Christmas Eve 1968
The television networks would get their billion people. They didn’t think such a thing was possible—or at least not possible yet, not in 1968, when a billion-person audience would mean that nearly a third of the people on the planet had stopped what they were doing to turn on a television set and watch the same broadcast at the same moment.
But the numbers coming in to the networks said otherwise. It wasn’t just North America and Western Europe that watched the first, poorly timed broadcast from Apollo 8 in lunar orbit. It was all of Europe, on both sides of the East-West divide—including the grim, gray bunker that was East Berlin—with the nations in the Soviet bloc either parting the Iron Curtain to let the broadcast through or giving up the fight to prevent the people who lived there from pirating the television signal. That first broadcast was watched as well in Central America and South America and Japan and South Korea and throughout much of the war zone that was Southeast Asia. It was watched in India and Africa and Australia. It was watched on American naval vessels and military bases around the world. It was watched more or less anywhere there were TV sets, electricity, and human beings interested in tuning in to the first-ever broadcast from a different world.
“Your TV program was a big success,” Mike Collins called up to the spacecraft late on the morning of Christmas Eve. “It was viewed by most of the nations of your neighboring planet, the Earth.”
That audience would surely be dwarfed by the one for the evening broadcast that was still to come—the show that would air during the Western Hemisphere’s Christmas Eve, when people would be gathered with their families and friends and, in the American time zones at least, would have just had their dinners and sung their holiday songs and settled back on their sofas to hear what the men circling the moon had to say to them. The three astronauts would be on their ninth lunar revolution when they spoke, and after the tenth they would attempt to fire their engine again and return to Earth. If the engine worked, the broadcast would be remembered as a lyric celebration of a job brilliantly done. If it did not work, the broadcast would be known as an elegy.
The NASA image makers may not have fully anticipated just how huge the viewership for the television show would be, but they’d suspected that it would set records. And even before the spacecraft had left the Earth, they had decided that whatever the crew said, it had better be good.
“You’re going to have the largest audience that’s ever listened to or seen a television picture of a human being, on Christmas Eve,” Julian Scheer, the chief public affairs officer in Houston, said when he first raised the matter to Borman, weeks before liftoff. “And you’ve got, I don’t know, five or six minutes.”
“Well, that’s great, Julian,” Borman answered. “What are we doing?”
“Do whatever’s appropriate” was all Scheer could suggest.
Borman chewed that over for a while but couldn’t come up with much. Then he discussed it with Lovell and Anders, but they were stumped, too. So Borman approached Si Bourgin, a friend who worked for the U.S. Information Agency, to see what he might suggest. But Bourgin, whose job was to frame the American story in the most appealing way possible for the consumption of the world, drew a blank as well. He then farmed the problem out to Joe Laitin, a former wire service reporter who had later become a public affairs officer for President Kennedy and currently worked for President Johnson.
Laitin agreed to give the matter some thought. He tried out a few notions, got nowhere, and then asked his wife, Christine, if she had any ideas about what the astronauts should say; she, too, could suggest nothing. One night, he sat in his kitchen and typed out what he hoped were the appropriate words; upon rereading them, he balled up the piece of paper and started over. Hours went by, and more pages came out of his typewriter only to be tossed aside. Finally, at four in the morning, his wife padded into the kitchen and said she had an idea. She described it and he listened and he smiled. It was perfect.
Laitin passed the idea to Borman, Lovell, and Anders; they approved it, as did NASA. So the words Joe Laitin’s wife had suggested were then typed onto a piece of fireproof paper—since Apollo 1, the only kind of paper allowed in a spacecraft—and the page was inserted at the back of the flight plan. There it would remain until Christmas Eve, when the mission to the moon would be nearly done.
* * *
The day unspooled slowly in Houston—too slowly for the NASA employees who were involved in the mission, to say nothing of the much smaller group of people who lived with and loved the men flying it. The mission controllers who weren’t on duty idled about their homes until they couldn’t take it anymore, at which point they drove to the space center. Many of them appeared hours before their shifts were due to begin; their early arrival wasn’t discussed or planned, and it didn’t need to be.
Since the beginning of the space program, Mission Control had operated on a three-shift cycle during flights. But NASA was already planning to expand it to four: eight hours on and sixteen hours off was simply too tiring for console teams doing the white-knuckle work of sending men to the moon. If the Apollo 8 controllers were showing the strain, however, today none of that mattered. Chris Kraft, Gene Kranz, Bob Gilruth, George Mueller, and the other members of the space agency brass barely left the Mission Control auditorium except to go home for a shower, a change of clothes, and, if absolutely necessary, a brief nap.
