Lyndon Johnson didn’t need to know the names of every one of the 142 people who would be joining him in the State Dining Room for dinner on the night of December 9, 1968, just that it would be a full house and he’d be expected to make all of them laugh. Johnson was good with a dinner crowd and good at working a room, but he was not especially good at making anyone laugh. Not like Kennedy had been—Kennedy with the wink and the twinkle and all the happy back-and-forth. A press conference with Kennedy had been like an Ivy League cocktail party, all wit and banter. For Johnson it was more like a subcommittee hearing, at least lately, with one question about the war followed by another question about the war followed by a third question about the war, and Johnson looking more and more like a reluctant witness being picked apart by a panel of prosecutors.
But tonight would be Johnson’s night, and for once the laughs would come easily. Actually, that was always the way at a White House function when you were president: you tell a joke, you get a laugh. The laughter perk would expire in forty-two days, on January 20, when Richard Nixon, who had defeated Hubert Humphrey in a close presidential election the previous month, would take Johnson’s place in the Oval Office.
Johnson was determined to make this evening a happy one, and it was shaping up that way. The dinner was being held in honor of NASA, the Apollo astronauts in particular, and, more specifically, three of those astronauts—Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders. After the dinner, those three would say good-bye to their wives, head straight back to Cape Kennedy, and move into the on-base crew quarters, where they would live until the morning of December 21, when they would lift off for the moon.
Twenty other astronauts were here tonight, too, all but four of whom had flown in space at least once. To most of the non-NASA guests, these veterans would give off that magical, beyond-the-visible-spectrum aura that only spacemen could. Jim Webb and Wernher von Braun were also in attendance, as was Kurt Debus, the director of the Cape Kennedy launch facility. All three men were integral to the series of programs that had launched the astronauts into space, but they had never gone themselves and thus did not have the aura and never would.
The only other person on the guest list who did have a bit of that special shimmer was Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Now sixty-six, Lindbergh had taken a keen interest in the Apollo 8 mission and planned to travel to the Cape to watch the launch. Even the spacemen showed a respectful deference in the presence of Lindbergh. The rest of the guests—Vice President Humphrey, cabinet members, senators and representatives—would be mere extras and supernumeraries in an event that would star the aviator and the astronauts.
The evening was to begin with dinner and end with an abbreviated version of the four-act opera Voyage to the Moon, written by the German-French composer Jacques Offenbach in 1875. In the twentieth-century version, a young prince takes off in a three-man rocket ship to meet the girl in the moon, even as the king of the moon is hatching plans to push the Earth aside in its orbit so that the moon can get more sunlight. Ultimately there is resolution and romance and peace, and the leaders of the two worlds decide to work together in friendly scientific pursuits. The unsubtle nod to the American-Soviet space race was impossible to miss, though it was open to doubt whether the NASA men in the audience, who had a real moon flight to think about, would be paying enough attention to perceive the intended meaning.
For that reason as much as any, Johnson was determined that his pre-performance remarks succeed, and his writers had given him material that they knew would land well. He began his remarks, and after a couple of easy jokes about how busy the astronauts were and how hard it had been to schedule the dinner, Johnson turned his attention to Webb.
Just before the dinner, Johnson said, Webb “came up to me and said in that serious way of his, ‘Mr. President, are you a turtle?’” At this, the astronauts roared, directing their attention now toward Wally Schirra, who practically owned the joke. One of the speechwriters had done some good research and gotten the backstory from the head of the Manned Spacecraft Center’s public affairs office.
“This is an in-joke known to the astronauts,” read a note on the president’s draft. “Unless the person answers with the reply, ‘You bet your ass I am,’ he has to buy a round of drinks.”
The joke may have needed some explaining to the president, but not to the astronauts. And if the other dignitaries in the room didn’t get it, that was just as well, since it reinforced the sense that tonight’s event was for the fliers’ fraternity. Johnson went on in this vein for another minute or two. Then, a politician down to his marrow, he knew when to quit the monkeyshines and get down to the real purpose of the evening. The dinner tonight, he said, was dedicated not just to the Apollo 8 crew but to all of the people of NASA and especially the twenty other astronauts in the room who might one day be making lunar voyages of their own.
“Our rockets can fly from place to place,” the president said, “but only the mind of man can cross the new frontiers of space. This may be an unusual toast, because I would like to ask more people to remain seated than to stand. I would like to ask the vice president and the secretary of defense and the members of Congress and their wives to join Mrs. Johnson and me in a toast to the brave and dedicated men of our space program and their wonderful wives.”
