21 December 1968. Apollo 8. Crew: Frank Borman (Commander), Jim Lovell (Command Module Pilot), Bill Anders (Lunar Module Pilot). Duration of mission: 6 days, 3 hours, 42 minutes.
At 2.30am on 21 December 1968 the crew are woken up by Deke Slayton. Borman says that he hasn’t slept much. After a final medical check-up the crew eat the astronauts’ traditional last meal before a launch of steak wrapped in bacon with eggs, orange juice and coffee without milk; euphemistically – and perhaps optimistically – described as a ‘low-residue’ meal. Anders has privately decided that he is going to see if he can get through the entire mission without defecating at all. Joining them at breakfast is the back-up crew: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Fred Haise. George Low, whose idea it was to make Apollo 8 a shot at the moon, is also there. After breakfast the crew clamber into their suits. None of them will be leaving the craft on this mission so the suits aren’t an absolute requirement, but are worn in case of sudden loss of pressure during the launch, and to give a measure of protection should fire break out. When they are on their way they can take them off. Finally, as if in some futuristic coronation service, their helmets are lowered and snapped into place. The astronauts become mere observers of a world that has become detached from them; reduced to what can be seen through the visor. The world outside can no longer be smelled, felt, or tasted, and all that any of them can hear is the swish of their yellow rubber galoshes as they drag along the ground, and the hiss of oxygen coming into their suits. It is an eight-mile ride to the launch pad. Saturn V is still being fuelled up. The rocket emits a fog as if it is breathing.
Apollo 8 crew at breakfast, left to right: Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders
Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders
Saturn V is actually three rockets stacked on top of each other: Stage 1 is the tallest at 138 feet, the second stage is 81 feet tall and the final stage 58 feet. On top of the three stages is a section called the Adaptor that on future missions will enshroud the Lunar Module (LM). Above the Adaptor is the Service Module (SM), which houses the oxygen, the propellant and remaining rocket engine. It is also where the food is stored and electricity generated. Above it is the Command Module (CM), the astronauts’ home for the next few days. In the elevator that takes them up to the CM they feel the rocket humming and vibrating next to them. Chunks of ice slide and fall away from the rocket’s skin, as ‘her cryogenic lifeblood’, liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, boil and bubble in her guts. At a height of 320 feet they get out onto an arm that leads into the White Room which in turn leads into the CM, a conical space just under 13 feet at its widest, and under 10½ feet tall. Above them, rising another 40 feet, is the escape rocket – the rocket’s apex that ends in a small pointed cap – attached to the CM, and able to eject them to safety if something goes wrong. The whole ensemble, often referred to as Apollo 8, the name of the mission, weighs 3,300 tons, 90 per cent of which is fuel. At 363 feet tall, it looks like some modernist iteration of a Gothic cathedral spire.
Apollo 8 seen from above
In the White Room, as ever, Guenther Wendt is there to greet them. As he leaves, he says what he always says in farewell: Godspeed. It falls to back-up astronaut Fred Haise to make last-minute checks. As the crew enter the Command Module he squeezes his way out past them and shakes their hands, closing the massive hatch behind him as he leaves.
The canvas seats are positively spacious compared to those on Mercury and Gemini. Even so, Lovell, who is in the middle, barely has room to move. He thinks, ‘My God, they’re serious!’ The crew begin to go through their checklist. Anders feels surprisingly calm, almost bored. He looks at the window cover – they cannot see outside yet – and watches a hornet trapped between the glass and the cover. He wonders if it might be about to start building a nest.
It is still possible for the mission to be aborted. If anything goes seriously wrong Borman can activate the escape rocket, or else – if there is time – the crew can clamber into a small gondola suspended on a wire, and be whizzed down into a concrete tunnel, onto a 40-footslide, and be deposited into a rubber room, shock-proofed to withstand even the explosion of Saturn V above them. The room is big enough to accommodate up to 20 people, with supplies to last at least three days.