As the day went on and the other controllers arrived, they looked for a free chair and dragged it over to the console where they usually worked, sitting behind the shoulder of the man on duty. The controllers who couldn’t find a chair simply stood against the wall or wandered about the room.
When Milt Windler walked in, he was carrying a bundle filled with his red-and-blue flags with their white numeral 1. Assuming all went well, he would hand out the flags whenever the moment seemed right.
Late in the afternoon, when Mike Collins finished his shift, Borman made a point of calling down to the new capcom, Ken Mattingly, who was one of the space program’s few unmarried astronauts. “Hey, Ken,” Borman said. “How’d you pull a duty on Christmas Eve? It happens to bachelors all the time, doesn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t be anywhere else tonight,” Mattingly answered.
In the Borman, Lovell, and Anders households, the wives worked on as they had for much of the week, which meant managing the children and hosting the guests and satisfying the unceasing needs of the media. Susan Borman had slept little and felt ragged; she feared she looked that way, too. Days earlier, she had scheduled a beauty parlor appointment for today, partly because she knew she would have hours to fill and might as well look nice for the photographers and cameramen and partly because that was exactly the kind of business-as-usual behavior that NASA liked the world to see.
Valerie Anders remained indoors with her children and came outside to talk whenever the press needed a statement; otherwise, she remained unseen. As the rookie’s wife, Valerie was expected to have a rookie’s nerves. But she didn’t, mainly because she was good at managing her mood by managing her environment.
Like Susan Borman and Marilyn Lovell, she’d known how critical the LOI burn was, and she had stayed awake for it. But she’d passed those crucial minutes in her own way, listening to the squawk box in her darkened living room, with the Christmas tree and the fireplace providing the only illumination. She was surrounded by a tight clutch of people that included an old school friend as well as Jan Armstrong—the wife of astronaut Neil Armstrong—and Dave Scott, Armstrong’s copilot on Gemini 8 and one of the three astronauts who would fly Apollo 9 just two months later. As the burn played out, Scott leaned in toward the squawk box and explained any of the gibberish she wasn’t able to follow.
When Valerie stepped outside to address the reporters after learning that the burn had been successful, she did so with a polish suited more to a senator than to the young wife of a hero.
“The significance of historical events cannot be realized immediately,” she said, “nor can the impact or magnitude of the event be adequately described at the time of the occurrence. Though history is being made today, we all need to try and comprehend the years of effort by many people involved in the eventual lunar landing.”
The reporters raced to take it all down. Valerie, her job complete, went back inside to make sure her five young children hadn’t wrecked the house in the few short moments she had been gone.
Marilyn Lovell—the most experienced of the three wives and, indeed, the most experienced astronaut’s wife in the world, measured by the amount of time her husband had spent in space—knew she would have to make time for a nap, and she did so, too, just as soon as the LOI burn was finished and the first broadcast had signed off. She also knew that if she could possibly manage it, she needed a few minutes out of the house.
Christmas week had always meant church for her and her family, and they had found a comfortable Episcopal congregation in Houston with a popular minister, Father Donald Raish, who knew all of the Lovells well. Attending a proper Christmas Eve service today would be impossible, what with the business of getting the children ready and navigating the media storm that would erupt the moment the entire family emerged on the front lawn.
Instead, Marilyn called Father Raish and asked if she might come by early, perhaps to have a private moment inside the church. He agreed, and late in the afternoon she left the house alone, fielded as few questions from the press as she could, hopped in her car, and drove to the church.
When she arrived and went inside, she could see that the sanctuary was almost empty, save for Father Raish and the organist. Candles were lit, the organ was playing, and Father Raish greeted her. They walked to the altar, and Marilyn prayed. She was happy for the quiet moment and grateful for the effort that had been made on her behalf.
“You did all this for me?” she asked Father Raish.
“Well, you have to miss Mass tonight, so yes,” he answered modestly.
Marilyn smiled, thanked him, and hurried back out to her car. It was already getting dark, but avoiding the crowds meant that she would have to take the poorly lit back roads into the Timber Cove neighborhood. After so many years, however, she knew the route well. As she approached her home, the trees above the road appeared to part: directly in front of her, the moon hung in the sky. She stopped the car and looked up at it.
Jim is up there, she thought.
Marilyn sat with that idea for a moment, then drove the rest of the way to her brightly lit and very crowded home. The nighttime broadcast was still hours away, and the house would only get brighter and more crowded still.