Chairs scraped as the dignitaries stood and toasted. And although the speech had done what it was supposed to do—pay respects, yes, but also indulge in a bit of the bonhomie of the pilots, the ribbing that would naturally precede a risky mission and help banish the fear that lurked about its edges—there was, all the same, a shadow in the room.
On the list of honored guests tonight—and remaining seated at their own tables to receive the toast with the rest of the NASA family—were Mrs. Gus Grissom and Mrs. Ed White. Unlike the other women in the room, they had come to the dinner unescorted.
* * *
If there was a great big party taking place in Florida on the weekend of December 20, 1968—and there was—the Apollo 8 astronauts weren’t invited to it. Nobody counted the precise number of people pouring out of the cars that were swarming toward the Cape and parking along its beach roads and in its motel lots, but the best guess put it at about a quarter of a million. Likewise, no one could say how far all of these people had traveled to get here, but the license plates came from dozens of states as well as Canada—far more than just Florida’s Deep South neighbors, whose residents could usually be counted on to show up no matter how routine the launch.
The people at NASA paid little attention to the horde of spectators camping in the chilly night air the evening before the liftoff. They were much more interested in a more rarefied group: the celebrities and other VIPs who’d been invited as official guests of NASA. Every launch brought a crowd of notables, but this time the list was enormous. At least two thousand people long, it included all of the members of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the cabinet, as well as the aristocracy of Hollywood and industry. Those special guests—who got first claim on the best hotels and sole claim to the comfortable viewing stands on the space center grounds on the banks of the Banana River—had received an engraved invitation to the event.
You are cordially invited
to attend the departure of United States
spaceship Apollo 8 on its voyage around the moon.
Departing from launch complex 39
Kennedy Space Center, with the
launch window commencing at 7 A.M.,
the twenty-first of December,
nineteen hundred and sixty-eight
The phrasing was self-consciously grand and strangely quaint—the business about “spaceship Apollo 8” especially, which sounded equal parts fairy tale and Homer’s Odyssey. Not a single soul in NASA had ever referred to any of the vehicles they’d ever launched as a spaceship, but the epochal tone of the invitation seemed suited to the occasion.
In the days leading up to liftoff, Borman, Lovell, and Anders saw little of the crowd or the VIPs or the reporters who were swarming around the Cape, and they liked that just fine, especially Borman. The hullabaloo surrounding the mission was a distraction, and not one he welcomed. Borman found the dinner at the White House pleasant enough; it was a nuisance but a tolerable one, and Susan clearly enjoyed it. Shortly afterward, she and Valerie Anders would be returning home to Houston to watch the launch on TV, while Marilyn Lovell and the four Lovell children would go to the Cape. If Susan had to say good-bye to Frank, doing so on the morning after being feted at the White House seemed fair and fitting, given the risks that he—and, by extension, the whole Borman family—was taking.
Once the White House business was done, Borman found the spartan crew quarters on the Cape Kennedy grounds something of a relief. The astronauts were installed in what amounted to a three-bedroom apartment, with a common area, a bathroom, and a small kitchen. The beds were metal-framed and military grade; the dressers and nightstands were slightly better motel grade. The sofa in the common area was a grudging thing, soft enough to be called a sofa, but no more.
The one concession to the astronauts’ comfort was the cook who had been assigned to them and who was rather grandly called a chef. It was an odd word to have chosen, since the man had actually learned his craft slinging meals for tugboat crews in the Florida ports. That, however, made the food he cooked just right—heavy, simple, satisfying—even if the too-grand title was all wrong.
The ten days at the Cape before the launch would be spent shuttling between the crew quarters and the Apollo simulators, with intermittent briefings by the trajectory experts and flight planners. Still, even in semi-isolation, the crew would suffer the occasional intrusions, which generally came from the odd celebrity who asked NASA for an audience with the astronauts and then was persistent enough to ask more than once.
A few days after the crew settled in, Chuck Deiterich, a mission controller who worked the retrofire console, came to visit. Ordinarily, retrofire was a procedure performed at the end of an Earth orbit mission, when the ship turned itself blunt-end forward and lit its engine to slow down and come home. But on Apollo 8, the spacecraft would execute that same maneuver as it approached the moon in order to enter orbit, then fire the engine again to come home, and then, three days later, have to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere from a distance and at a speed that had never been attempted before. If Deiterich had even a small detail to review or address, Borman wanted to hear it.