With 15 minutes to go until takeoff, medics at the control centre notice that the astronauts’ heart rates are beginning to rise. At T minus five minutes the White Room and access arm swing away. There is no way out now except via the escape rocket. The crew can hear fuel still pouring into the rocket’s tanks. At 10 seconds before takeoff the tanks are finally full and there is silence. At T minus 8.9 seconds, valves open. The five F-1 engines of the first stage of Saturn V come alive: 15,000 gallons of kerosene are being pumped into the engines every second, along with 24,000 gallons of liquid oxygen. The pumps are at greatly different temperatures. That the fuels are mixed carefully is an understatement. Flames scorch the concrete launch pad. At zero the rocket shudders. Only now, after 43 tons of kerosene and liquid oxygen have been converted into 6.4 million lbs of thrust, does the rocket slowly rise above the ground. Millions of parts of this massive machine, made to a precision within millionths of an inch, work together in response to the collective intent of hundreds of thousands of human beings.
Around the base of the rocket, sand blown onto the launch pad from nearby beaches is vitrified: what was opaque is made transparent. Standing three miles away, Anne Morrow Lindbergh turns from the rocket to watch some birds take to the air.
The crew hears what sounds like a distant rumble of thunder rolling towards them. Seconds later they are being shaken around, and much more violently than they had anticipated. They feel the many quick and jerky corrections that are being made by the rocket’s computer. It has been an immense challenge to build a computer small enough to fit inside a spacecraft. The task was accomplished by the Electronic Research Center (ERC) set up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1964 expressly to solve this problem. Now that its work is done the centre will, in the next few months, be closed down; its lasting legacy the constant drive to make ever-smaller computers.
This is the first manned test of Saturn V. Atlas and Titan rockets each had around 50 test flights before they took men into space. Saturn V had two, and one of them had not been successful. The rocket suffered what the programme director described as ‘several important technical failures and malfunctions’. The pogoing problem was supposedly fixed, but now that the crew is being buffeted about it must be hard not to wonder if the problem might return at any moment. It is so noisy inside the capsule the crew cannot hear themselves speak. No number of simulated flights could have prepared them for the experience they are now going through.
It takes 12 seconds for Apollo 8 to creep up and away from the gantry before rapidly accelerating skywards. Frank Borman’s wife, Susan, thinks it is like seeing the Empire State Building taking off.
Under two and three-quarter minutes later the first stage has burned through 500,000 gallons of fuel. Apollo 8 is 42 miles above the surface of the turning Earth, travelling at 6,000 miles per hour. The massive first stage has fulfilled its function and is sloughed off. Bolts are blown and it falls away, heading towards the Atlantic Ocean.
The second stage fires up its five J-2 rockets. They burn through a further 600,000 gallons of fuel, and accelerate what is left of Apollo 8 to 15,000 miles per hour and to an altitude of 60 miles.
After three and a quarter minutes in to the flight there is a loud explosion above the astronauts’ heads as the escape capsule is jettisoned. Though they know this will happen, it still comes as a surprise to the crew, perhaps like that moment for the rest of us when the wheels go up as our plane takes off. With the escape rocket now gone, for the first time the windows are uncovered and light floods into the capsule.
After eight minutes in to the flight the rocket starts shaking again, quite violently. The astronauts can hear the metal skin of the rocket straining and creaking. The rocket is pogoing. The problem, it seems, was not entirely fixed. But a minute later the second-stage engines shut down and the pogoing stops. The second stage has now served its purpose and it, too, is cast off and sent plummeting to Earth. Already, 97 per cent of the ensemble that left the launch pad has been shed or burned up.
For a few seconds the crew is weightless and all is quiet. Odd objects begin to appear and float around the Command Module, a screw, a piece of string, reminders that the machine is made by fallible human beings who have left things behind.
The crew is waiting for the third stage to fire, and though only a few seconds have passed since the second stage shut down, it feels like forever before the single J-2 engine of the third stage ignites – and, because they are being accelerated, gravity returns.
At 11¾ minutes into the flight the third stage shuts down, and gravity departs once more. They have been put into orbit 100 miles above the surface of the Earth, travelling at 17,432 mph. For the next two and a half hours they will stay in orbit with their heads pointing towards the Earth.
There is much to do. Commander Frank Borman warns his crew: ‘I don’t want to see you looking out the window.’ No time for Earthgazing.
It is Bill Anders’ first experience of being in orbit around the Earth, and he is itching to see the Earth below, but during that two and a half hours he only manages to catch two brief glimpses: a thunderstorm at night over Australia, and he just has time to identify the location of his childhood home town of San Diego, shrouded in fog.
