December 21, 1968
Valerie Anders chose to watch the launch of Apollo 8 in the way that made her most comfortable—that is, in no special way at all. She would not sit in the VIP stands on the space center grounds, among a crowd of celebrities and the family members of NASA’s astronauts. She would not smell the rocket fuel or feel the ground shake or have to shade her eyes to follow the Saturn’s rise into the sky. Instead, she would perch on a wooden toy chest in the family den with her youngest child in her lap, the rest of her children at her feet and a television set in front of her. What the moment might lack in drama, it would make up in comfortable familiarity.
This would by no means be the first launch Valerie and her family had watched on TV in their den, but it would be the first they watched on a color TV. The Anderses had been among the last families in the neighborhood to trade up to that particular luxury. But given that this would be Bill’s first flight and that he’d be away from his family on the very week practically every other family in the country would be gathering together, Bill had decided that he ought to leave a special gift behind—particularly if it would allow his brood to have a better view of the beginning of his adventure.
Hours before launch, the Anders home had begun filling up with astronauts and their families. So had the Borman home, and the Lovell home would do the same once Marilyn and her children got back from the Cape. Dodie Hamblin, the Life magazine reporter whom the wives trusted—and therefore NASA trusted—was in suburban Houston today, and she would do the same kind of reporting she usually did, which involved visiting the astronauts’ homes, doing a lot of quiet observing, and asking very few questions until the moment was right and the answer might yield something more than the wifely bromides other reporters got. There was a reason NASA had made their original deal with Life and a reason they kept renewing it, and Hamblin was a big part of that.
But early that morning, the focus was on the television. Watching a Saturn V fly on a TV screen may have been nothing like watching it fly in person, but it was still very dramatic. You could sense its massive size, and even through the tinny speaker of an ordinary TV, you could hear its explosive roar. As Valerie watched the five main engines light—in full, living color—and saw the rocket rise and heard Walter Cronkite shout about his booth shaking and man perhaps being on the way to the moon, she had only one thought: “Thank you, Dr. von Braun.”
It was odd maybe, but it was apt. He had built the rocket, and that rocket, she could already tell, was flying true. She stayed to watch the Saturn do its job, shedding its first stage and dwindling to a dot. She watched as the TV animations took over to show the parts of the mission the cameras no longer could. She heard the reporters announce that her husband was in orbit around the Earth. And then, less than three hours later, she learned that he had left that orbit and was headed for the moon.
Valerie knew that she would need to take the mission as a series of such moments and milestones and that she’d have to pace herself emotionally—and pace her children, too. This was especially important since they would have to spend so much of the next six days inside the house.
The day before, she had planned to drive over to the space center commissary to lay in some supplies for what she knew would be a week of siege. A few journalists had already arrived and taken up positions in front of her house; by launch morning, the crowd of reporters and photographers would grow large enough to encircle the house, effectively imprisoning her family inside. She’d known that she had to get out early or not go at all. There were supermarkets in town, but she would surely draw notice there. At the space center, where people were forever running into an astronaut or one of the other wives, she would be nothing special.
To avoid the early-arriving journalists, Valerie had tried to slip out of the house through the children’s playroom door, which opened onto the backyard and was concealed by a wooden fence surrounding the property. Carrying Eric, the youngest, who at four years old would still suck his thumb when he was tired or overwhelmed—both of which he was today—she worked the gate open with her free hand. As soon as she did, she walked straight into a photographer. He snapped a picture of an ambushed mother and a startled-looking toddler who had just popped his thumb out of his mouth.
“Thumbs up for Dad!” the caption under the photograph in the next day’s paper would read.
Valerie, defeated even in that small venture outside, retreated indoors to begin her confinement early. Before long, however, she realized that she needn’t have worried about going shopping. By that evening, her refrigerator was stuffed with casseroles and sandwiches and potato salad and snacks, and her counters were stacked with pies and coffee cakes and cookies, all provided by the visitors who had been through this experience before and would never think of coming to the home of an astronaut on a mission without provisions.