Today the flight controller and the astronaut were talking about the engine burn required to enter lunar orbit. Sitting in the common area, Deiterich picked up a can of shaving cream that one of the astronauts had left on the coffee table, then turned it bottom forward to illustrate a point about the spacecraft’s orientation during the firing. At that moment the two men heard a knock on the door; an apologetic-looking public affairs officer poked his head inside. He was escorting Arthur Godfrey, the redheaded comedian and TV pitchman, who in recent years had been less well known for his comedy work than for his job selling Chesterfield cigarettes, urging his audiences to “Buy ’em by the carton.”
Now he came in, walking with a cane. Godfrey had been battling lung cancer since 1959, the wages of the Chesterfields he’d since given up; looking much older than his sixty-five years, he was seeking a moment in the presence of the men who would go to the moon. Borman stood and smiled and shook Godfrey’s hand, though the shaving cream can in Deiterich’s hand was the only thing that really concerned him at the moment. He accepted the entertainer’s best wishes, thanked him for his time, and then the little ritual was over. The public affairs officer nodded a discreet thanks to the astronaut and ushered out the celebrity, who would go home with a “guess who I met” story to tell. Borman, had he been going home at the end of the day, would likely not have done the same.
More important—and more complicated—was the visit by Charles Lindbergh, which came later. Lindbergh had shadowed the astronauts down to the Cape just as he’d said he would, but he didn’t come knocking until the day before the launch. Borman, for one, didn’t know quite what to make of him. Both he and Lovell had been born in 1928, just one year after Lindbergh’s flight, and they’d grown up adoring the great aviator. Then, like almost every American of that era, they’d wound up reviling the man after he made common cause with the German Reich in the late 1930s. Spouting much of the same swill about racial supremacy the Nazis ladled out, Lindbergh had become a leader of the America First movement, arguing that the United States should stay out of the coming European war. In the Borman household, Lindbergh became a man spoken of only with disdain.
Now, three decades later, the once-great aviator was tapping on the door of the crew quarters and asking for a few minutes of the crew’s time. The Apollo 8 astronauts let him in around lunchtime on December 20. They all sat down and ate the tugboat man’s food, after which the dishes were supposed to be cleared and the visitor was supposed to leave.
Instead, the four men continued talking. Or, more accurately, Lindbergh talked—about the early age of flying, about the aviators he’d known, about the fifty combat missions he’d flown for the United States in the Pacific theater after the war he’d opposed had come anyway and he’d gone to help fight it. He spoke of meeting Robert Goddard, the American inventor of the liquid-fueled rocket, who had told Lindbergh in the 1920s that a trip to the moon might one day be possible but that it could cost an unheard-of $1 million.
The astronauts listened long and attentively. As the afternoon wore on, they at last began to speak about their own mission, which, as a glance at the clock and the lengthening shadows told them, would get under way in less than sixteen hours. At first they spoke almost reluctantly, because if a flight to the moon would be a rather more ambitious affair than a flight across the Atlantic, Lindbergh had already achieved his great deed, while Borman, Lovell, and Anders had yet to do theirs. Lindbergh was attentive as they spoke and asked them a few questions about their spacecraft and their rocket. As they answered, he picked up a piece of notepaper that was sitting on the table and began to scribble something on it, glancing up once or twice to show that he was listening. Finally, he stopped and looked at the three men.
“In the first second of your mission tomorrow,” he said, “you will use ten times more fuel than I used on my entire flight.” With that, the tarnished old flier showed his respect, making it clear that he would accept no more diffidence from the three young men who were about to make their own historic marks as pilots.
* * *
Borman and Anders would have a bit of time to reflect on the singular experience of having spent an afternoon with Charles Lindbergh, but Lovell would have no such luxury. While his crewmates had only the imminent mission on their minds, Lovell had his entire family to attend to.
Three days before the launch, Marilyn Lovell had flown to Florida with her two-year-old, Jeffrey, aboard a charter flight arranged by one of the aerospace companies that worked as an Apollo program contractor; such firms invariably scrambled for the goodwill and touch of celebrity that came with giving a lift to an astronaut’s family during a launch week. Two days later, the other three Lovell children followed on another charter. The entire family took up residence in a beach house within sight of the launchpad.