At precisely two hours, 27 minutes and 22 seconds after takeoff, Mike Collins at Mission Control – the first Capsule Communicator (CapCom) on duty – radios through: ‘You are go for TLI.’ NASA’s cool liturgy steadies the moment. The timing of this so-called trans-lunar injection is crucial. The third stage fires up again. The craft is accelerated to 25,000 mph, out of Earth orbit and onto a trajectory that has been carefully calculated to take them to the moon. The many launch processes have been successfully activated one after another, like a line of falling dominoes: manual switches have been thrown; computer and other types of automated control have kicked in at precise moments. Sometimes it has been the acceleration of the rocket itself that has caused some sequence of operations to unfold: tapered pins have fallen out just when they needed to; metal rings have dropped away because of some inertial change. Everything has happened as it was meant to do, and now the first human beings ever to leave the pull of the Earth are on their way to the moon.
Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon in Gemini XI rose higher above the Earth than any other human beings in history, but with every passing second that record now recedes into insignificance. Through the round window of the Command Module, the Apollo 8 crew can see the Earth receding rapidly. From their perspective the Earth is positioned with Antarctica at the top, except that in space there is no up and down. After a while the whole Earth – 8,000 miles across – can be taken in in a single glance. It is the first time in history that human beings have seen the entire Earth with their own eyes, for what it is: a sphere in space. Even those back on the ground at Mission Control are shaken by the images of the round Earth being beamed back to them. ‘We were the first humans to see the world in its majestic totality,’ Borman will write, ‘an intensely emotional experience for each of us. This must be what God sees.’ Anders thinks: where have I seen this before ? And remembers that it was three months earlier, at the premiere of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. After a while the Earth appears not to shrink any further, and now it feels as if their craft is hardly moving at all.
Though the third stage has fallen away, they can see it out of one of the Command Module windows, as if it is following them. Borman asks Mission Control if they can slightly deviate from their course in order to open up some greater distance between the CM and the spent booster rocket. From the ground Collins tells them to use the Earth to align the craft. Borman replies, ‘OK, as soon as I can find the Earth.’ There is astonished laughter back on the ground. The Apollo 8 astronauts are not only the first humans to see the whole Earth but the first to lose sight of it altogether.
When they reach seven hours into the flight, the craft is put into what is called barbecue mode. The Command Module, together with the Service Module (sometimes referred to as the CSM), rotates steadily in order to keep the outside of the craft at an even temperature, otherwise one side would rise to 250 degrees Fahrenheit and the other minus 250 degrees. Inside it is a pleasant 70 degrees. As the CSM rotates, the Earth and moon appear successively in the crew’s windows.
It is Anders’ first proper experience of zero gravity. During training they had flown in so-called reduced-gravity planes, taken up into a great parabolic arc. At 90,000 feet the plane levelled out and for a few seconds the astronauts experienced zero gravity. They called them vomit comets. But this is nothing like that. Anders unbuckles his harness and stays exactly where he is, floating above his couch like an Indian mystic. At first his eyes bulge, and his face flushes and gets puffy. After a few hours the body adjusts and Anders feels as if he has always been weightless. Without his suit on, weightless, wearing just long johns, Anders experiences a sense of freedom as never before. And then for a moment he feels nauseous, and then the feeling passes.
Mission Control knows exactly where the Command Module is at all times, but if radio contact fails it will be Lovell’s job as the navigator to guide them back home. One of his tasks is to make star readings at regular intervals throughout the journey, and to compare his calculated trajectory with the actual one. He uses what looks like a sextant – a compass in outer space is of course useless: there is no East or West, North or South. As at sea, Lovell uses the stars to sail by, though in space the constellations are harder to recognize; the star field is much richer than it is when seen from Earth.
When the time comes to try to go to sleep, they zip themselves into sleeping bags in an attempt to create the effect of blankets on a bed: ‘Instinctively I feel I am lying on my back, not my stomach, but I am doing neither – all normal yardsticks have disappeared, and I am no more lying than I am standing or falling.’ If their arms stray outside the hammock they drift up like a praying mantis’s, and stay there. A pillow is no help. The head floats just above it, except not of course ‘above’, or even ‘below’ it. Nor are they lying with their arms floating up; they could just as well be said to be lying on their front, arms floating down. Or standing on their head. Anders finds it hard to sleep. In the silence of space, and without gravity to overcome, he hears his heart beating loudly and more forcefully than he is used to. Nor can Borman get to sleep. He radios NASA to ask if he can have permission to take a Seconal. NASA phones his wife Susan to ask if he usually has trouble sleeping. No, she says, and generally he doesn’t like to take drugs. NASA gives him permission to take the pill anyway. The next day, Sunday, he has a headache and then begins to feel sick. He vomits. Worse, he gets diarrhea. The smell is revolting. Anders puts on his oxygen mask. The crew spends some time chasing down globules of floating vomit and faeces with paper towels. Anders says it is like going on a butterfly hunt. One globule is the size of a tennis ball, ‘shimmering and pulsating in three dimensions . . . in some kind of complex fluid vibrations made possible in zero gravity’. It splashes onto Lovell.