* * *
Of the three men circling the moon in the small Apollo spacecraft, Borman was the only one who would admit that he was flat-out exhausted. Lovell seemed tireless, but then Lovell was never as happy as when he was in space. He also loved being busy, and the complex navigation of the translunar route meant he almost always had a lot to do. Even when the current flight plan called for a rest period, he was perfectly content to vanish into the equipment bay to take his sightings and make fine corrections in the trajectory.
Anders, meanwhile, could not sit still. He was five years younger than Borman and Lovell, but the way he bounced from window to window, taking his sightings and snapping his pictures, put Borman in mind of his boys when they’d been in grade school.
In truth, however, both Anders and Lovell were wrung out; Borman could see it in the red that rimmed their eyes and the periodic yawns they tried to stifle. What was more, while Lovell would sometimes boast, with justification, about how deftly he could play the computer’s keypad—“like a concert pianist,” he liked to say—he couldn’t hide his mistakes. Mostly the computer was silent, but when Lovell entered an erroneous command, the system would emit a warning tone. Borman had heard a few too many of those alerts, another sign that fatigue was taking a toll.
Although mission rules allowed all three astronauts to schedule their sleep interval for the same time, Borman had made it clear that he preferred it if one of them kept watch.
“I’m going to sack out for an hour,” he told Lovell and Anders. “One of you should, too.”
Lovell, in the equipment bay, nodded vaguely. Anders held up a hand in a “just a minute” gesture.
Borman did not care to pull rank—not yet, anyway—but he could at least set a good example. He floated down to the equipment bay, rigged his sleeping bag, and floated back out to confirm that his ship was in order. After deciding that it was, he drifted back down to the equipment bay.
Moments later, Anders and Lovell could hear Borman breathing steadily. For the next hour, the two astronauts worked together to help Anders catch up on his photography. Lovell—whose formal title was command module pilot and who had both the ability and the authority to take the wheel of the ship whenever necessary—maneuvered the spacecraft to give Anders the angles he needed. Anders changed windows as required, working to get the alignment for each picture right.
Toward the end of the hour, the two men began struggling with a particularly difficult target.
“Is it ten degrees left?” Lovell whispered.
“Yes, right now. You got enough roll?” Anders asked.
“I’ll get it for you.”
“That you driving it?”
“I’m driving it now, yes.”
They continued whispering back and forth as the spacecraft moved about. At one point, Lovell overshot his mark and fired a counterthrust to halt the ship.
“Ahhh!” he exclaimed.
“What happened?” Anders asked.
“It’s okay,” Lovell reassured him.
“Don’t wake up Frank.”
But it was too late; Borman was awake. The motion of the ship and the ongoing background chatter had proved too much. He drifted out of his sleeping bag, rubbed his eyes, and looked around.
“Sorry, Frank, didn’t mean to disturb you,” Lovell said.
Borman waved it off. The hour of sleep had helped; though he didn’t feel anything like fully rested, he did feel much improved. Looking at his crewmen, however, he could see that the same hour hadn’t done them any favors; the fatigue showing in their faces was becoming ever more evident. He would give them a little more time, through the remainder of the seventh rev, and then whether they liked it or not, they’d go belowdecks, climb into their sleeping bags, and, as they put it at West Point, go “local horizontal.”
Borman gave them that time, and they all spent it working through their checklists and the other chores the capcom radioed up. Then, at the end of the orbit, Collins called with yet another series of tasks: a battery charge, a cryogenics stir, a telemetry check, all in addition to the ongoing work involving the surface sightings.
That was it. Borman keyed open his mike in annoyance.
“Houston, Apollo 8,” he called down.
“Roger, go ahead, Frank.”
“I want to scrub these control point sightings on this next rev,” he declared.
“I understand you want to scrub control points one, two, three on the next rev,” Collins said.
“That’s right. We’re all getting too tired.”
“Okay, Frank.”
Then, just to be clear, Borman keyed his mike open again. “We’re scrubbing everything,” he declared. “I’ll stay up and keep the spacecraft vertical and take some automatic pictures. But I want Bill and Jim to get some sleep.”
“Roger,” Collins responded. “Understood.”
“Unbelievable, the details these guys send,” Borman muttered. “Just completely unrealistic stuff.”
“I’m willing to try it,” Anders suggested tentatively, indicating his cameras and his flight plan.
“No, you try it and we’ll make another mistake,” Borman said. “I want you to get your ass in bed.” When Anders hesitated, Borman practically barked at him: “Right now! Get to bed! I’m not kidding you.”