Lovell, accordingly, would duck out of the crew quarters when he could, driving to the bungalow to play and roughhouse with his children and then, when they were worn out, walk alone with Marilyn. The two of them did not talk about the mission; there was really nothing to say, just as there had never been anything to say when Jim had been test-flying unproven fighter jets. So they said barely a word about mankind’s first flight to the moon, at least not until the night before launch.
Darkness came early on December 20, the shortest day of 1968. At about 5:30 p.m., Lovell drove over to the beach house and bundled Marilyn and all four children into the car. Jim and Marilyn drove in silence, and the children chattered in the backseat as they wheeled onto Highway AIA, toward the space center. After approaching the heavily guarded gate, Lovell flashed his Cape credentials, but the guard did not need to see them, beaming warmly at the lunar astronaut and his handsome family.
More than three miles away, on a spit of land behind the space center fortifications, stood the brilliant spike of white that was the Saturn V. Flood-lit, the rocket was impossible to miss across the flat terrain. Lovell drove through the gate and past the space center’s multiple buildings and blockhouses; as he drew closer to the launchpad, the thirty-six-story missile seemed to grow and grow.
The technicians crowding around the pad waved but gave the Lovell family room as they got out of the car on a nearby sand dune and gazed upward, Jeffrey in Marilyn’s arms and the rest of the children standing nearby. A NASA protocol group had set up a table on the sand and offered doughnuts and coffee. The Lovells were far too taken with the spectacle of the rocket to think about eating; the technicians, who were used to the sight of a Saturn, were happy for the distraction of a snack. Marilyn had seen the far smaller, steel-gray Titan boosters that had twice before taken her husband to space, but this was different. She craned her neck upward at the Saturn V; if some might find the rocket to be monstrous at such close remove, she found that she had a single, surprising thought:
It’s a work of art.
It wasn’t a monster at all. It was gorgeous.
Marilyn would watch it fly from a safe distance of one and a half miles the following morning, and it would take the father of her children to a very unsafe distance of nearly a quarter million miles. But at that moment, she could feel nothing but a frisson of excitement for her husband and a deep awe at the machine.
“You know the roar is going to be something terrible,” Lovell said as he stepped close to her and followed her gaze.
“We’ll be all right,” Marilyn assured him. “We saw the Titans go.”
“They were nothing like this,” Lovell said.
Marilyn nodded.
“And don’t worry when it leans,” he added.
“Leans?” Marilyn asked.
Lovell nodded. “Just a degree or two to the right at liftoff, so it doesn’t hit the tower.”
Marilyn tried to picture the massive object tilting even an inch off its perfectly upright line and then shook off the image. If that was the way the thing needed to fly, that was how it would fly.
After a few more minutes, with the children getting restless, Marilyn shooed them back into the car and the family drove off the grounds and returned to the beach house. Lovell joined them inside for a last good-bye, and now, Marilyn noticed, he was carrying a manila envelope. He opened it up and produced a picture of the moon—a close-up of a wide, gray plain, taken by one of NASA’s lunar orbiters.
“It’s the Sea of Tranquillity,” he told her. Then he pointed to a small triangular mountain on the dry bank of the waterless sea. “This is one of the ‘initial points’ we’ll be surveying. It’s a landmark that a later crew will use when they begin their descent.” Marilyn nodded, not certain why he was sharing this bit of mission arcana. “I’ll be one of the first people ever to see it,” he said, “so I’m going to name it Mount Marilyn.”
Marilyn’s eyes filled with tears. Not trusting her voice, she simply gave him a hug and kissed him good-bye.
* * *
Lovell returned to the astronaut quarters not long after 8:00 p.m., and once he did, the Apollo 8 crew’s flight to the moon effectively began. The astronauts were still on the ground, still in their civvies, still breathing the same air and walking the same ground as the other 3.6 billion people on the planet. But their departure clock had begun to run, and it was ticking insistently.
Liftoff would be the next morning at 7:51 a.m. eastern time. That had meant an old man’s dinner hour of 5:30 p.m. Lovell had eaten before he went to the beach house; by the time he returned, Borman and Anders were getting ready for bed, and now he did the same. Wake-up, according to NASA’s compulsively precise schedule, would come at 2:36 a.m.; a final medical check would follow at 2:51; breakfast would be at 3:21; suit-up would start at 3:56. At 4:42, the crew would walk out to the van that would take them to the launchpad. At 5:03, they would get to the pad, and by 5:11 they would have ridden the gantry elevator to the top and climbed into their spacecraft.