Borman doesn’t want to tell Mission Control that he has been sick, but he is persuaded otherwise by his crewmates. He decides he doesn’t want to speak to the ground directly and tapes a message. He says he is sure it is just a 24-hour virus. When the message is played back on the ground, for a while NASA considers aborting the mission. In the end medics on the ground decide that Borman suffered a bad reaction to the Seconal. In fact it has been the first experience of space sickness among the American astronauts. One in two of them will suffer from it.
On Sunday 22 December 1968 the crew of Apollo 8 makes its first broadcast. The Intelsat-3A satellite was rushed into service to cover the mission; its first transmission was made just a few hours earlier: the Pope celebrating Mass from St Peter’s in Rome. Now the satellite transmits images of the Earth from 120,000 miles away. The images might have been clearer but the crew can’t get the telephoto lens onto the TV camera, which anyway only broadcasts in black and white. The television audience must take it on trust that the white blob they are looking at is indeed the Earth.
Two days and seven hours into the flight, the Command Module moves into the gravitational pull of the moon, though the moon itself has hardly been in view at all during the journey. The angle of the trajectory has put them in the moon’s shadow, or, when the moon might have been visible, the light of the sun was too bright.
But then, suddenly, on Monday 23 December there it is, on top of them, what looks like a great disk of black emptiness in space. The hairs on Anders’ neck stand up. They have arrived. It took only two small in-flight corrections to get them here.
Now they are about to lose radio contact with the Earth for reasons entirely foreseen. They are about to pass to the side of the moon never visible from the Earth, the so-called dark side; though not dark because it is not illuminated but dark because we cannot see it from Earth, and dark because the astronauts will be out of radio contact. They will orbit the moon 10 times before returning home, putting them out of radio contact every couple of hours.
The Service Module’s single engine fires for four minutes, just long enough to slow the craft down to 3,700 mph, the speed required to put the craft into lunar orbit: slower and it would crash into the moon’s surface; any faster and it would shoot past the moon altogether. For the crew it is the longest four minutes of their lives. The craft settles into a circular orbit 69 miles above the moon’s surface. Since they took off, 66 hours have passed. They are 234,000 miles from home.
‘Oh, my God!’ says Anders. ‘What’s wrong?’ asks Borman. ‘Look at that,’ says Anders. Vast mountains have, without warning, appeared below them. The largest window is clouded up because the sealant has decomposed; Anders’ side window is smeary, as if covered in oil; and the two so-called rendezvous windows are tiny – but, even so, they can see the moon’s surface in extraordinary detail. Because the moon has no atmosphere, and the sunlight is so strong, the mountain peaks feel very close, as if their craft might clip one as it rushes by. They are the first human beings to see the far side of the moon at first hand. But then, for pioneers, everything is new. ‘Alright, alright, come on,’ Borman says, ‘you’re going to look at that for a long time.’ Radio contact is resumed 45 minutes later, as they leave the far side of the moon.
If the moon takes them by surprise, so does their first experience of seeing the Earth rise over the horizon of the moon. At a press conference in November the crew was asked what part of the mission they were most looking forward to. Lovell said, ‘To see Earth set and Earth rise.’ The Earth has risen and set three times since they have gone into lunar orbit but they have been too busy to notice. (In fact the Earth doesn’t rise over the horizon of the moon in the way that the sun appears to rise over the horizon of the turning Earth. The moon and Earth are locked together in a synchronized gravitational dance, the result of which is that the moon only ever shows one side to the Earth. The Earth only appears to rise over the moon’s horizon because the craft is in orbit around the moon.)
Now, as they move to the dark side for the fourth time, they do notice, and Borman has his camera at the ready.
