The flight of Apollo 8 was an exercise in uplift for the nation, and revisiting the first mission to the moon as I wrote this book was very much the same experience for me. It’s a story I’ve wanted to tell for a long time, and I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity to do so after many conversations over the years with a number of the people who made the historic flight possible.
My job was made far easier—and far richer—because of the help of the three men who flew the mission: Colonel Frank Borman, Captain Jim Lovell, and Major General Bill Anders. Borman and Anders did not know me before I began my work, yet they made themselves available for interviews and answered all of my questions thoughtfully and candidly.
The two days I spent in the summer of 2015 visiting Frank Borman in his gleaming hangar at the Billings, Montana, airport where he keeps his two planes were unforgettable experiences. He is exceedingly candid and unexpectedly funny and projects a deep and fundamental decency.
Jim Lovell, unlike the other two men of the Apollo 8 crew, is someone I have known long and well, ever since 1992, when we began working as coauthors and collaborators on the book Apollo 13. In the years since, I have been privileged to call not only Jim but the entire Lovell clan friends, and I have always remained mindful of what a gift that is. In the summer of 2012, my wife and daughters and I spent the weekend with the Lovells at their home outside of Chicago; during our stay, Jim took us to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry to see the Apollo 8 command module. On our way there, I told our girls, who were eleven and nine at the time, “You may not be quite old enough to appreciate it now, but this will be like Columbus showing you the Santa Maria.” As it turned out, they were old enough to appreciate the experience—and they still do.
I am indebted, as well, to other veterans of the Apollo program who took the time to share their thoughts and reliably answered my calls and e-mails whenever I had questions—which, I confess, was often. Those people, listed alphabetically, are: Michael Collins, Gerry Griffin, Gene Kranz, Glynn Lunney, and Milt Windler. I also benefited from the dozens of interviews I conducted years ago when Jim Lovell and I were writing Apollo 13. Some of the people whose recollections again proved helpful were John Aaron, Jerry Bostick, Pete Conrad, Chuck Deiterich, Dick Gordon, Chris Kraft, Sy Liebergot, Jim McDivitt, Wally Schirra, and Guenter Wendt. For Apollo 8, I also had the singular experience of interviewing Gene Smith, a close friend of Gerry Griffin’s and an Air Force fighter pilot who spent 1,967 days as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam during the years the Apollo program was flying. The material from our conversations—as can often happen—did not make it into the final version of the book, but my appreciation for his time and his service to the country is undiminished.
The canon of space books is deep and long, and a number of the best of those books were helpful to me as I worked. They included: Countdown, by Frank Borman; A Man on the Moon, by Andrew Chaikin, Rockets and People, by Boris Chertok; Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins; Flight, by Chris Kraft; Failure Is Not an Option, by Gene Kranz; Genesis, by Robert Zimmerman; and Apollo 8, the official NASA mission report.
Perhaps the best source of material on the history of NASA is NASA itself. The Johnson Space Center History Office, in particular, offers an almost bottomless wealth of documents, mission transcripts, images, and more. Especially valuable is the center’s Oral History Project, which makes available more than a thousand detailed interviews with key figures from NASA’s past, many of whom are no longer living. It is a gift to history that this project exists.
Throughout this book, all conversations inside the spacecraft and between the astronauts and the ground were drawn from NASA mission transcripts. In some cases, the exchanges were edited or compressed for clarity and readability; in no event was the meaning or context changed. Conversations for which there is no historic transcript were reconstructed from interviews with the principals involved or from biographies and autobiographies.
The confidential exchanges that took place in the Soviet Union’s Central Research Institute building, outside of Moscow, were originally reported in volume 4 of Boris Chertok’s four-volume Rockets and People. The sources for details about Chris Kraft’s meeting with Admiral John McCain Jr. and Susan Borman’s conversation with Kraft about the odds for Apollo 8’s success were interviews with Kraft and Borman included in the PBS American Experience program Race to the Moon.
My most readily available archive was the searchable online history of Time magazine, which, along with Life magazine, was the country’s leading source of space news during the days of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Thanks to managing editor Nancy Gibbs for permitting me to use the original reporting files that were telexed and wired from Houston to New York during the Apollo 8 mission—and survive today on perforated printer paper and yellow onionskin. I have been privileged to be a part of the Time family for more than twenty years, and could happily do another twenty.
A word of appreciation, too, goes to the New York Times for its TimesMachine site, an archive of every issue of the paper going back more than 165 years. It is an extraordinary tool for researching both historic events and, more important, the context in which they unfolded.
I found additional valuable material at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. The facility fulfills both parts of its mission—as a library and a museum—extraordinarily well.
In one of life’s wonderful bits of serendipity, the original proposal for this book landed in the hands of the talented John Sterling of Henry Holt and Company. It was John who, in 1992, saw the power and potential in the story of Apollo 13, signed me to my first publishing contract, and shaped that book into what it became. And it is John who, two decades later, worked the same magic with Apollo 8. His passion for the story and his exacting method of editing were perfectly expressed when he explained to me, “I read hot and I edit cold.” It is precisely the balance that every manuscript—and every author—needs. Thanks also to copy editor Bonnie Thompson for bringing a jeweler’s eye to the business of reading and correcting the manuscript.
Like every book I’ve ever written, this one would not have been possible without the wise guidance of Joy Harris of the Joy Harris Literary Agency. Joy, like John, made Apollo 13 happen so long ago, and she has shared with me all of the literary adventures that have unfolded since. Over time, the qualities of an extraordinary agent and an extraordinary friend have come together in a single person, one I’m deeply lucky to know.
Finally, thanks and love go to my wife, Alejandra, and my daughters, Elisa and Paloma. They have understood, as I’ve written this book, the music I find in the moon—just as they’ve helped me see the lyricism in so many other things.