If there was a measure of privacy to be had, it came from an accommodation NASA always made for the astronauts’ families: a small squawk box that was typically set up in a bedroom or some other less public spot. From the moment the crew took off until the moment they splashed down, the device allowed the family to listen to every second of the air-to-ground chatter. At first, the transmission was delayed by a fraction of a second; later, when the spacecraft got to the moon, that would grow to a full second and a half—the lag representing the time it took a radio signal, even traveling at 186,000 miles per second, the speed of light, to cover the 233,000-mile translunar distance. In truth, NASA had built an extra couple of seconds into the transmission, allowing for a kill switch to spare the families from hearing something they shouldn’t. Nobody in Mission Control who had heard the voices crying out from the burning Apollo 1 spacecraft could abide the idea of that horror pouring straight into the ears of the dying man’s wife or child.
Before Bill left, he had been honest with Valerie about the risks he faced and the odds that he would come home. “There’s a thirty-three percent chance the mission is a success, a thirty-three percent chance we come back safely but don’t make it to the moon, and a thirty-three percent chance we don’t come back at all,” he’d said. Anders’s odds-making sense came from the same place as Chris Kraft’s less rosy fifty-fifty prediction: his gut. And although neither man could say with certainty how he had arrived at these figures, both were confident that they were right.
Planning for every possibility, Bill had left behind two tape recordings for the children. They were to listen to the first tape on Christmas Day; they were to listen to the second tape only if it became clear that the family would never again spend Christmas together.
Valerie gave as little thought as possible to that second tape. As a pilot’s wife, she had long since developed a kill switch of her own, one that allowed her to consider only the things she could control and ignore the terrible things she couldn’t. Many of her friends were pilots’ wives, too, and a number of them had husbands in Vietnam—a very different, far bloodier battle in the Cold War than a mission to the moon. If they could shut out the fear, she thought, she could do it, too. What’s more, she would help her children learn the trick as well.
She knew she could not promise her children that their father would come home, and therefore she wouldn’t. But she could promise them that they had her, and that they always would.
“I’m here,” she told them as she tucked them into bed the night after the rocket was launched. “And I’ll be here.” She planned to repeat that every night until Bill was back.
* * *
Susan Borman’s sons did not need to be reassured the way Valerie Anders’s children did—or if they did need it, they weren’t about to let on. Fred was seventeen and Ed was fifteen, and both were now taller than their five-foot-seven-inch father. They were tall enough to be on the high school football team, in fact, and tough enough for it, too. And they were old enough to believe that there were emotions a man displayed and emotions he didn’t, and they guessed they knew the difference.
The boys got their innate calm from their father, but they got another kind—the kind you could put on even if you weren’t feeling it—from their mother. There were days when Susan needed that skill more than others, and Apollo 8’s launch day was one of them. Friends and family began arriving before dawn, and she stayed busy entertaining her guests, keeping watch over her sons, and sparing them the peckings of the press. There were no reporters in the house during liftoff, but after Apollo 8 was safely in space, she gave the gathering journalists what they needed—on her terms—emerging on the front lawn with Frank’s parents and the family dog, and without Fred and Ed. After the cameras finished capturing that tableau, she offered up a few words: “I’m always known as the person who had something to say, but today I’m speechless.”
But then she did go on to speak, answering the predictable questions with the proper declarations of confidence and pride. “The magnitude of this entire thing is very difficult to comprehend and hasn’t sunk in on me. This is very much different from Gemini 7.”
Finally, toward the end of the brief session, she said, “I’m too emotionally drained to talk.”
Then, begging the press’s pardon, she went inside. She had a very long week ahead and knew by now exactly how much attention she could spare for the reporters on any given day. For launch day, she had no more to give them.
* * *
Before the astronauts of Apollo 8 had even shed their heavy pressure suits and donned the white jumpsuits they would wear throughout their mission, they had already traveled farther from Earth than any person ever had. For more than two years, Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon had held the altitude record for humans, having flown their Gemini 11 spacecraft to a then-unprecedented 850 miles up. It took a very long time for the species to reach that pinnacle, but as Borman, Lovell, and Anders sped toward the moon at their near-escape velocity, they put that kind of mileage on the odometer every ninety-one seconds. By the time they reached the thirty-five-minute mark after the TLI burn, they had beaten Gemini 11 more than fourteen-fold, climbing to nearly 14,000 miles.
