December 25–27, 1968
Deke Slayton had not spoken directly to a crew in space since October, when he’d made his futile attempt to persuade Wally Schirra to put his helmet on before Apollo 7 reentered the atmosphere. Slayton was well aware that communications protocols frowned on anyone but the capcom—even the head of the astronaut office—talking to the crews, but after the TEI burn, he felt like making another exception.
“Good morning, Apollo 8, Deke here,” he said, after plugging his headset into a second jack at the capcom station. “I just would like to wish you a very merry Christmas on behalf of everyone in the control center and, I’m sure, everyone around the world.”
Slayton getting even a little sappy was not something the crew had ever experienced before, and they did not know quite how to respond. That mattered little, however, because apparently a sappy Slayton was also a garrulous Slayton.
“None of us ever expected to have a better Christmas present than this one. Hope you get a good night’s sleep from here on and enjoy your Christmas dinner tomorrow. We look forward to seeing you in Hawaii on the twenty-eighth.”
Borman waited till he was sure Slayton was done and only then responded. “Okay, leader,” he began, choosing an unexpectedly deferential form of address and one he hadn’t used before. But the commander of the mission was not entirely immune to sentiment, either. “We’ll see you there,” he said. “Thank everyone on the ground for us. It’s pretty clear we wouldn’t be anywhere if we didn’t have them helping us out.”
“We concur that,” Slayton said.
“Even Mr. Kraft does something right once in a while,” Anders added.
Slayton glanced over his shoulder to see if Kraft had taken the ship-to-shore impudence in good humor. But Kraft wasn’t in the room; with the spacecraft at last on its way to Earth, he had run home for a nap and a change of clothes.
“He got tired of waiting for you to talk and went home,” Slayton answered.
As Slayton hoped they would, the astronauts did get some sleep—Borman and Lovell first and then Anders when they awoke. And they did have their Christmas dinner, later in the day on Christmas proper.
Like all the other meals they’d had so far, these were wrapped and stacked in a bin in the equipment bay. But the Christmas dinner packages were heavier than usual, and each was tied up with a green fireproof ribbon with a card reading, “Merry Christmas.” When the astronauts took off the outer wrapping, they discovered that the plastic pouches contained turkey and gravy and cranberry sauce and stuffing. Accompanying the dinner was a miniature bottle of Coronet VSQ brandy for each man.
All three astronauts smiled at the meal, which, after four days of flight rations, looked like a feast. And two of the three men—Lovell and Anders—were glad to see the brandy. Borman wasn’t.
“For crying out loud, don’t drink that,” he said. “If anything at all goes wrong in the next two days, they’ll blame the problem on a drunken crew.”
Lovell and Anders had no intention of opening the bottles. Though they could both handle their liquor, they were still too fatigued to enjoy the indulgence. What’s more, they knew Borman was right; especially now that they were on their way home, they couldn’t afford to get sloppy.
Not long after they ate, Lovell radioed down to the ground. “It appears we did a grave injustice to the food people,” he said. “Santa Claus brought us a TV dinner each, which was delicious: turkey and gravy, cranberry sauce, grape punch, outstanding.” He stressed the “grape punch” part, just to be safe.
At the flight director’s station, Milt Windler laughed. In front of him, on a clear spot on the console’s little desk area, a cup of coffee and a baloney sandwich rested on a crinkled piece of waxed paper. Just this once, the men in space were eating better than the men on the ground.
* * *
The Apollo 8 wives spent Christmas Day in a more traditional way. Valerie Anders gathered up her five children and drove to nearby Ellington Air Force Base, where they attended Catholic services at the base chapel. Susan Borman, accompanied by her boys and her parents-in-law, drove to St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church, where the Reverend James Buckner read a prayer particular to the most conspicuous member of the congregation, who could not be in attendance that day:
“O, eternal God, in whose domain are all the planets, stars, and galaxies and all the reaches of time and space, from infinity to infinity,” he said, “watch over and protect, we pray, the astronauts of our country.”
Marilyn Lovell’s Christmas morning began with an act of charity. Almost everyone in the media crowd that had filled her lawn for most of the week had briefly decamped to celebrate the day, and now there was just one photographer left. Marilyn peeked out her window and took pity on the man.
“Why don’t you go home?” she asked, standing on the front step with her arms folded against the chill. “We’re not coming out now.”
“I can’t go home,” the man said forlornly.
“Why not?” Marilyn asked.
“I can’t leave until I get a picture.”
Marilyn laughed. “Is that all?” she said.
Looking over her shoulder into the living room, she saw that her youngest, Jeffrey, and her oldest, Barbara, were sitting by the Christmas tree amid the morning’s presents.
“Kids!” she called. “Come over here.” Both children jumped up, but they were empty-handed. “No, no,” she said, gesturing toward the mound of gifts, “bring something.”
Barbara collected whatever toy was in reach, Jeffrey grabbed a pogo stick that he’d been trying to master for much of the morning, and they both went outside. Jeffrey bounced while Barbara posed, and the reporter took a few pictures. Then he hurried off to spend a few hours of Christmas Day on his own time.
Not long afterward, Marilyn’s holiday generosity was repaid. Unannounced, a Rolls-Royce pulled up to the curb and a uniformed man climbed out. He came up the walk, knocked on the door, and presented Marilyn with a box from the Neiman Marcus department store. It was wrapped in sky blue paper and decorated with two Styrofoam balls—one larger, one smaller; one painted like the Earth, one painted like the moon. Attached was a note that read, “Merry Christmas. With love from the man in the moon.” Inside was a mink jacket.