“Shall we … shall we do that thing over there?” Anders asked, gesturing vaguely to a target somewhere out the window that he had been preparing to shoot.
Borman rolled his eyes. “This is a closed issue,” he said. “Go to sleep, both of you guys.” Anders, still dithering with his cameras, stalled some more. “To hell with the other stuff!” Borman said sharply. “You should see your eyes; get to bed.”
Finally relenting, Anders slumped off to the equipment bay.
“A quick snooze and you guys will feel a hell of a lot better,” Borman said, his tone a little softer now.
Lovell, unlike Anders, hadn’t needed any persuading. He had flown under Borman’s command before—and chafed under it, too. But this time he was more than willing to submit to Borman’s authority. Without having to be asked a second time, he drifted down to his own sleeping area and was out almost instantly.
Borman settled back into his left-hand seat. “Lovell’s snoring already,” he radioed quietly to the ground.
“Yes,” Collins answered, “we can hear him down here.”
* * *
As the time for the Christmas Eve television show approached, Borman, Lovell, and Anders were flying over the far side of the moon. They had completed their seventh orbit—with Lovell and Anders sound asleep through most of it—and then their eighth. Now they had barely fifteen minutes left until reacquisition of signal, when the broadcast would begin, and they were still not entirely clear about how they were going to fill the time.
Julian Scheer had originally promised that the show would last just six or seven minutes; the flight plan, however, called for at least twenty. Yes, the last couple of minutes were planned, but as for the rest, the astronauts had been so busy with other things that they hadn’t thought much about how they would inform and entertain their enormous audience.
“We’ve got to do it up right,” Borman said as Anders unstowed the camera and began fooling with focal angles. Then, just in case his fellow crew members had forgotten, he added, “There will be more people listening to this than ever listened to any single person in history.”
Neither Lovell nor Anders offered any useful ideas about how the three of them should amuse all of those people, so Borman made a suggestion. “Why don’t we each talk about one thing that impressed us most out of what we saw and describe it,” he said.
There was silence.
“Okay?” Borman asked.
The other two shrugged, and the matter was settled.
As the crew sailed through the final miles of their far-side orbit, Walter Cronkite went live from his studio in New York. The astronauts might find it difficult to fill their airtime, but Cronkite, with a lifetime of on-camera experience, had no trouble keeping the chatter going until the signal from the spacecraft was acquired.
“Apollo 8 is in its ninth and next-to-last full orbit of the moon,” he began. “The astronauts, on the orders of command pilot Frank Borman, are scrubbing all remaining items from their flight plan except one more television transmission, which should come up very shortly now, because they are tired and need to rest before the critical maneuver that starts them back to Earth early tomorrow morning.”
In Houston, Mission Control reported that it had acquired the signal from the spacecraft. But the transmission was initially scratchy, and a full two minutes would elapse before voice and pictures could accompany the basic telemetry.
That was just as well, because the ship’s crew clearly wasn’t ready to go on the air. Borman was at his couch, working the attitude controller and struggling to bring the lunar surface into frame. Anders, fighting to get the high-gain antenna locked onto the Earth, adjusted the communications systems, which were on his side of the instrument panel.
“You’ll have to pitch up, Frank,” he said. “Pitch up or yaw right.”
“I’ll do both,” Borman replied.
As he maneuvered the ship with one hand, Borman picked up the TV camera with the other, hoping he could capture a good angle. A second later, the surface of the moon slid into the viewfinder in sharp focus.
“Here it comes!” he said.
“Okay!” Anders answered.
“Oh boy!” Borman exclaimed.
“Got a good shot of her?” Lovell asked.
“Yes!”
“Well, keep the camera there!” Lovell admonished. “Keep the camera.”
On the ground, Cronkite talked on: “We’re all anxiously looking forward to this second set of pictures of the moon from seventy miles high and the spacecraft moving across the moon’s surface at thirty-six hundred miles per hour.” Numbers and names, the anchorman knew, were a good way to add substance to any part of a broadcast that was really just an exercise in filling time. “The person you’ll be hearing speaking to Apollo 8 is astronaut Ken Mattingly, who is so-called capcom, capsule communicator.”
Finally, a voice-and-picture link was established. The screens in Mission Control, the New York studios, and a billion homes around the world were once again filled with the moon.
“How’s the TV look, Houston?” Anders asked.
“Loud and clear,” Mattingly answered.
“It looks okay?”