Lovell, who had flown with Conrad at Naval Air Station Patuxent River when they were both test pilots, delighted in needling his longtime friend. “Tell Conrad he lost his record,” he radioed down with a smile.
Apollo 8’s spectacular altitude should have meant an equally spectacular view of the Earth, but the crew couldn’t yet think about turning the spacecraft around to get a good look at their home planet. Soon enough they would be able to do that; once the ship was headed in one direction, physics dictated that it would continue moving in that direction no matter which way its nose was pointed. For the moment, though, the more important issue was that the Saturn V’s third stage was still hanging off the back of their service module. The rocket’s final stage had done its job well, but now it was space junk and it had to go.
The third stage was connected to the spacecraft by a ring of explosive bolts. The separation maneuver called for the crew to detonate the bolts, then pulse their thrusters to add a few extra feet per second to their speed. That would open a gap between the spacecraft and the third stage. And the gap couldn’t be small, either: when the bolts blew, the stage would begin leaking stray fuel through the severed lines, making its behavior unpredictable—the last quality you want in a twenty-three-thousand-pound piece of hardware that’s trailing right behind you. Borman preferred to avoid that kind of randomness.
Each of the astronauts had a part to play in the delicate maneuver. Anders would have the flight plan checklist in hand and read off the separation commands; Lovell would punch them into the computer and execute the explosive separation; Borman would control the thrusters once the spacecraft was free. Lovell, for one, had been looking forward to this first opportunity to operate the computer in flight: he had spent many hours practicing with the powerful electronic brain on the ground, and now it was finally time to test it for real.
The computer, which was operated via a nine-button keypad, was relatively compact, but it had a very large screen that was able to display twenty-one characters in a single line from left to right. The language of the machine was, in its way, a great deal like spoken English, consisting principally of verbs and nouns that were represented by numbers. During months of training, Lovell had made it his business to learn how to speak the computer’s language fluently. A verb represented some action that was to be taken, and a noun represented the thing that was supposed to be acted upon. Punch in the verb 82, which stood for “request orbital parameter display,” and the computer would digest the command and then wait for more. Which orbital parameters exactly? Inclination? Velocity? There were a lot of them. Following the 82 with a 43—for latitude, longitude, and altitude—would complete the command, and the computer would respond. Fortunately, the complex separation maneuver would be made somewhat easier because part of the procedure was preloaded, which meant the computer had all of the nouns memorized. All Lovell needed to provide were the verbs.
Borman scanned his instrument display to make sure the ship was configured properly for the maneuver. It was.
“All right,” he said with a nod at his crew.
“Okay, verb 62, enter,” Anders read out.
“Verb 62, enter,” Lovell confirmed and punched the proper key.
“Verb 49, enter,” Anders said.
“Verb 49, enter,” Lovell repeated.
Anders scanned his instruments and nodded in approval. “Okay,” he said, “proceed.”
“Roger,” Lovell answered and pressed the button on the display panel that read just that: PROCEED.
The bump that occurred when the bolts exploded took all three men by surprise. It was certainly tolerable, especially compared to the earthquake of the launch, but it was much more of a punch in the back than the simulations had led them to believe it would be.
Borman shook off the jolt, grabbed the pistol-grip handle that fired the spacecraft’s thrusters, and began edging forward. Once he had opened up what the instruments told him was a sufficient gap, he planned to pitch the ship backward so that the crew could look through the windows and confirm that distance. But the windows were small and the third stage could be anywhere; it would not be easy to bring it into frame.
Borman fired his jets, performed the half somersault, and looked out his window. Nothing. He nosed left, then right; up, then down. Still nothing.
“Man, where’s that S-IVB?” he said. “Anybody see it now?”
Lovell and Anders squinted through their own windows, staying silent as Borman continued to ply the thrusters.