Marilyn Lovell, wife of the moon man, wore her gift to church with her children by her side that morning. And if it looked to anyone in the Houston community as if she was putting on airs, well, let it. She had done more than enough this week to earn the indulgence.
* * *
By late on Christmas Day, a lot of people, including some in the media, had begun to act as if the Apollo 8 mission was effectively over. Yes, the crew still had to land their spacecraft, but that was really just a formality, wasn’t it? Commentators on television had begun offering guesses about which cities—aside from cursed New York with its cursed ticker-tape—would host parades and where the astronauts would go on the world tour that would follow. Especially intense was the speculation about when the surely inevitable lunar landing would take place.
The betting was that it could happen as early as May, when Apollo 10 was due to be launched. After a quick shakedown run for the LEM in Earth orbit, it would be off to stamp some bootprints in the Sea of Tranquillity. The crew would include Tom Stafford, Wally Schirra’s copilot when Gemini 6 rendezvoused with Gemini 7 in Earth orbit, and he would probably draw the card as first man on the moon. John Young—whom Gus Grissom had chosen above Borman for Gemini 3—and Gene Cernan would fly with him. The press was already starting to prepare the Stafford profiles.
The cocksure idea that Apollo 8’s ride home was little more than an easy free fall got an unintentional boost from Bill Anders when the spacecraft had traveled about 45,000 miles from the moon and crossed over the invisible line at which lunar gravity gave way to the Earth’s more powerful gravity. When Collins mentioned on the capcom loop that his young son had asked him which of the astronauts was driving the spacecraft, Anders responded, “I think Isaac Newton is doing most of the driving right now.”
Physics alone would not bring the crew home, of course, but even Mission Control began sounding a little overconfident. Not long after Anders’s comment, Mattingly gave Borman a read of the mood on Earth and related, as well, a conversation he had just had with Windler. “Everybody is smiling,” he said. “Santa was good to most of the folks in the world, and everything is pretty calm, like it should be on Christmas.”
“Very good,” Borman answered.
“Milt says we’re in a state of relaxed vigilance.”
“Very good,” Borman repeated, before realizing what Mattingly had just said. “We’ll relax,” he said, his tone a bit stern. “You be vigilant.”
“That’s a fair trade,” Mattingly responded.
Borman had a right to demand that vigilance. Apollo 8’s flight back to the home planet might appear to be the equivalent of long-distance skydiving, but as with skydiving, it could still go badly awry. In the hours since the TEI, in fact, the mission had nearly come undone, though the news was little reported on Earth.
Borman had been sleeping off his Christmas dinner in the equipment bay while Anders minded the ship in the left-hand couch and Lovell worked the computer. Collins was reading Lovell new coordinates for the rotisserie roll, which kept the spacecraft evenly heated on all sides. Now and then, the attitude of the ship had to be changed depending on its ever-shifting angle relative to the sun. Lovell was punching the commands into the computer when suddenly the thrusters began firing. The spacecraft slewed dizzyingly, causing it to swing from its roughly nose-forward position to a straight nose-up attitude.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Lovell exclaimed.
“Okay, whoa, whoa. Standing by,” Collins responded.
Anders watched as the attitude indicator on the instrument panel swung in parallel to the ship, providing a disturbing readout of the equally disturbing motion; Borman awoke with a start.
“What happened?” he demanded.
For the moment, Lovell didn’t have an answer, and the spacecraft continued to lurch. Anders fired the thrusters to return the ship to its proper orientation, but whatever bit of bad code had initiated the problem was fighting back, working to maintain the nose-up position. Knowing that the first rule for this kind of situation was to avoid introducing new problems while one was already unfolding, Anders let go of the thruster handle.
Lovell ran his computer commands in his head and quickly figured out what he had done. Collins had called up the verb 3723 and the noun 501, which would have positioned the ship at the proper roll angle. Lovell, his fatigue getting the better of him, had inadvertently shortened it to verb 37 and noun 01. Those were very different commands: verb 37 meant “return to Earth,” and noun 01 meant “prelaunch mode.” In effect, Lovell had told the spacecraft that it was on the launchpad in Florida, and the spacecraft had believed him—hence its proud nose-up position as it prepared for liftoff.
“It was my goof,” Lovell said.
Collins, who had already correctly guessed what the cause of the problem was, answered simply, “Roger.”
The scrambled coding could be fixed, but it would take some work. Because of the incorrect commands, the spacecraft’s brain had been wiped clean of any knowledge of its current orientation. Restoring it would require Lovell to take what was known as a coarse alignment on three target stars, punch those coordinates into the computer, and then take a series of finer alignments until the guidance platform was back in balance. At that point, the ship would once again know its precise orientation in the three-dimensional bowl of space. It was similar to the sighting work Lovell had done throughout the mission, but this time the computer was so confused that the alignments had to be re-established starting from scratch.
Lovell was able to complete the job in comparatively short order. When he was finished, he reflected that it was a good procedure for any Apollo commander to have in his back pocket. In the event that a future spacecraft ever suffered a catastrophic systems failure, the first thing he’d need to know would be how to get the ship pointed properly again.
* * *
Avoidable errors like Lovell’s were nothing compared to the unavoidable hazards that still awaited the spacecraft during reentry. The first critical step would come less than an hour before the ship made its initial contact with the atmosphere, when it would jettison the service half of the command and service module, the part with the engine and the long-term life-support systems. The spacecraft that had begun its journey at the top of a 363-foot stack of rocket would then be reduced to an eleven-foot-tall cone with a heat shield covering its blunt bottom and enough oxygen and power to keep the crew alive for just a few hours.