“Very good.”
Satisfied, Borman began: “This is Apollo 8, coming to you live from the moon.” His voice, traveling across a quarter million miles of void, sounded thinner and more nasal than it really was. But it was steady and strong, and so was the signal that carried it. “Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and myself have spent the day before Christmas doing experiments, taking pictures, and firing our spacecraft engines to maneuver around. What we will do now is follow the trail we’ve been following all day and take you on through a lunar sunset.”
The static crackled but the picture stayed true, and Borman went on, following the narrative the crew had planned. “The moon is a different thing to each one of us,” he said. “I know my own impression is that it’s a vast, lonely, forbidding-type existence or expanse of nothing. It looks like clouds and clouds of pumice stone, and certainly not a very inviting place to live or work. Jim, what have you thought most about?”
“My thoughts are very similar,” Lovell said. “The vast loneliness up here of the moon is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth. The Earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space.”
“Bill, what do you think?” Borman asked.
“I think the one thing that impressed me most was the lunar sunrises and sunsets,” said Anders, still very much the photographer. “These in particular bring out the stark nature of the terrain, and the long shadows really bring out the relief that is hard to see at this very bright surface that we’re going over now.”
They were trying, these pilots who had been asked to play poets, and they were performing reasonably well. But it was Anders, staying true to what he was—a professional on a mission—who sounded the most authentic, and Borman and Lovell knew it. So for the rest of the broadcast, they made an unspoken decision to play it straight and simply narrate what they were seeing.
“We are now coming onto Smyth’s Sea, a small mare region covered with a dark level material,” Anders said.
“What you’re seeing across Smyth’s Sea are the craters Kästner and Gilbert,” Lovell said.
“The horizon here is very, very stark,” Anders said. “The sky is pitch-black, and the Earth”—Anders caught himself—“or the moon, rather, excuse me, is quite light.” Moon below, Earth in the sky; it still took getting used to.
The audience encountered the Marsh of Sleep again, and the Seas of Tranquillity, Fertility, and Crises. And then, finally, the ship approached what was known, too ominously, as the lunar terminator—the clean, sharp line on the airless moon where daylight instantly gave way to nighttime, with none of the luminous wash of sun through atmosphere that makes dawn and dusk so gradual on Earth. The thing about the terminator, though, was that it was two things at once, either the dying of the light or the arrival of it, depending on whether you were standing in the shadow and looking at the sun or standing in the sun and looking at the shadow. Borman knew which one he preferred.
“Now you can see the long shadows of the lunar sunrise,” he said, “and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you.”
Anders picked up the flight plan and turned to the last page. Poetry might be alien to the three men, but at last they had verse to speak.
“In the beginning,” Anders began, “God created the heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”
Anders read a bit more, and then Lovell picked up the words. “And God called the light Day and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters. And let it divide the waters from the waters.’”
Finally, when Lovell was through, Borman finished up. He read the ancient passage about the gathering of the waters, the appearance of the dry land, and the naming of the land and the waters, concluding with the words, “And God saw that it was good.” Then the commander of the crew that had ventured so far and seen so much spoke to the billion or so people who represented the entire questing species for whom they had made their journey.
“And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”
Then the signal from the spacecraft cut off and the men circling the moon were once again alone, beings apart. Now, with the broadcast over, it would be up to the men and women and children on the home planet to make what they would of the images they had just seen and the words they had just heard.
* * *
Frank Borman, finished with the television broadcast, was still in command of an active spacecraft, and that spacecraft was still locked in a repeating orbit around the moon. So once the TV show was over, he was eager to get back to the business at hand.
On the ground, many of the controllers were not quite ready to let go of the feelings they had just experienced. Gene Kranz, for all his military grit, was also something of a sentimentalist, which he would readily admit. When the broadcast from Apollo 8 ended, he stood quietly at his back-of-the-room console in Mission Control, still filled with the rhapsody of what he had just seen.
Jerry Bostick, the flight dynamics officer at his console in the trench, felt something he could describe only as a wave of gratitude—for the astonishing moment in history that was unfolding in front of him, and for the accident of birth and timing and talent that had placed him, one person out of billions, in the middle of that moment. Thank you, Lord, for letting me be here and be a part of this, he said to himself silently.
Milt Windler, now sitting at the flight director’s console, considered his bundle of happy flags with their big white numeral and decided that they would forever remain packed away. The secular cathedral of Mission Control had, if only briefly, become a spiritual one. A pep rally, no matter how well intentioned, suddenly seemed entirely out of place.