That was how the crew’s prelaunch sequence was scripted, and when the planned moments arrived, that was exactly how it began to play out. The reveille came the way it always did, with Deke Slayton letting himself into the astronauts’ darkened suite and flipping the lights on in the common room. He then went from bedroom to bedroom, knocking on each door, opening it up so that the light could flood in, pointing at his watch and reminding the crew of what time it was and that medical call was in fifteen minutes.
The menu of steak, eggs, toast, fruit, juice, and coffee was the same as it had been since the Mercury days, and the practice of having the backup crew tuck in with the prime crew remained unchanged, too. This morning, that meant breakfasting with Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and rookie Fred Haise. Lovell looked their way, reflecting that but for Michael Collins’s bad back, he would have been a member of that trio of stay-at-home astronauts today. Lovell had only recently come to know Haise—the man who’d replaced him on the backup crew when he’d replaced Collins on the prime crew—but he liked what he saw. The newcomer had made himself as much of a LEM expert as Anders was, but unlike Anders, he might actually get to fly the machine.
The reporters massing outside in the predawn chill would not see the astronauts until they were suited up and ready to make the walk to the van. But there was a pool photographer present at the breakfast, and he would follow the crew to the suit-up. Though the astronauts didn’t mind the cameraman watching them eat, the suit-up photos were another matter.
A man being dressed for space was a lot less like a knight being dressed for battle than the public would want to know. It was a slow and cumbersome process: each piece of space suit the astronaut donned left him more helpless and thus more dependent on the technicians for every step to follow. They would put on his boots and hoist up his pants and snap the wrist rings of his gloves into place on his sleeves. The result was a puffy, clumsy parade float of a man who, in a final indignity, would be required to spend the next several minutes lying supine on a large recliner—a beached turtle on his back—pre-breathing the canned air in his life-support systems to make sure he adjusted properly. Only then would he be helped back to his feet for the walk out to the van that would take him to the pad.
As the astronauts went through the awkward business of putting on their clothing, the great, clanking machine of Cape Kennedy on a launch day stirred to life around them. The rocket was already fueled and standing on the pad—6.5 million pounds of fuel and machine, plus an additional 1,200 pounds of weight that would be added as the humid Florida air condensed into frost along the skin of the rocket, which had been chilled to freezing by the supercooled liquid oxygen and hydrogen filling the fuel tanks inside.
On the Cape’s beaches, the spectators emerged from their tents and cars, blinking into the rising sun and training their binoculars on the rocket more than three miles away. Inside the sprawling firing room, 350 men sat at their consoles, manning a Mission Control far larger than the one in Houston. Yet this operation would be powered up for use only this morning; the moment the engine bells of the rocket cleared the launch tower and Houston took control, the firing room would have nothing at all to do with the flight.
Rocco Petrone, the launch director, surveyed the room from his console at the back, keeping a close eye on both the state of the rocket and the state of his team. A controller who stood at his console, either because he was nervous or simply wanted to stretch his legs, would hear Petrone’s voice in his headset telling him to sit back down. A successful launch meant a disciplined firing room.
When Borman, Lovell, and Anders at last emerged from the suit-up building, they walked straight into a storm of flashing cameras and shouted questions from the reporters, who were held behind barricades to keep the crew’s short path from the door of the building to the door of the transport van clear. The astronauts carried their portable air-conditioning units in one hand and waved with the other. They saw everything around them through the windscreen of their bubble helmets, and they heard the commotion caused by their departure mostly as muffled noise, like sounds from the surface world heard underwater. Once they climbed into the back of the van and the door was closed behind them, even that sound was stilled.
The drive to the pad was spent mostly in silence; so was the ride up the gantry elevator. As the Florida coastline fell away beneath the astronauts, the frosty, steaming flank of the rocket slipped by. The massive American flag decal and the capital-lettered USA and UNITED STATES—written vertically along the first and second stages—were visible through the ice layer, and the letters appeared in reverse order as the men rose higher.
At the top of the gantry came the walk along the caged gangway of the swing arm to the white room, which surrounded the spacecraft. The hatch of the capsule—which looked so much like the one that had killed Grissom, White, and Chaffee, even if it didn’t function like it—stood open, waiting for them. Borman, who would fly in the left-hand seat, climbed inside: first in, last out, like any good commander. Anders, in the right-hand seat, climbed in next. Lovell, in the center and directly under the hatch, would be last, and thus he was left alone briefly on the swing arm.