Borman: ‘Oh, my God. Look at that picture over there.’
Anders: ‘What is it?’
Borman: ‘Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, that is pretty.’
Anders: ‘Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.’
Borman: (Laughter). ‘You got a color film, Jim?’
Anders to Lovell, laughing: ‘Hand me that roll of color, quick, will you?’
Lovell, ignoring him and joining them at the window: ‘Oh man, that’s great!’
Anders to Lovell: ‘Hurry. Quick.’
Anders snaps on the colour magazine.
Lovell impatiently: ‘You got it? Take several of them. Here, give it to me.’
Borman: ‘Calm down, Lovell.’
Lovell: ‘Are you sure we got it now?’
Anders, sarcastically: ‘Yeah. It’ll come up again, I think.’
Frank Borman claims later that it was he who took the famous photograph later known as Earthrise, which is ironic given what he said about not looking out of the window; nor did he want to take along a TV camera, seeing it as a distraction. It will be overlooked for decades, but Borman took some black-and-white photographs of Earthrise before Anders snapped the colour magazine onto his camera. Borman had taken the first photograph of the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon but the famous photograph is in colour and it was Anders who took that. Colour will make all the difference.
Up to now, Anders has been so focused on photographing the surface of the moon that he hasn’t thought much about the Earth. But seeing Earthrise he realizes what it is that he has been missing whenever he looks at the moon. The Earth is the only thing out there that has any colour to it. The universe looks black and white; except for the Earth. Anders sees now that the moon is not as interesting as it first seemed. He has become oppressed by the moon’s unrelenting sameness. Has he come 240,000 miles just to see something that looks like a dirty beach? Borman says the moon looks like the Earth might have done before the advent of life, or as it will after life is extinct. Earthrise makes the contrast clear: the beauty of the Earth and ‘this ugly lunar surface’.
Earthrise happened when they were out of earshot of Mission Control, on the dark side of the moon. Curiously, despite their obvious excitement, they don’t say anything to their colleagues back on the ground when the craft comes back into radio contact.
Later that day, as they approach their tenth and last orbit of the moon, the crew makes a final TV broadcast back to Earth. It is 8.11pm Houston time on Christmas Eve. At a pre-launch conference on 7 December 1968 a reporter questioned the Christmas timing of the flight – in fact, there was only a small window of opportunity each month when the launch could take place. Lovell cut him off mid-sentence: ‘I can’t think of a better religious aspect to the flight than to further explore the heavens.’ Borman interjected with a secular justification: ‘When you’re finally up at the moon looking back at the Earth, all those differences and national traits are pretty well going to blend and you’re going to get a concept that this is really one world and why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people.’
Their final broadcast opens with another view of the Earth as a white blob. Much of the rest of the broadcast is taken up with showing images of the surface of the moon. In turn, each member of the crew gives his impression of the moon. Borman says that it is ‘a vast, lonely, forbidding type of existence or expanse of nothing’; Lovell, too, talks of the lonely moon, essentially grey with no colour, but, unlike Anders, he finds the surface of the moon mesmerizing. He describes space as ‘a vastness of black and white, absolutely no colour . . . The loneliness out here is awe-inspiring. It makes us realize what you have back on Earth. The Earth is a grand oasis in the vastness of space.’
And then, towards the end of the 23-minute broadcast, Anders says, ‘We are now approaching lunar sunrise. And for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send to you.’
No one knew what was coming. Back at Houston the flight controller Gene Krantz said he felt a chill. Some time before the mission, Julian Scheer, NASA’s deputy administrator for public affairs, gave Borman some oblique advice: ‘Look, Frank, we’ve determined that you’ll be circling the moon on Christmas Eve and we’ve scheduled one of the television broadcasts from Apollo 8 around that time. We figure more people will be listening to your voice than that of any man in history. So we want you to say something appropriate.’ Borman had asked a publicist he knew, Simon Bourgin, Science Policy Officer at the US Information Agency for advice. He in turn asked a journalist, Joe Laitin; a Christian who searched the New Testament without finding anything that struck him as suitable. He asked his wife, and she said: ‘Why don’t you begin at the beginning.’ Joe Laitin suggested that after the broadcast there should be silence.
Now, at the end of their final broadcast to Earth, and in a soft voice, Anders begins to read:
In the beginning 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. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
And then Jim Lovell takes over:
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. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
And then Frank Borman:
And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
‘And from the crew of Apollo 8,’ says Borman, ‘we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you – all of you on the good Earth.’