Borman, meanwhile, waited until he was reasonably sure the broadcast had ended and then waited a beat longer. Sensing the power of the moment that had just passed, he wanted to make certain that his next words would get through to Mission Control but not go beyond.
“Are we off the air now?” he asked.
“That’s affirmative, Apollo 8, you are,” Ken Mattingly answered evenly.
“Did you read everything we had to say there?”
“Loud and clear. Thank you for a real good show.”
“Okay. Now, Ken, we’d like to get squared away for TEI here,” Borman said. “Can you give us some good words like you promised?”
“Yes, sir,” Mattingly answered.
The good words Borman wanted were the PADs—the preliminary advisory data, or the computer commands—for the return-to-Earth burn, as well as other details like the navigational star sightings Lovell would need to take and the precise length of the burn. In the simulator, all of the variables in a TEI could be controlled, but in a real burn, any number of factors could be introduced, from orbital wobbles caused by the mascons to trajectory shallowing caused by wastewater dumps. Especially important was the question of precisely how much fuel the SPS had used in its previous burns. The engine ingested 547 pounds of fuel every second it fired, which was a lot of weight to give or take when you were aiming to place a spacecraft in a very narrow reentry corridor in the Earth’s atmosphere 233,000 miles away.
Borman was well aware of the importance of these kinds of calculations. During the broadcast, he might have sounded nonchalant when speaking about how the crew had been “firing our spacecraft engines to maneuver around,” but that glossed over the fact that “maneuvering around” took a lot of planning and a lot of fuel. Good words from Ken Mattingly would go a long way toward minimizing the attendant risk.
Mattingly spent a fair bit of the ninth revolution sending up the necessary alignments and other settings. Much of it was a delightfully discordant mix of the mathematical and the zodiacal—the strange language of both the ancient mariners who’d once sailed and the new sky mariners flying today.
“Scorpii Delta down 071,” Mattingly read off. “Sirius Rigel 129.”
Borman and Anders copied it all out in longhand, like operators at telegraph keys. Lovell, at his computer, punched in the coordinates.
“Basically,” Mattingly concluded when he was at last done, “all systems are good. After one hundred and thirty-eight seconds of the burn, you are on your way home. The weather in the recovery area looks good.”
Borman acknowledged Mattingly’s report but made no response to the capcom’s mention of the recovery area. The weather could change well before Apollo 8 returned to Earth, and certainly the fortunes of the spacecraft could, too. For now, the crew was headed toward the end of their ninth orbit and their penultimate thirty-five minutes of blackout.
“Thanks a lot,” Borman said without ceremony. “We’ll see you around the next pass.”
* * *
As the hour of the trans-Earth injection burn approached, Susan Borman decided that she would handle Apollo 8’s final burn differently from the way she’d handled the lunar orbit insertion. She still preferred to keep the press and most of the guests in her home at a safe remove during the mission’s most critical moments, but the solitary vigil she had maintained for the LOI burn had also left her spent. This time around, she chose to share the high-wire wait with at least one other person by her side, and she very much wanted that person to be Valerie Anders. Like Susan, Valerie lived in the El Lago community, meaning she was just a few lawns and a short stroll away. Marilyn lived in Timber Cove, which would require her to get in her car and drive through the mobs of reporters and photographers in order to get to the Bormans’ home. So Susan had invited Valerie to drop by for the Christmas Eve broadcast and the engine burn, and Valerie had accepted.
Susan and her sons had their Christmas Eve dinner at the nearby home of Joe and Margaret Elkins, the Bormans’ closest friends in the neighborhood, and then she and the boys hurried back to their house. Valerie put her children to bed, left them in the care of one of the many adults visiting her, and walked over the Bormans’. Before long, the two women slipped away from the crowd of well-wishers in the living room, repaired to the kitchen nook, and began their vigil.
Marilyn had chosen not to change a thing: she would follow the coverage in her home just as she had all of the other critical moments in the mission, with her friends and family grouped around her, in front of the TV. After the crew’s broadcast but before the burn, she had taken her children for a walk around the Timber Cove neighborhood, wearing a long red skirt that seemed fitting for Christmas Eve. The nearby houses were always decorated during the holiday season, but this evening Marilyn was surprised to see that almost all of her neighbors had gone further than usual and lined the sidewalks with homemade luminaries. Up and down the street, carefully positioned candles flickered inside paper bags in tribute to the men aboard Apollo 8. Though the display was fragile—a brisk wind or a tipped candle could destroy it—for now the lights were holding.