After another moment, Lovell called out: “There it is!”
“You found it?” Borman asked.
“Right in the middle! Right in the middle of my window!”
The third stage was there all right—bright white and reflecting the sun. By eyeball reckoning, it appeared to be as far behind their spacecraft as the computer said it was, which was several dozen yards, but that was not yet far enough. Borman could see that it was spraying so much fuel that it was in danger of tumbling out of control and presenting a collision hazard. Not caring for that possibility, Borman began contemplating whether an evasive maneuver would be necessary.
Then, suddenly, all thoughts of the troublesome third stage fell away, because in that moment he saw something much, much grander. He saw the Earth.
It was a view that American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts had seen from space many times before, but in those cases, the planet had been a broad arc, too big to fit into the aperture of a window because it was too close. Now, however, Borman, Lovell, and Anders could see the planet floating alone, unsupported, in space. The Earth was no longer the soil beneath their feet or the horizon below their spacecraft. It was an almost complete disk of light suspended in front of them, a delicate Christmas tree ornament made of swirls of blue and white glass. It looked impossibly beautiful—and impossibly breakable.
What Borman said aloud was: “What a view!”
What Borman thought was: This must be what God sees.
Then he collected himself. “We see the Earth now, almost as a disk,” he radioed down.
“Good show,” Collins said. “Get a picture of it.”
Borman gestured to Anders, but the prompt wasn’t necessary; the mission photographer was already assembling his cameras. Lovell looked out the window and described the scene Anders would capture.
“We have a beautiful view of Florida now,” he said. “We can see the Cape, just the point. At the same time, we can see Africa. West Africa is beautiful.” Then, to stress the magnitude of what he had just said—the perspective he had—he added, “I can also see Gibraltar at the same time I’m looking at Florida.” More than that, he could see Cuba, Central America, and most of South America. “All the way down through Argentina and down through Chile,” he said.
Borman allowed himself to take in the view for a moment longer, then turned his mind from sightseeing back to business. No matter how NASA had expected the third stage to behave at this point in the mission, it clearly wasn’t playing along. It was supposed to leak only a little fuel and then conduct what was known as a blow-down maneuver, emptying whatever remained in its tanks in a quick and tidy blast to prevent uncontrolled venting. But Borman was not looking at anything like quick and tidy now.
“Boy, it’s pretty spectacular,” the commander said. “It’s spewing down from all sides like a huge water sprinkler.”
“Get some pictures of it,” Collins instructed again.
Borman wasn’t thrilled with this directive. Photographing the third stage wasn’t nearly as important as being done with it; in his mind, this was exactly the kind of freelancing that could end in misery. But the ground wanted pictures, and at least at this point, Borman wasn’t about to disobey.
Lovell heard Collins’s request, and since the third stage was visible in his window, he took the camera from Anders.
“Could you pitch up a little?” he asked Borman.
The commander complied.
“Could you pitch a little more?”
Borman gave the thrusters another tweak.
Anders moved up to Lovell’s window and squinted outside. “We haven’t got it in here yet,” he said. “Could you pitch just a little more?”
“I’m not going to fly around the damn thing,” Borman snapped. He puffed the thrusters a bit more, until Lovell at last had the view he needed and fired off a fusillade of shots.
Anders, glancing at Borman and guessing that his patience was just about worn through, turned back to Lovell. “Don’t you think that’s enough pictures of it?” he said.
Lovell lowered the camera and handed it back to Anders.
Borman directed one more glower at the misbehaving third stage. Then he looked back down at his thruster pistol grip.
“Houston, Apollo 8,” he radioed down. “I suggest a separation maneuver if that’s all right with you.”
There was silence on the ground. Borman could practically see the flight controllers contemplating this idea, conferring with one another about whether to green-light so routine a procedure as an unplanned thruster firing. He gave them about twenty seconds to consider the matter.
“Houston, Apollo 8,” he repeated.
His words were again greeted with silence. This time he gave them just six seconds.
“Roger,” he said with finality. “I believe we’re going to have to thrust to get away from this thing.”
