Lai massacre, and the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
Robert Kurson looks back 50 years to Apollo 8, its voyage and its rejuvenating effect on a troubled American psyche in Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (Random House, 336 pp., out of four).
Kurson’s first-rate account of this remarkable spaceflight starts by reminding us what a gamble it was, a revelatory wake-up nudge for anyone who thinks moon flights were routine.
Those flights were anything but routine. The lunar program started with the tragic loss of three astronauts in a fire aboard their Apollo 1 spacecraft in a prelaunch test in January 1967. Their deaths shocked the nation and forced NASA to make numerous changes in its push to the moon.
As the space agency struggled with delays, U.S. intelligence sources reported that the Soviets were planning to launch their own cosmonauts on a circumlunar flight in late 1968, a prologue that would have given the Russians the edge for the first moon landing.
NASA wanted to get there first, and program managers drew up an ambitious plan to send three astronauts to orbit the moon and return to Earth. It had never been done before.
After intense debate — “If these three men are stranded out there and die in lunar orbit, no one — lovers, poets, no
one — will ever look at the moon the same way again,” one official says — the plan is approved.
NASA and the crew of Apollo 8 — commander Frank Borman, command module pilot James Lovell and lunar module pilot Bill Anders — knew the mission was a bold move and a gamble. Too many things could go wrong.
The giant Saturn V rocket, the most powerful ever built, had been tested twice in unmanned flights but never with a crew. The service module engine, the rocket used for orbiting the moon and getting the crew back to Earth, had to function without flaw.
There are many pieces to the Apollo 8 story, but Kurson brings them together effortlessly. We see the human aspect of the flight from stories of the astronauts and how their families cope with the danger of the mission. We learn the engineering challenges that must be overcome. We learn the engineering challenges that must be overcome and how Apollo 8 paved the way for subsequent flights, most important the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969.
All of this is going on as America seethes and riots over civil rights and the Vietnam War. But times of trouble give way to hopes for the future. Kurson puts us in the command module as the astronauts read movingly from the Book of Genesis and on Christmas Eve as Anders takes the historic photo that astounded America and the world.