That capsule would collide with the atmosphere at nearly 25,000 miles per hour, and withstanding that high-velocity hammer blow would be only part of the challenge. The spacecraft would also have to thread its way into an entry corridor no shallower than 5.3 degrees from horizontal and no steeper than 7.4 degrees. That translated to a fifteen-mile-wide keyhole in the sky, which was an exceedingly small target if you were taking a bead on it from a quarter million miles away. On a far smaller scale, if the Earth were the size of a basketball and the moon were the size of a baseball, the two worlds would be positioned twenty-three feet apart and the fifteen-mile-wide reentry corridor would be no thicker than a piece of paper.
The wages of missing that target would be immediate. Come in too steep and the crew would be killed by the g-forces, assuming the spacecraft didn’t get shaken apart by the aerodynamic violence first. Come in too shallow and Apollo 8 would skip off the skin of the atmosphere and ricochet into the void forever. Even a successful reentry would require riding the fire to splashdown in a way no crew had ever done before, with the temperature on the heat shield climbing to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit—or twice the melting point of steel—which was much more daunting than the 3,000 degrees of orbital reentry. The intense heat would cause the spacecraft to be surrounded by a cloud of ionized gas that would be impenetrable to radio signals, meaning that this life-or-death maneuver, like so many others on this mission, would take place during a blackout.
And there was still more to worry about. Assuming that the crew could hit the ballistic bull’s-eye, the reentry would not be survivable if the spacecraft didn’t do some complex maneuvering on the way down. The faint wisps of the upper atmosphere wouldn’t present much resistance until the ship had descended to about 400,000 feet above the Earth, or about 75 miles. At this point, the spacecraft and crew would be pulling 2.5 g’s, an easily survivable load. Eventually, the g’s would climb to between 6.8 and 7.0, which would be tougher but still manageable. But after that, if the ship continued on the same trajectory, the g-forces would multiply lethally.
Instead, the command module would have to pull up, climb briefly back out of the atmosphere, allow the temperature of the heat shield to cool a bit and the g-forces to vanish, and then re-reenter at a shallower angle. The physics of the so-called skip reentry were not unlike those of a roller coaster: the first plunge is always the steepest, and each successive peak and valley is lower and shallower, as the gravitational energy that is accumulated during the slow, clanking climb to the top of the ride’s first peak is steadily dissipated.
On the chalkboards and notepads where the skip reentry was first worked out, it all made clean, unarguable sense, except for one small thing: the Apollo spacecraft had no wings. Without wings you can’t have lift, and without lift you can’t climb. But there was an answer to that, too: design the command module so that its center of gravity was deliberately off-kilter.
Rather than placing that invisible pivot point at the center of the spacecraft cone, the engineers positioned it above the center. That design feature led to what was called a stable trim attitude, which naturally positioned the ship with its heat shield at a shallow downward angle. This is how the command module would be pointed as it made the first part of its plunge. When it came time to climb, the spacecraft, governed by the computer, would roll over, with the heat shield still facing forward but the astronauts now upside down in their couches. That would put the center of gravity below the center line, changing the angle of approach and causing the capsule to climb. When it was time to dive back down, the ship would roll once more.
The skip reentry would be a wild ride, and it would have been awfully nice to have test-flown the flight path from just a few thousand miles above Earth once or twice before. That was exactly the test Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders had been scheduled to run when Apollo 8 was still called Apollo 9 and the crew was slated to bring a LEM and not go anywhere near the moon. But the ship never got its LEM and it went to the moon instead, and now the astronauts’ test flight would be a real flight from a true lunar distance.
And that’s why Frank Borman did not care a whit for talk of parades and world tours and relaxed vigilance in Houston.
* * *
It was deep in the Pacific night when the spacecraft from the moon was making its final approach to Earth. If you’d lived on one of the islands in the middle of the ocean and stood outside at about 3:00 a.m. local time on December 27, you could have seen the ship coming, though you might have needed the help of a pair of seven-power binoculars. Apollo 8, through those lenses, would have been a faint point of light about a quarter of the way between the moon and the bright point that was Venus. You would have had to be patient, though: if you saw the target dot move a tiny bit over the course of fifteen minutes, you’d know you were looking at the spaceship, which by then would be just over sixty minutes from entering the Earth’s atmosphere, moving at about 20,000 miles an hour and still accelerating.
Aboard the dot, the experience was very different and much less peaceful. The men in the machine couldn’t feel the ship’s motion, but the Earth, which had been as small as a coin just two days before, was growing fast, expanding well beyond the frames of the spacecraft’s windows and once again becoming an enormous arc of horizon that was far too big to be seen whole in a single field. From the distance of the moon, Jim Lovell had marveled that he could extend his arm and hide the entire Earth behind his thumb. Now, as the planet resumed its proper scale, his thumb was once again a near nothing against the great mass of the world.
Before the crew could fly much closer to that growing bulk, they had a lot to do. As soon as reentry caused even a ghost of gravity to appear, any loose debris that had been floating around the cockpit would fall down to the base of the spacecraft, which meant onto the astronauts. This problem would only get worse as the g-forces grew, and you did not want to get hit in the head by a seven-g flashlight or bolt when you’re trying to pilot a spacecraft through free fall.
Borman and Lovell did a fast cleanup of the vehicle. Anders, meanwhile, made sure the valves on the potable water tank and any coolant systems or evaporators were closed, since water raining down on the electronics would be even worse than junk raining down on the crew. Lovell watched Anders to ensure that the job got done and then called the ground to confirm.