At Houston, there is silence. ‘For those moments,’ Flight Director Eugene Krantz said later, ‘I felt the presence of creation and the Creator . . . Tears were on my cheeks.’ Krantz was a former airforce fighter pilot, rugged-looking, crew-cut, nicknamed General Savage, might have been a character from Catch-22, but inside ‘was as sentimental as they come . . . At the start of the day he would go into his office and listen to John Philip Sousa marches, to get his blood flowing. He was a devout Catholic and a man of strong beliefs, and at his core he believed in the exploration of space.’
The astronauts go off air just as they enter the dark side for the tenth and last time. While they are out of radio contact with Earth the so-called trans-Earth injection (TEI) will take place. The craft’s single engine will fire just the right amount – carefully calculated to take into account the moon’s uneven gravitational pull – to put the craft on a trajectory back home.
On Earth the astronauts’ wives are able to listen in to the mission from home via a device called a squawk box. When Susan Borman hears the squawk box fall silent a tenth time, she feels that the silence now has a different quality. Some time before the launch she said to Chris Kraft: ‘Hey Chris, I’d really appreciate it if you would level with me. I really, really want to know what you think their chances are of getting home.’ ‘Okay,’ Chris replied, ‘how’s fifty-fifty?’ She is sure TEI will fail. She is so sure her husband isn’t coming back that she has started to prepare his memorial service. She is calm on the outside, but has turned to alcohol, and drinks in private. Now she is at home with a camera crew – at NASA’s insistence – for company. They are filming her as she waits to hear if TEI goes smoothly, or not.
TEI takes place exactly as it is supposed to do. The crew finds the journey home boring. Anders calls it falling for 240,000 miles. Not that there aren’t still hazards to negotiate. At one point Lovell accidentally wipes all the navigational information from the onboard computer. He has to recalculate their position using his special sextant and the stars. He sends his measurements to Mission Control for double-checking.
On Christmas Day, back on Earth, Marilyn Lovell opens the present her husband has left behind for her. A mink jacket. It is what she has always wanted. She wonders if he thought: ‘If I don’t make it back at least she’ll have the fur.’
The next day, during the last hour of the journey, the Service Module is jettisoned. All that is left of the original rocket is the Command Module, little more than a human container, ‘a steel cone less than a dozen feet high’, the fulfilment of Jules Verne’s vision of a manned cannon shell.
Entering the Earth’s atmosphere is a particularly hazardous moment. The capsule, travelling at 25,000 miles an hour – 10 times faster than a high-speed rifle bullet – must somehow be slowed down. The incoming trajectory has been minutely calculated so that the craft will skim the atmosphere, like a pebble across the surface of a pond, in order to lose energy. Of the four unmanned attempts to do this, two failed. If the approach is too shallow the craft will shoot off into space, too steep, and even the heat shield will burn up like a meteorite.
To viewers on Earth the capsule looks even now like a meteorite. If the heat shield fails they will burn up. The ionized air around the capsule becomes impenetrable to radio signals for a few minutes. The g-forces make the astronauts feel as if they are more than six times heavier than normal. And after days of feeling as if they weighed nothing at all, the effect is all the harder to bear.
The parachutes deploy in sequence: two drogue parachutes each 16 feet in diameter to stabilize the capsule, and then three main parachutes each 80 feet in diameter.
And suddenly there they are, upside down in the Pacific Ocean, 10-foot waves outside. They are only 3 miles from where USS Yorktown has been waiting for their return. Everything that is not lashed down is violently thrown about. Seawater begins to come in. Borman throws up, again. When the first navy swimmer arrives and opens the hatch, he reels back from the smell as if he has ‘been kicked in the head’.
Back at Mission Control a couple of dozen men (they are all men, average age 26) are cheering and lighting up cigars. Each of them has invested so much in making this happen it feels like their flight too. CapCom Mike Collins wants to cry, but instead claps a few colleagues on the back and leaves. It could have gone wrong in a thousand ways, but it hasn’t. Almost miraculously it has all gone to plan.
Four days later, Charles Lindbergh sends the crew a telegram: ‘THE GREATEST FEAT OF TEAMWORK IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. YOU HAVE TURNED INTO REALITY THE DREAM OF ROBERT GODDARD’.