He looked down at the ground far below and noticed for the first time the hundreds of thousands of people and cars—most with their headlights on in the predawn darkness—gathering to watch the liftoff. He noticed, too, that not a single one of those spectators had been allowed within a mile-and-a-half radius of the rocket. A circular, no-go footprint had been stamped around the massive, violent machine that was the center of so much attention. And the crew of Apollo 8 was perched directly atop that machine.
“Maybe they know something we don’t,” Lovell muttered to himself—joking, mostly.
After making his way to the open hatch, he peeked inside and saw Borman frowning at the instrument panel. Little Christmas decorations hung in front of each seat.
“What is this?” Borman grumbled, as much to himself as to anyone else, though the question was audible through Lovell’s headset.
“Guenter,” Lovell responded, an answer Borman knew without having to be told.
Guenter was Guenter Wendt, one of the German engineers who had come over with Wernher von Braun after the war and now worked as white room director and pad leader. Wendt was the last person each astronaut would see before the hatch was sealed, and he loved to surprise the crews with his little pranks and props. Plenty of the astronauts liked them, too—Wally Schirra, especially. But Frank Borman was no Wally Schirra, especially on a mission like this one, so he plucked off the decoration in front of his seat, looked back over his shoulder, and gave Wendt a small and, he hoped, believable smile.
“Thanks, Guenter,” he said, handing the nonregulation cargo back to him. Lovell and Anders did the same.
Now another member of the closeout crew appeared at the hatch. One by one, he stepped hard on each astronaut’s shoulder, providing him enough purchase to tighten his seat restraints properly. The job had to be done just so, given the violence with which the crew would be shaken in their seats when the engines lit, then slammed forward during flight when the first stage cut off and dropped away, then slammed back when the second stage lit, and then forward and back again when the second stage gave way to the third. The hatch—the improved hatch, the safe hatch, the one that could be popped open in just a few seconds so that astronauts would never again be incinerated in their seats—was then closed and sealed. It would not be opened again until Borman and his crewmates had gone to the moon and come home.
More than an hour went by as the astronauts and the ground worked through their prelaunch checklists, which so far were being completed without any glitches. The more smoothly they went, the less the likelihood of any holds in the countdown and the sooner the mission would be on its way.
“Apollo Saturn launch control,” said Jack King, as the launch finally drew near. King was the broadcast voice of NASA, the man who would narrate the countdown and who could hush even the network anchors in their booths, especially when he offered a humanizing detail he’d picked up by listening to the chatter between the cockpit and the control room.
When the astronauts had climbed into their spacecraft, the sun had not been up, but since then the morning had brightened considerably. “T-minus seven minutes and thirty seconds and counting, and still aiming toward our planned liftoff time,” King said. “Jim Lovell reported just a few minutes ago that he could see a blue sky and it looked like the sun is out.”
The clock raced downhill toward the six-minute mark and the five-minute mark and then the four-minute mark. At three minutes, the tanks began to pressurize; a powerful churning, glugging sound filled the Apollo spacecraft, a much deeper tone than the one Borman and Lovell had heard in their little Gemini atop their Titan booster three Christmastimes ago. In the cockpit, Borman looked to Lovell, who nodded in recognition of the sound. Lovell then turned to Anders, who had no such sense memory, to offer a reassuring nod.
The last three minutes ticked off. When liftoff finally came, it was every bit as violent as it had been with the first two Saturn V launches.
“Liftoff!” Jack King announced as the five main engines erupted in their controlled firestorm.
“This building is shaking under us!” Walter Cronkite called, once again delighting at the display of raw engineering power. “Our camera platform is shaking. But what a beautiful sight. Man is perhaps on the way to the moon if all continues to go well.”
That generic man, of course, was in fact three men, and for them the experience of liftoff was something else entirely. They were aboard the beast—within the beast—that was shaking Cronkite’s building.
“Liftoff, and the clock is running,” Borman called as loudly as he could over the roar. The clock on the instrument panel, which had been still while the clocks on the ground counted down, now began to count up.
“Roger. Clock,” said Collins, who had been reassigned as one of the three astronauts who would be working as the capcom for this mission.
“Roll-and-pitch program,” Borman said, his voice shaking from the power of the 7.5 million pounds of thrust lifting 6.5 million pounds of machine. As it rose into the sky, the Saturn V began to orient itself, pointing its nose just so for the ride to orbit.