“Bill just shut the potable inlet, Ken,” he radioed to Mattingly.
“Okay, thank you.”
“If I see any water floating around, I’ll give you another call,” Anders added.
The comment was meant to reassure, but it did no such thing. By now, any loose water that hadn’t shown itself probably wouldn’t appear until it came out of hiding during reentry, and then it would be too late.
The ground had other chores for the crew to perform, too, including making sure that the space suits, with their heavy fishbowl helmets, were securely stowed. If one good thing had come out of Wally Schirra’s refusal to wear his helmet during Apollo 7’s return to Earth, it was that the uneventful reentry allowed NASA to feel confident that the spacecraft’s design was solid and the vehicle was unlikely to spring a depressurizing leak during the return. As a consequence, Mission Control gave Borman and his crew permission to reenter in the lighter, much more comfortable cloth jumpsuits they had worn throughout the flight.
Anders also had to adjust the environmental control system so that the cabin temperature fell to 62 degrees. That was too low for their thin garments, but the chill wouldn’t last long. Even the best-insulated ship would experience some heat soak when its leading edge was reaching 5,000 degrees. And by the time the fiery reentry was over, the ship would have traded the deep freeze of space for the 85-degree weather of the near-equatorial South Pacific, at which point it might grow uncomfortably warm inside.
Though the skies over the splashdown area were due to be clear, the weather service was also forecasting four-foot waves. That prompted Mattingly to offer one further advisory.
“It has been recommended that since Marezine takes some time to take effect, you might want to consider taking one now,” he radioed up.
Borman could not believe what he was hearing. Marezine—again. He had flown planes through chop and so had his crewmates, and this would be just one more bumpy ride. Wisely, the capcom had provided himself with some cover, mentioning in the same transmission that he had another set of figures on the entry PAD to read up to the crew. Borman decided that he would address only one of Mattingly’s points, the preliminary advisory data.
“Okay, stand by. Let me get out the entry PAD,” he answered, making no mention of the Marezine. Mattingly wouldn’t mention it again, either.
Finally, the time came for the no-turning-back maneuver—the junking of the service module. Like so much else during this voyage, it would be an exercise in controlled violence, with explosive bolts blowing all links between the two parts of the ship. Immediately afterward, the ground would send up a command for the now-headless service module to fire its forward thrusters so that it could back away from the command module and then tumble to its death in the atmosphere.
“Houston, Apollo 8, confirm go for pyro arm,” Lovell called down, asking for official clearance to arm the pyrotechnics that would effectively pull the pin on the jettison grenade.
“Apollo 8, you are go for pyro arm,” Mattingly answered.
With that clearance from the ground, the astronauts returned to their seats and cinched their restraints as tight as possible. The loose settings used during the LOI and TEI burns would be nowhere near sufficient for the ride that lay ahead. After Borman belted himself in, he glanced over to Lovell and Anders to make sure they had done so as well. Then he looked at the clock on his instrument panel. The moment the service module was gone, he and his crew would be entering the period of peak risk. Within the hour, they would be safely in the water—or they would be casualties of space.
* * *
On the ground in Houston, it was just after 8:00 a.m. Television coverage, which had returned to the air on all three networks, was intercutting between the voices of the anchors in their studios and the voice of Paul Haney, the Mission Control commentator currently on duty. Haney or one of his colleagues had been on the microphone for the entirety of the mission, but for much of that time, the newscasters had dominated the broadcasts. Today, the TV personalities stepped back to give more room to the voice of the space program.
“The route of flight, in case you’re not looking at a map,” Haney said in the flat, unemotive voice all of the NASA commentators used, “will be over northeast China, Peking, and then over Tokyo, and then we start a southeastern slant. The landing point is at one hundred and sixty-five degrees west, approximately eight north. That point, by the way, is just six hundred miles northwest of Christmas Island, which I’m sure has been noted.” He was referring to the Kiritimati atoll, south of Hawaii, which sometimes goes by the name of the better known Christmas Island much farther west. The reference was a stretch, but one Haney was willing to make given the season and circumstances.
With just ninety seconds left until the service module would be jettisoned, Mattingly could be heard on the air alerting the crew that the spacecraft’s primary evaporator had dried out. As with the evaporator problem that occurred during the first broadcast from lunar orbit, this issue would ordinarily require immediate attention. But since both the primary and the backup evaporators were located in the service module, they had a mere minute and a half to live. Mission rules, however, were not tolerant of excuses, so the command to switch to the backup system was sent up to the ship. Anders radioed down a bemused “Roger,” and it was left to Haney to offer the viewers some candid perspective on the exchange.
“Crew’s been advised that their primary evaporator has dried out,” he said, “a fact that I’m sure that they couldn’t care less about.”
In his center seat, Lovell tapped the commands that would initiate the separation sequence into the computer. After thinking for a moment, the computer processed what it had been told and flashed back the 99:20 “go or no-go” code.
“Go to proceed,” Lovell called out.
“Go to proceed,” Borman agreed. He placed his hand on his thruster controller in the event the maneuver went awry and the ship flew off course.
Lovell pressed the PROCEED key. As the bolts exploded, a dull thump accompanied by a jolt shook the astronauts. The command module popped free, and the service module—drifting somewhere invisibly behind—fired the proper burst through its forward-facing thrusters and backed safely away.
Borman eyeballed his attitude indicators and relaxed his hand. His ship was stable.
“That was a kick,” he said. Though he was fully aware of the power of the pyros, he was surprised that he had felt so much of the explosion’s force.