Marilyn could not personally thank every one of her neighbors, but she could express her appreciation for the attention her family had been shown all week in another way. After she got home and put the children to bed, she went into her kitchen, arranged cups of eggnog on a large tray, and went back to the front lawn to pass the Christmas cheer out to the members of the press, who were very far from their own homes tonight. Then she went back inside and gathered with her guests in front of the TV.
Although Walter Cronkite had signed off the air after the astronauts’ broadcast, he had remained in the New York studio, using the brief break to rest and review technical material about the burn. He and the other network anchors then signed back on to cover the final orbit, which was decidedly short on news. The sightseeing was done and the happy narration for the viewers at home was over. What passed for conversation between ship and shore was now almost entirely the stream of numbers and technical language that would further refine the systems for the burn. But Cronkite framed the moment in a starker, more binary way.
“While Apollo 8 is behind the moon, out of touch with the ground control again, the astronauts are to start up that big rocket engine that powered them into lunar orbit,” he said. “It must work perfectly again, because if it fails, Apollo 8 could be caught in that lunar orbit. That, of course, is not expected to happen. The engine has worked perfectly so far. It should work once more.”
That was true as far as it went, but it didn’t go far. As the astronauts, their wives, and everyone at NASA knew very well, completely reliable systems worked only until the moment they became completely unreliable.
* * *
Shortly before the blackout at the end of the tenth orbit, Ken Mattingly made the call that began the countdown to the burn.
“Okay, Apollo 8,” he said. “We’ve reviewed all your systems. You have a go for TEI.”
“Okay,” Borman answered.
As the clock ticked toward what everyone hoped would be the final loss of signal, Mattingly began the ritual of calling off the time.
“Apollo 8, Houston. We have three minutes to LOS. All systems are go.”
There was no answer from the ship.
“Apollo 8, Apollo 8, this is Houston,” Mattingly repeated. “Three minutes LOS. All systems are go. Over.”
“Roger, thank you, Houston. Apollo 8,” Borman responded, with a clear emphasis on the last two words. There was a conclusory note to the sign-off, one that did not invite further chatter unless it was necessary.
Mattingly, fluent in the commander’s tongue, held his own for the next three minutes. For the only time in the mission thus far, there would be no steady countdown to a pivotal event.
Finally, just seconds before blackout, the capcom sent up an all-business good-bye.
“All systems are go, Apollo 8.”
“Thank you,” Borman answered.
Then the line went dead.
* * *
Inside the spacecraft, the astronauts took a moment to sit quietly. It was a relief to be freed from the stream of must-do chores that were forever being read off to them. Then they went about making the final preparations for the TEI burn as wordlessly as they could—saying what they had to, avoiding anything else.
When the burn was less than thirty minutes away, Borman finally spoke up again.
“It’s been a pretty fantastic week, hasn’t it?” he said.
Lovell smiled, thinking of home. “It’s going to get better,” he said.
For the next twenty minutes, they worked on various routine tasks, including the orientation of their high-gain antenna. Though useless now, it would go back to work when they came around the moon’s near side.
Anders glanced out his window. “Boy, it’s blacker than pitch out there,” he said.
A few more minutes elapsed. Borman looked at his clock, which indicated the time remaining until the burn. “Seven minutes,” he said. “Coming up on six minutes.”
As they had before, the astronauts settled back into their couches and loosely fastened their seat restraints. This time the spacecraft would be accelerating by 3,552 feet per second, or 2,422 miles per hour, up to a peak speed of at least 5,324 miles per hour. That would be a lot of acceleration in just over two minutes. Once again the crew would be pushed back in their seats with a comparatively gentle hand of less than one g, though after four days of no g’s at all, it would feel like a lot more.
Anders called more attitude coordinates from the flight plan. In response, Borman fine-tuned the ship in the pitch and yaw axes.
“Stand by for two minutes,” Anders said.
After the final seconds ticked down, the computer flashed its 99:20 last-chance code.
Lovell reached forward and pressed PROCEED.
* * *
The atmosphere in Mission Control wasn’t at all what Chris Kraft wanted it to be. His controllers were professionals, and they generally abided by the rules of the room, which meant concentrating on the work and keeping extraneous talk to a minimum. But those rules were usually relaxed during blackouts, and though the mood had been tense during Apollo 8’s first loss of signal, the experience was familiar by now. With the headsets silent and the telemetry shooting blanks, why should anyone object if a man exchanged a few words with the fellow to his left or right?