There would be no Wally-type mutiny on a mission Borman commanded, but there would be no dithering, either. He hit his thrusters and Apollo 8 jumped quickly away from the third stage, leaving it to fall into its trash-can orbit around the sun.
* * *
If the global audience that was following the mission during its first twenty-four hours had been listening carefully, at least a few of its members might have noticed a troubling bit of chatter going on between the spacecraft and the ground. It’s a safe bet that no one actually noticed; there was too much else to pay attention to as the spacecraft blew through its 14,000-mile altitude record, increasing it more than eight-fold to 120,000 miles in the time it took the Earth to turn just once.
Even more exciting was the promise of several live TV broadcasts from space. The first was due to occur at the thirty-one-hour point in the mission, or about 3:00 p.m. eastern time on December 22; at that time, the folks at home would be able to see the planet they inhabited from the same surreal perspective enjoyed by the astronauts.
Still, there was that occasional troubling chatter. To the uninformed listener, it would almost certainly be merely puzzling.
Anders, for instance, would say: “Houston, we’ve rewound the tape. You can dump it at your convenience.”
And Collins would respond: “Apollo 8, Houston. We’re going to try to dump your tape right now.”
A while later, one of the astronauts would say that NASA might enjoy some interesting details on those tapes, and then he would request that NASA let the crew know their opinion of the tapes once they’d had a chance to listen to them.
What the crew and the ground were talking about was the DSE, or data storage equipment, which they more casually referred to as the dump tapes. Installed in Apollo 8’s cockpit was a recording system that remained on, more or less continuously, from liftoff to splashdown. The dump tapes recorded everything the astronauts said to one another in the privacy of their spacecraft, without the air-to-ground loop picking up what was being discussed. Not only did the tapes create an important historical record, they would also provide critical information if there were ever an accident on board and a later investigative committee had to determine the cause of the problem.
Most important was that the taping system gave the crew a way to record a private message to Mission Control and then transmit it at high speed without anyone in the larger world listening in. But Mission Control would need to find a spare moment to listen to the damn thing, and at present they were taking their time about doing so. That was a problem, because what the crew wanted the ground to know was that Borman was sick—and it wasn’t just the mild motion sickness that Lovell and Anders had experienced early on.
For the better part of twelve hours, Borman had been alternating between throwing up and battling the urge to throw up, a fight he often lost. He was also experiencing intermittent episodes of very loose bowels, a symptom that often accompanies this kind of digestive upset. Both problems were extremely difficult to manage in a spacecraft that had no indoor plumbing. Although the commander was going about his work and his voice betrayed nothing, he would be able to carry on that way for only so long. If Borman couldn’t eat food and hold it down, his performance would falter, and eventually he wouldn’t be able to function at all. Already, the sound and smell of his suffering were making the cramped cockpit unbearable for all three men. Worse, if Borman’s sickness had been caused by a virus, Lovell and Anders would almost certainly contract it, too.
At first, Borman forbade the crew to breathe a word to the ground. “I’m not going to say anything at all,” he told them when Houston wasn’t listening. “And you guys shut up, too.”
But after half a day, Borman himself was worried. He had never gotten sick in an airplane in his life unless he was hungover—which happened at least a few times in any Air Force man’s career. During the Gemini 7 mission, his stomach had been rock steady for fourteen straight days. This time, however, his digestive system was in full revolt.
Lovell and Anders knew that if he had to, Borman would just grind it out, and that worried them. But finally they persuaded him to sign off on the dump-tape plan, which would eventually bring the problem to the attention of the flight surgeon, Dr. Charles Berry—or so they hoped.
Hours after the recorded transmissions had been sent, Houston at last picked up the hints the crew was sending.
Glynn Lunney was at the flight director’s console; Cliff Charlesworth, though he was not on duty, was nearby. They both suspected that whatever the crew was going on about, it might be a medical issue. Lunney asked Charlesworth to summon Berry and said that the two of them should meet him in a backup control room just one floor down; there they could listen to the tapes in private and communicate with the crew if they needed to. Berry, in turn, called Collins, who had recently ended his shift on the capcom console and turned the microphone over to rookie astronaut Ken Mattingly.