Mission Control could see from its telemetry that the jettison had occurred, and Anders and Lovell had felt it as powerfully as Borman had. As a consequence, no one thought to say it aloud.
On Earth, the newscasters got jumpy.
“Separation should be taking place just about now,” Cronkite said. “We’re waiting for confirmation of that from Paul Haney.” But Haney wasn’t saying, and after more than a minute had elapsed, Cronkite fretted. “We’re still waiting for confirmation of the separation, which should have taken place at thirteen seconds after 10:22 eastern time,” he said. “To make us all happier, we’d like to have it.”
At last, Haney either realized his oversight or was told by someone monitoring the networks to make the anchorman happy. “The flight director has confirmed separation,” he said.
“So apparently all things are going well with the flight of Apollo 8,” said Cronkite, obviously relieved.
Reentry was now an inevitability less than twelve minutes away. But the success of that imminent collision between spacecraft and air required one more navigational sighting.
Precisely six minutes before reentry began, the moon—remote once more—would rise over the horizon of the Earth, the last time the crew would see it through the void of space. If it showed itself at the expected moment, it would mean Apollo 8’s trajectory was true. If not, Lovell and Borman would have some fast and complicated navigating and flying to do to put their course right before time ran out.
Two minutes before the lunar sighting was due to occur, Anders, following the flight plan, called out, “Horizon check.”
Lovell, who had been watching Borman from his adjacent seat, responded: “He’s doing that now.”
Anders, confident that the moon sighting would go as planned, began reading off the next set of commands. “Pitch needle error goes toward zero,” he said.
Borman, keeping his eyes on the horizon outside, answered only, “Okay.”
“Don’t forget manual attitude to three, rate command,” continued Anders.
“Yes, okay, but tell me that later,” Borman replied.
“Yes, right. Just don’t forget it.”
“Just tell me later,” Borman said. “Okay?”
The commander looked away from the horizon and scowled at his instruments. The ship was fighting the proper line of descent, straining up and away from the route it needed to travel. Suddenly the scheduled moonrise was a secondary concern.
Borman fired a burst from his thrusters.
“See where this baby wants to fly? The pitch is way up,” he muttered. Then he fired the thrusters again and began bringing the spacecraft to heel. “Keep checking my yaw for me there, will you?” he asked Lovell.
“I will,” Lovell answered. “You’re a little bit left.”
Borman brought the ship back to midline.
“It looks like you’re slightly rolled,” Anders said.
“I don’t care about the rolls,” Borman said—caring indeed, but still monitoring yaw. A moment later, he corrected the roll too, and the ship finally seemed to stabilize.
Anders checked the indicators. “We’ve got a good horizon,” he confirmed.
Borman, pleased, looked through his window and smiled. “And look who’s coming there, would you?”
“Yes!” Anders exclaimed, glancing ahead.
“You see it?”
“Yes.”
“Just like they promised.”
“What?” asked Lovell, who had been minding his instruments.
“The moon,” Borman and Anders said in unison.
Lovell looked up and saw it, too—a tiny world that, like the Earth a few days ago, could fit behind his thumb.
“At six minutes before,” Borman said, glancing at the flight plan, “just like it says.”
Haney, reading the telemetry that indicated the ship’s stable attitude, now described for the television audience the coming sequence of events.
“The four-hundred-thousand-foot point is where they will begin to encounter some little bit of atmosphere,” he said. “The blackout should begin some twenty-five seconds later. The max g-force felt by the crew will be six-point-eight g’s. A second g spike of about four-point-two will be noted about four, five minutes later. The total blackout we’re predicting this morning is on the order of three minutes. But since we have very little experience reentering at these velocities, we must caution you that those are only estimates.”
It was all so informal—the list of events that would happen in a predictable order, the g-forces that would be merely noted by the crew. But for Haney to say that NASA had “very little experience reentering at these velocities” was like saying that until Apollo 8, human beings had very little experience flying to the moon. In fact, they had had none.
Inside the ship, the astronauts kept their tone equally nonchalant. Lovell looked through his window and noticed the way the onion skin of the atmosphere now looked so much thicker—thick enough that the sun shining through it broke into a spectrum of shades from the black of space to deep blue, then red, orange, and finally bright yellow. Just three Christmases before, he and Borman had spent fourteen days with that rainbow ribbon outside their window; Anders, who had been extremely busy during Apollo 8’s brief stay in Earth orbit six days ago, had likely not seen it at all.
“I got the old…” Lovell began, waving his hand toward the window.
“What is that?” Anders asked.
“Good old airglow is what it is,” Borman said.
Anders glanced at it; unimpressed, he looked back down at his flight plan. “I’ll look at the airglow next time,” he said.
Lovell pressed: “You’ve never seen the airglow. Take a look at it.”
“You can’t get your pin without seeing the airglow,” Borman teased, echoing the stewardesses on airplane flights who would bribe restless children into good behavior with the promise of the gift of souvenir pilot’s wings.
“That’s right,” Lovell said.
“I see it, I see it!” Anders laughed, making a show of gaping out the window. Then he affected the nervous look of the rookie pilot. “Let’s see, is this where I’m supposed to ask, ‘How many g’s, Lovell?’”
Anders could joke, but the fact was, the needle on the g-meter had indeed begun to twitch. Meanwhile, the airglow was growing bright enough to reflect off the windows. The reflection quickly grew brighter and redder, the first sign that the ship was encountering air resistance.
At that moment, NASA radioed up a reminder to the crew to turn on the radar transponder that the recovery ships would need to track the spacecraft as it fell. But Mission Control would have to trust that the astronauts had heard the command and obeyed it, because the instant the words were uttered, the communications link was cut.