The noise inside the cockpit was like nothing the astronauts’ simulator training had remotely been able to reproduce. For at least ten seconds—though to Anders it felt like the better part of a minute—the crewmates had no way to communicate with one another, which meant that each man would effectively be on his own in the event of an emergency. The g-forces were lighter than they’d been on the Titan, just over four compared to the seven or eight Borman and Lovell had endured during the Gemini liftoff. But to Anders, the first-timer, the Saturn V’s four g’s felt like twice that number.
Anders experienced the brute force of the Saturn V in more than just the g-load. The engines at the bottom of the booster were mounted on gimbals, allowing them to pivot one way or the other to keep the whole stack flying in the proper direction. But such minor motion at the base of the 363-foot spire translated to violent thrashing at the top. Anders felt like a bug on the end of a whip.
The vibration in the cockpit was dramatically more severe than it had been on the Titan. Borman, as commander, had the responsibility of turning the abort handle that would carry the command module and the crew up and away from the Saturn in the event that it went awry or threatened to explode. Mission regulations called for him to keep his gloved hand on the handle at all times, and he was not about to break any rule in the first three minutes of the flight. His fear, however, was that the powerful vibrations of the rocket could cause him to turn the handle by accident, ending an intended lunar mission just a few miles above the Atlantic. But as the rocket streaked into the heavens, Borman kept his hand steady.
At two and half minutes, when the Saturn and its crew were 40 miles above the ground and moving at 5,400 miles per hour, the first stage cut off and dropped away, punching the three astronauts forward into their restraints. When the second stage lit, a second later, they were punched violently back into their seats.
For Anders, this whipsaw meant trouble. A few seconds earlier, he had tried to lift his hand toward the instrument panel and it had felt as if a twenty-pound weight were attached to it. The moment he did succeed in reaching forward was just before the second stage lit; when it did light, it caused his hand to slam back into his helmet visor. The metal wrist ring left a nasty scrape across the unbreakable glass. He cursed himself—the rookie of the flight now had a big rookie mark on his faceplate.
Borman may or may not have seen Anders’s mishap; if he did, he exercised the commander’s prerogative to ignore a small screwup. “The first stage was smooth and this one is smoother,” he announced to the ground.
“Roger, smooth and smoother,” Collins answered. “Looks good here.”
At the eight-minute mark, the trip suddenly became less smooth, as the Saturn V, now shorn of its first stage, began the vibrational bouncing that had nearly torn Apollo 6 apart.
Borman reported the troubling news. “Picking up a slight pogo here,” he said.
“Roger, slight pogo,” Collins echoed, both men wondering why von Braun’s newly added shock absorbers weren’t doing their job. But seconds later, the helium in the tanks proved itself, working whatever bit of mechanical magic it possessed to settle things back down.
“Pogo’s damping out,” Borman said.
“Understood,” Collins said.
And with that, the Saturn V, which had one perfect and one dreadful flight to its name, did every single thing von Braun had built it to do without another instant’s trouble. Its second stage cut off and fell away just when it was supposed to; its third stage lit briefly and shut down again, providing just enough of a kick to carry Apollo 8 to a temporary parking orbit around the Earth. The spacecraft’s orbit was too low to sustain for an extended mission, but it was perfectly fine for a crew that would not tarry long. While taking some bearings and checking their systems, the astronauts would make less than two circuits around the Earth before firing up their third-stage engine once more to light out, at last, for the moon.
“Apollo 8, Houston. We have you apogee one-oh-three, perigee ninety-nine,” Collins called, reading off the high and low points of the orbit in miles.
“One-oh-three, ninety-nine,” Lovell answered crisply.
He settled back into his seat, then spoke to his crewmates: “Okay, we can breathe a little bit more, hear a little bit more, huh?” Around him, the stray dust and occasional bolt left behind by the technicians again floated up into view.
“That was quite a ride, wasn’t it?” Borman answered, easing back as well.
“Felt like an old freight train,” said Anders.
“It is an old freight train, pal,” Lovell said, snapping off his gloves and taking off his helmet. “Let’s get comfortable. This is going to be a long trip.”
On that point, Lovell was exactly right. The moon, at the moment of launch, was 233,707 miles from Earth. At the very peak of their current orbit, the Apollo 8 crew still had 233,604 miles to go.