The four men arrived in the backup room, shut the door, and listened to the tapes in mounting alarm. The best case was motion sickness. The not-good case was a virus. The worst case—the one that occurred to Berry immediately—was radiation sickness. It was consistent with the sudden onset; it was consistent with the vomiting; it was consistent with the diarrhea. And on this mission, a ready source of radiation poisoning had been impossible to avoid: the Van Allen belts, the bands of radiation that surround the Earth from a low of 620 miles up to a high of 37,000 miles.
Gemini 11 had briefly grazed the lower edge of the belts. But the Apollo 8 crew had plowed right through them, getting a full dose of the high-energy rays, with little to stop them but the comparatively thin skin of the spacecraft itself. Even at the high speed the ship was traveling, the crew would need two hours to clear the upper limits of the radiation field.
Berry had been fretting about the risks the Van Allen belts posed since the beginning of the Apollo program, but there was no way off the planet Earth except to push through those thousands of miles of radiation, so they had built the most robust ship they could and hoped the crew would not suffer any ill effects. Now Borman was displaying exactly the right symptoms at exactly the right point in time.
Berry raised the radiation-poisoning possibility to Lunney, Charlesworth, and Collins, but they weren’t persuaded. Lovell and Anders were healthy, weren’t they?
So far, Berry answered.
And even if the belt extended more than 36,000 miles high, they reminded him, the radiation dose was low all the way through—little more than what a man would get from a chest X-ray.
Yes, Berry replied, a two-hour chest X-ray.
Still, Berry was a scientist, and he had to agree that if the other two astronauts were not experiencing Borman’s symptoms, it was unlikely that radiation sickness was causing the commander’s distress.
The likeliest explanation, to his way of thinking, was a virus, and that would create a serious situation. According to flight rules, that left him only one option.
“I’m recommending that we consider canceling the mission,” he said.
Lunney, Charlesworth, and Collins looked at him in disbelief. But also according to flight rules, their only option was to get on the radio and send the medical man’s opinion up to the ship. Still in the backup control room, they called the crew and got right to the point.
“Dr. Berry thinks you’ve caught a bug, and he’s worried Bill and Jim are going to get it, too,” Collins said to Borman. “He’s recommending that we consider canceling the mission.”
“What?” Borman exclaimed. He turned to Lovell and Anders, equal parts amused and outraged by the suggestion. Looking at his crewmates and lowering his voice to a mutter, he said, “That is pure, unadulterated horseshit.” The other two men nodded in agreement.
For Houston’s benefit, Borman collected himself. “Look, you’ve got three mature people in a spacecraft here, and we’re not just going to turn around and come home. I’m fine.” That was hardly the case, but he then amended his fib with the truth: “Or at least I’m feeling better.”
And, in fact, he was. The half day it had taken him to admit the problem and the additional half day it had taken NASA to respond to the dump tapes had given his stomach time to settle down. Now Borman was sure the problem wasn’t radiation, and he suspected that it wasn’t a virus. That left the most ignoble explanation of all: an extreme case of motion sickness. He was the first American astronaut ever to report it, but in the roomy Apollo, he figured, he wouldn’t be the last. Either way, he would speak of it no more.
* * *
The reception was terrible on the one television in the office inside the Central Research Institute building in Moscow. There were other channels to watch—much clearer channels—but they were all state-controlled. If you wanted to get Eurovision, which was what the men in the office needed today, you had to rig a special cable. That was certainly something the engineers who worked in a place like the Central Research Institute building could manage, but it didn’t mean the picture would be terribly good.
Still, that was the only way the Soviet space brass could follow the activities of the three men aboard the American spacecraft that was now, just thirty-one hours after its launch, halfway to the moon and about to beam a television show to Earth. Nobody outside the room was officially told the names of all of the people who were inside, but Dmitry Ustinov, the Central Committee member who was being groomed as minister of defense, was certainly among them. So was Victor Litvinov, a gifted aircraft designer who directed the country’s aerospace industry. As was Boris Chertok, perhaps the nation’s greatest rocket engineer after Sergei Korolev—the late chief designer himself.