“And we have lost signal,” Haney announced.
* * *
Lovell didn’t need a mission commentator to tell him what the hiss in his headset already had. The crew was alone once more. He turned to Anders.
“You’ve got the checklist again, Bill?” he asked.
“You’ve got it?” Borman repeated.
“Yes,” Anders assured them, holding up the flight plan.
“I’ll tell you when the g’s start going,” Lovell said, the matter no longer a subject of humor.
“This is going to be a real ride; hang on,” Borman said, then turned to Lovell. “You got point-zero-five g?” That reading—just .05 of a single g—would be the first data reading indicating that reentry had officially begun.
“I’ve got point-zero-two,” Lovell said.
A stray washer, missed in the cleanup but now with a tiny bit of weight to it, drifted into view, falling in slow motion.
“There goes a washer,” Borman said. “Can you grab it?”
Before anyone could get it, the little bit of junk floated off again.
Lovell’s eyes remained on his instruments, watching both his g-meter and the mission clock. He knew precisely how the joint forces of gravity and time were supposed to play out. “Stand by—thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one…” His voice trailed off. And then: “Point-zero-five!”
“Point-zero-five,” Borman confirmed.
“Okay, we got it!” Anders said.
“Hang on!” Borman called.
“They’re building up,” Lovell said.
“Call out the g’s,” Borman commanded.
“We’re at one g!” Lovell called.
The astronauts stayed silent for just twenty seconds as the g-forces rapidly multiplied. Lovell watched the needle climb to two, then three, then four and beyond.
“Five,” he said, straining to get out the syllable as a force quintuple Earth’s nominal gravity pressed down on his chest. Then yet another rock was piled on.
“Six,” he said through his teeth.
The red glow outside the spacecraft brightened to the orange of a roaring fire, then to deep yellow, then brilliant yellow, then a pure, nearly blinding white. The astronauts squinted against it; to Borman, it was like being on the inside of a fluorescent bulb. As the white light, which had no other degree of brightness left to it, held steady, the g’s, which knew no such limits, climbed to a peak of 6.84.
Then, at last, the roller coaster rose according to the plan and the g’s started backing off.
“Four,” Lovell said, relieved at that minimal easing of the pressure.
“Quite a ride, huh?” Anders said.
A moment later, Lovell, breathing more easily still, provided another report: “We’re below two g’s.”
“Nice job there, gang,” Borman said.
The break would not last. The final dive was yet to come, when the g’s would climb back over four. The astronauts were still more than 175,000 feet—or 33 miles—above the Earth and free-falling through the sky. Not until 24,000 feet would the two thirteen-foot-diameter drogue parachutes be deployed, jerking the spacecraft to a slower but still lethal 200 miles per hour. Only at 10,000 feet would the three main chutes, each 83.5 feet across, open up, braking the spacecraft to a tolerable landing speed.
Even then, “tolerable” was a relative notion. The spacecraft would hit the water at just over 21 miles per hour, which seems like nothing when you’ve been flying a ship that just minutes before was moving at one thousand times that speed. But 21 miles per hour is also thirty-one feet per second, a speed that on impact makes water feel like a solid and shakes you with a force that rattles your teeth. The arrangement of the parachutes was designed to mitigate that a bit, since they were attached in a way that caused the spacecraft to hang from them somewhat crookedly, so that the command module didn’t slam into the water on its wide, flat bottom but sliced into it with the leading edge first. Further, the astronauts’ couches were mounted on crushable aluminum struts that were meant to collapse on impact and thus absorb some of the blow.
But all that was for when Apollo 8 was a lot closer to the Earth and moving a lot slower than it was right now.
* * *
Far below the spacecraft, rescue helicopters had already begun scrambling from the deck of the USS Yorktown in the Pacific, converging on the site where the command module was likely to splash down. Once the rescue teams arrived, there would be nothing for them to do but hover and maintain their positions.
For now, Apollo 8 still hadn’t emerged from blackout. The ship was at least a minute away from that milestone, and on the ground Haney did what he could do to manage expectations.
“Our curves put the spacecraft down about thirty-five to thirty-six miles above the Earth,” he said.
In the background, Haney could hear Mattingly make a preliminary call to the ship, and if he could hear it, the viewers heard it as well. They needed to know not to expect a reply. “Ken Mattingly just put in a call and frankly labeled it a radio check,” Haney said. “He’s gotten no response as yet.”
Cronkite, decidedly not managing expectations, broke in and spoke more bluntly. “If the blackout ends as planned,” he said, “it should be over in about ten or eleven seconds from now.”
Ten and then eleven seconds ticked off, but there was still no word.
“Apollo 8, Houston, through Huntsville,” Mattingly said, trying to reach the ship through the communications network at NASA’s Huntsville, Alabama, facility.
Again he got no response.
“And Ken puts a second call in to the crew,” Haney said. “About three and a half minutes since we went into the blackout.”
Moments later, word flashed through Mission Control that Huntsville had just picked up a first radar signal from Apollo 8. It wasn’t much, but it meant the ship was alive.
Haney went wide with the news. “And Huntsville says that they have acquired an S-band signal,” he announced.
Cronkite jumped on the report. “They do have a sig—”
Haney cut him off. “They immediately called back and said no contact,” he said firmly. “They negate that announcement.”
Cronkite groaned audibly. “I really thought we had them,” he said.
The blackout now stretched to four minutes. In the Borman, Lovell, and Anders homes, the only sounds came from the television sets and the squawk boxes. The children—eleven of them among the three families—were all awake, and those who were old enough to understand what was happening were watching the coverage. For these final moments of the mission, all three mothers were sitting in their living rooms, their children close by.