This blackout, however, was different. In less than twenty minutes, Mission Control would get either very good news or very bad news, depending on what the SPS did. If the news was bad, it would likely mean the loss of three good men. Kraft now knew, as he hadn’t known twenty-three months before, what losing three men felt like, and he never wanted to experience such a thing again. So although the room was reasonably quiet, under the circumstances it was not as quiet as Kraft felt it should be.
“Could you please shut up over there?” he barked.
Heads swiveled in response.
Kraft wasn’t directing the remark at any one person in particular. He heard a low hum of talk off to one side, and if he had to pick one person whose voice was irritating him the most, he guessed it would be that of Charles Berry, the flight surgeon. Babysitting the astronauts’ health was necessary, of course, but at the moment it was entirely beside the point. You couldn’t prescribe Marezine or Seconal for a busted engine, and in Kraft’s view, it would be nice if Berry, of all people, stayed as far out of the way as possible tonight.
“Could you please shut up?” Kraft repeated. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m thinking about whether these guys are going to come out the other side.”
Kraft looked away, scanning the room and darkening his expression to make it clear that the scolding was for everyone.
In El Lago and Timber Cove, nobody had to ask for silence. Susan Borman and Valerie Anders were seated side by side, alone, in the Bormans’ kitchen nook. Marilyn Lovell sat on her living room floor with her knees tucked up, just as she had during the television broadcast hours earlier.
On the bottom of the TV screens tuned to the coverage of Apollo 8 and at the top of the main screen in Mission Control, the mission’s elapsed time ticked up to three days, seventeen hours, nineteen minutes, and twelve seconds. Some of the viewers at home might have known without being told that this was the moment the burn was supposed to begin. Every single person in Mission Control knew it well. If the engine lit as planned, it would speed the ship to an early exit from its final blackout, and the crew would regain radio contact just fifteen minutes and ten seconds later.
The engine burn—invisibly, unknowably—either did or didn’t take place, and the long wait for news from the ship passed the way Kraft wanted it to, in silence. He said nothing. George Low said nothing. Charles Berry said nothing. Ken Mattingly, at the capcom console, did not mark the start and stop times of the burn when they arrived and passed; if you couldn’t confirm that an event had happened, you didn’t announce it. Instead, fingers were drummed and Zippos were rasped and the mission clock counted off the time.
A bit less than twelve minutes after the burn should have happened, Mattingly made his first call. As with the orbital insertion burn, it was too soon to expect reacquisition of signal, but not too soon to begin hoping for it.
“Apollo 8, Houston,” Mattingly said to the invisible spacecraft and, by extension, to the global television audience.
He was met by silence.
“Apollo 8, Houston,” he repeated eighteen seconds later.
Again nothing—only the loud hiss of cosmic absence in his headset and on the TVs.
He tried again after twenty-eight more seconds. “Apollo 8, Houston.”
This time, hearing nothing, he gave it nearly a minute. His next call received no response, either.
After letting forty-eight more seconds pass, Mattingly hailed the ship again, then let yet another forty-eight seconds pass and tried once more. More silence.
Now the fifteen minutes and ten seconds were well and truly gone. If the spacecraft did not appear soon, it would be seriously overdue.
And then, as one, the dead screens at every console in front of every man in Mission Control began to jump and flicker. All at once they were filled with numbers—beautifully complete and beautifully healthy numbers—streaming to them from a spacecraft that was still a quarter million miles away but was undeniably speeding toward home.
A moment later, Jim Lovell’s voice came through clearly.
“Houston, Apollo 8,” he said. “Please be informed there is a Santa Claus.”
“That’s affirmative,” Mattingly responded. “You are the best ones to know.”
That, at least, is what the astronauts heard. But the people in Mission Control did not, because the capcom’s words were drowned out by the whooping and cheering and whistling from the controllers who now didn’t give a fig for Chris Kraft’s rule of silence.
In the Bormans’ kitchen nook, Susan leapt up, waved her hands excitedly in the air, and then brought them down to take Valerie in a happy hug. In the Lovell home, Marilyn stood at the center of a similarly raucous scene, and the noisy crowd soon woke the children she had just put to sleep.
There was much applause, too, in homes and in bars and on American military bases around the world. Also celebrating the moment were the seventeen hundred men aboard the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown, the prime recovery vessel, which was already steaming into position in the South Pacific for the splashdown that was now just over two days away.
From the spacecraft, which still had a long way to go before it landed in that small spot of ocean, Frank Borman had only one question.
“What’s next on the docket?” he asked.