Those three and many more officials had watched the Americans take off the day before on a giant viewing screen in Building 88 of the nearby Scientific Research Institute in Moscow, and the sight of the bright white Saturn V had been discouraging enough. The Soviet Union’s own N1 rocket—the military-green, heavy-lift vehicle that was their answer to the Saturn—had not yet had a successful unmanned flight, much less a manned one, and here were the Americans trusting the lives of three astronauts to their cursed Saturn.
There had been one moment during the launch that had caused the watching Soviets to catch their breath: when the second-stage engines lit, they produced a huge white cloud that made it appear as if the Saturn had exploded. If there was a man in the room who experienced a flicker of disappointment that it hadn’t, he observed the missileman’s credo of not giving voice to such a forbidden sentiment. But within seconds it was clear that the Americans were on their way to Earth orbit and then toward the moon, moving one step closer to eliminating the Soviets from the decade-long space race. Whatever their private thoughts, every man who had watched the launch left the room dispirited.
The television show from inside the spacecraft would be even worse, with the happy, cocky Americans showing off for their countrymen back home—and showing up the people of Russia. For that reason, there would be no more big-screen viewings in Building 88. Ustinov and a few others of high rank would be free to watch what they chose in their locked office with its rigging of cable. For everyone else, the TVs would stay dark.
When the broadcast began, the sloppiness of the whole affair was impossible for the Soviets to miss. The three Americans might have been on the way to the moon, but they didn’t appear to be taking the job very seriously or doing it very well. The astronaut they called Anders was holding the camera, and he seemed not quite able to make the thing work. He tried to show the Earth out the window, but the exposure was all wrong and the image came through as a washed-out circle.
“We are having no joy,” said a voice from the space control center in Houston, in apparent criticism of the astronaut’s work.
“How about now?” Anders asked.
“Still no joy. It’s coming through as a real bright blob. Hard to see what we’re looking at.”
The camera then swung around to show the inside of the ship, and the picture became much better. The commander known as Borman appeared on the screen, but he was upside down.
“You have everybody standing on their heads down here,” said the voice from Houston again.
“Well, we all have our problems,” answered Anders. Then he turned the camera and righted the picture.
The commander began talking. “I certainly wish that I could show you the Earth,” Borman said. “It is a beautiful blue with predominantly blue background and just huge covers of white clouds.”
The camera moved again and showed the third man, Lovell, in what looked like a storage area beneath the seats, working with a plastic packet of some kind. “Jim, what are you doing here?” said the commander. Answering his own question, Borman said, “Jim is fixing dessert. He is fixing up a bag of chocolate pudding. You can see it kind of floating by.”
Lovell smiled and looked toward the camera, already showing a growth of beard after only a day and a half without a shave. The commander noticed that and said, “Let everybody see that he has already outdistanced us in the beard race. Jim has quite a beard already.”
Anders appeared on the screen, and as he handed the camera off to Borman, he picked something up.
“You can see Bill has his toothbrush here,” Borman said. “He has been brushing regularly.” Then Anders began playing with the toothbrush, letting it go and catching it in the air. “To demonstrate how things float around in zero g,” Borman explained. “It looks like he plays for the Astros, the way he tries to catch those things.” Presumably, the Soviets figured, this was a reference to an American sports team.
The men went on like that in their happy way for five minutes or so before ending the transmission. “We will be signing off and we will be looking forward to seeing you all again shortly,” said Borman.
“Roger,” said the voice from the control center.
“Good-bye from Apollo 8,” said the commander.
The transmission from space ended, both for audiences watching it in the free world and for anyone who’d managed to get a signal somewhere else. The next day there would be a much larger meeting in the Central Research Institute building—the little television show had made that certain. Ustinov would chair it, and he would ask a question that would surprise no one.
“How are we going to respond to the Americans?” he would demand. “Sort it out and tell me what you’re going to do.”
Nobody attending the meeting was likely to have a very good answer.