The blackout stretched to four and a half minutes and then closed on five.
“It’s now just two minutes past the time we should have heard from the spacecraft,” Cronkite said somberly.
“Houston, Apollo 8, through Huntsville,” Mattingly called again.
He allowed almost another minute to pass.
“Apollo 8, Apollo 8, this is Houston,” he tried once more.
Fifteen more seconds of silence elapsed.
Then, at last, through the loud wash of air-to-ground static, Jim Lovell’s voice—broken but discernible—filled the Mission Control headsets and the living rooms around the planet.
“Houston, Apollo 8, over,” he said.
“And…” Haney began, his voice choking before he took a second breath, “there’s Jim Lovell!”
“Ha-ha!” Cronkite exclaimed.
“Go ahead, Apollo 8, read you broken and loud,” said Mattingly.
“Roger,” Borman shouted back through the crackle and roar of the plasma cloud only now dissipating from around the ship. “This is a real fireball! It’s looking good!”
“He says we’re looking good!” Haney said.
“It’s almost all over but the shouting, men,” Borman said to Lovell and Anders.
The altimeter on the instrument panel showed that the ship was fast approaching 24,000 feet, meaning the drogue chutes were about to be deployed.
“Make sure your heels are locked,” Anders called to Borman and Lovell, reminding them of their training.
Borman looked out his forward window. “There she comes!” he said, as the conical nose of the capsule blew away and the two red-and-white drogue chutes reefed and bloomed.
The astronauts jerked back in their couches, but the tenuous communications link had broken off again, and the crew did not even bother to call the ground to confirm the chute deployment.
Anders watched as the altimeter, dropping more slowly now, continued toward 10,000 feet.
“Should be approaching ten K,” he said a few moments later. “Stand by with the mains in one second.”
That second elapsed, and at just over the promised altitude of 10,000 feet, the main chutes burst free. The men jerked once more, and the ship’s descent slowed dramatically.
The communications loop opened up again and another voice—an entirely new one—filled their headsets.
“This is Air Boss 1,” someone announced, using the call signal of a rescue helicopter. The unmistakable sound of rotor blades chopped in the background. “You’re sounding very good, very good. You have been reported on radar as southwest of the ship, about twenty-five miles.”
“Roger,” Lovell answered.
The spacecraft fell through 8,000 and 6,000 and then just 5,000 feet. After a journey of half a million miles, the ship was now less than a mile above the water.
“The spacecraft is down to one thousand,” the pilot of the helicopter called to the Yorktown.
“Brace yourselves,” Borman yelled to Lovell and Anders.
“Welcome home, gentlemen,” the pilot said, a few seconds prematurely. “We’ll have you aboard in no time.”
“Stand by,” Borman told his crew. “Stand by for Earth landing.”
A moment later, the three astronauts felt the hard hand of the Earth’s surface hit them at their backs as their spacecraft half-sliced, half-slammed into the rolling waters of the Pacific Ocean. The struts beneath their seats collapsed as they had been designed to do, but the jolt was still violent.
The crew barely noticed. Borman pumped his fist, Lovell and Anders let out a whoop, and all three men looked at one another and grinned.
“Yorktown, Recovery 3,” a helicopter pilot called. “At this time the spacecraft is in the water.”
Walter Cronkite, his voice filled with relief and jubilation, made it official. “The spacecraft Apollo 8 is back!”
* * *
And so it was. Getting the spacecraft into the ocean was, however, not the same as getting the astronauts onto the carrier. At that moment, about four miles separated Apollo 8 from the ship. And distance wasn’t the only obstacle; time was, too. Splashdown had occurred at 4:51:50 a.m. Hawaii-Aleutian time, or 10:51 a.m. on the East Coast.
It would not be difficult to find Apollo 8 in the predawn darkness, thanks to both the flashing white light on the nose of the ship and the radar beacon that had been pinging throughout reentry. But Pacific sharks prowl during the early morning hours, and nobody wanted to take the chance that either the moon men or the frogmen would attract their deadly attention. So the astronauts would have to bob and drift in their airtight pod until first dawn, which was still at least half an hour away. Once the skies brightened, it would take another hour for the frogmen to hit the water and attach a flotation collar to the spacecraft, which would make it possible for the astronauts to leave their ship without falling into the sea. Only then could the hatch be opened and the crew extracted, at which point the men would be lifted one by one up to the helicopter that would fly them back to the Yorktown.
The wait for their rescuers would not be pleasant. NASA’s meteorologists had been right when they’d forecast waves in the recovery area, but they had been wrong in predicting that the waves would top out at about four feet. In fact, they were closer to six. And though it had been a good idea to turn the cabin temperature down to 62 degrees before reentry, that interior chill had been replaced by a stultifying heat, first from the fiery descent through the atmosphere and then by the warm temperatures of the near-equatorial Pacific. The combination of the two—hot, close air and the heaving of the capsule—did not do good things to a pilot’s insides.
Making the crew’s circumstances worse, the motion of the waves soon caused the spacecraft to flip from the position NASA called “stable one” to the position called “stable two”—what anyone else would call right side up to upside down. That left the astronauts hanging in their straps in the now unfamiliar one-g environment, looking down at their instrument panel. Borman could activate three flotation balloons packed in the nose of the spacecraft near where the parachutes had been, and he promptly did so. But it would take a while for the balloons to turn the spacecraft back over. Both Mission Control and the recovery helicopters noticed relatively little chatter coming from the spacecraft, a silence characteristic of anyone battling a rising bubble of nausea.
“Get us out of here,” Anders finally radioed, only partly joking. “I’m not the sailor on this boat.”
Lovell, the Navy man flying with two Air Force men, managed to keep any seasickness in check. So did Anders. Borman, who had begun his mission to the moon fighting a losing battle against his rebellious stomach, lost again. If the Apollo 8 spacecraft was destined for a museum—which it surely was—the conservators would have a little cleanup work to do first.
Eventually, the sky did brighten, the choppers closed in, and the frogmen leapt into the water. They waved at the crew through windows that less than seventy-two hours before had been filled with the bright, bleak landscape of the moon; now, seeing the faces of smiling strangers, the astronauts waved back. Once the flotation collar was secured, one of the frogmen signaled the all-clear by banging on the hatch. Lovell, in the center position—the position occupied by Ed White in a different ship almost two long years ago—opened the little door with ease.
The fresh smell and warm breeze of the Pacific flowed into the capsule, replacing the stuffy air the crew had been breathing for nearly a week.
“Welcome home, men,” the lead frogman said.
The astronauts were helped out of the spacecraft, onto the docking collar, and into a life raft—Lovell first, then Borman, then Anders. As a helicopter hovered noisily overhead, a rescue basket lifted them to safety. The chopper’s crew saluted each man as he climbed aboard.
“Congratulations, sir,” said Donald Jones, the pilot, to Borman. “It was a wonderful reentry.”
Borman demurred. “It was all automatic,” he said. “We had nothing to do with it.”
The commander of the first mission to the moon was pretty sure that he would be congratulated and applauded a lot in the coming weeks, but he had already decided that he would take credit only for the accomplishments that were actually his. Besides, he had something else on his mind.
“Did anyone bring the shaver?” he asked.
“Right here, sir,” one of the young crew members said, handing Borman an electric razor.
Borman had taken a lot of ribbing over the patchy blond beard he had grown during his two weeks aboard Gemini 7; during the same mission, Lovell had practically grown a full beard. Now the Apollo 8 commander flicked on the razor and cleaned up the stubble that had sprouted over the past six days. No one would have anything to tease him about this time.
When the helicopter at last landed on the Yorktown’s deck, a red carpet was waiting. The door opened and the astronauts emerged, grinning and waving as the carrier’s crew cheered. In Houston, the mission controllers had scrupulously abided by the rule that no final celebration would be permitted until that moment. When they saw the astronauts appear, they, too, shouted and hugged and shook hands and lit cigars.
The astronauts walked between the ranks of cheering sailors, waving and calling out thank-yous. At the end of the carpet, they were greeted by Captain John Field, the commander of the ship, who presented them with USS Yorktown baseball caps, which they donned as demanded by both tradition and a genuine gratitude for the efforts that had been made on their behalf. The astronauts shook hands with Field, who then motioned Borman to a standing microphone that had been placed there for him.
Though Borman had not prepared a speech, he welcomed the chance to show his appreciation to the carrier’s crew.
“It seems that Jim and I always fly in December, doesn’t it?” he said, to appreciative laughter from the ship’s crew. “That time we got back before Christmas. This time we didn’t, and we want to apologize for keeping you out here over the holidays.”
After a few more remarks and thank-yous, the astronauts vanished belowdecks to the sick bay for their postflight medical exams. There would be a call to take from President Johnson and another from Vice President Humphrey, and already congratulatory statements and telegrams were streaming in for the astronauts from world leaders—U Thant at the U.N. and Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace and Prime Minister Wilson at 10 Downing Street, as well as the presidents of France, Italy, and many other countries. The Kremlin sent its congratulations; in fact, the White House had used the Washington-Moscow hotline—installed mostly as a direct source of communication during times of military escalation—to keep the Soviets apprised of the status of the mission.
“Accept, Mr. President, our congratulations on the successful completion of the flight of the Apollo 8 spacecraft around the moon,” said Soviet president Nikolai Podgorny in his formal statement to Lyndon Johnson. The mission, Podgorny noted, “is a new accomplishment in mastering the outer space by man.” The telegram implicitly acknowledged that the United States had just won a dramatic battle in the Cold War, and the official spokesman for the opponent was—grudgingly perhaps, but graciously—conceding that fact. In a contest so often marked by ambiguous outcomes, Apollo 8 had scored a clear victory.
Belowdecks, freshly showered, the astronauts had changed into clean white flight suits, combed their hair, and donned their Yorktown caps, and soon they were climbing the metal ladder back to the deck. By now, their spacecraft had been hauled aboard, and the portion of the deck that held the little capsule had been cordoned off.
The astronauts approached their spacecraft and examined it. By any measure, the ship was spent. Its flanks had been discolored by the fires of the reentry, and its heat shield was half incinerated. Its tapered nose had been jettisoned to allow the parachutes and flotation balloons to deploy, giving the front of the capsule an incomplete, even broken look.
The hatch was partly open, and the men looked inside. It was a cluttered mess. There would be a few souvenirs to collect—the flight plans, a flashlight, the little unopened bottles of brandy, perhaps. But the command module was now retired, an artifact of history.
Jim Lovell and Bill Anders regarded their spacecraft with an acute feeling of unfinished business. If given the chance, they would take another ship—tomorrow wouldn’t be too soon—and fly the whole mission again, only this time they would land on the moon they had so recently orbited.
Frank Borman felt nothing of the kind. He had been assigned a mission, he had flown the mission, and he had come home from the mission. He gave the scarred side of the command module an affectionate slap, then turned around and walked away. He did not look back.