TECHNICALLY, GENE KRANZ did not need to be present at Mission Control in Houston on the day Apollo 8 launched. The official manning list—the roster of every controller who would sit at every console for each of the three eight-hour shifts during the six-day flight—did not include Kranz’s name anywhere. His odd-on, even-off flight schedule had him busy not with the business of flying Apollo 8, but with planning for Apollos 9, 11, 13, 15 and on down the line for however long the moonships kept flying. For Apollo 8, the prime seat in Mission Control—the flight director’s console—would be filled by a rotating cast, consisting of Cliff Charlesworth, Milt Windler and Glynn Lunney, and they would be more than up to the job without Kranz there to second-guess their work.
But what the manning list said and what Kranz wanted were two different things, and for him, Mission Control was the only possible place to be. Kranz loved everything about the great high-ceilinged control room, with its big board of maps and data filling the front wall like a giant movie screen.
Kranz could be dropped into Mission Control at any point in any flight and sense, just by looking around the room, how far into the shift and into the flight plan the controllers were. He could tell by how full the wastebaskets were, how stale the sandwiches looked. He could tell by whether the pizza was congealed or steaming, by whether the coffee smelled fresh or burned.
If things were going well, most of the men would be tending to business at their own consoles. If there was a problem, a huddle would have formed around the relevant console. One huddle meant one problem. More huddles spelled what could be real trouble.
On the morning Apollo 8 launched, even a novice would have sensed that all was going smoothly. Kranz arrived well before liftoff and took a seat near the back of the room, where he could observe unobtrusively but be available immediately if he was needed. As the countdown clock ticked toward zero, there was the usual bracing; as the Saturn V roared to Earth orbit, there was the usual tension. Once the rocket arrived there, the controllers would have nearly three hours before the next big milestone—translunar injection, or TLI, the engine burn that would send the astronauts moonward.
TLI was a tricky business, involving lighting up the engine on the third stage of the Saturn V that was still attached to the spacecraft. The third stage was nearly the height of a six-story building and when it fired, the engine would accelerate Apollo 8 to the proper speed to put it on its way to the moon. The third stage would then be jettisoned and sent into a waste-disposal orbit around the sun. It all looked simple enough in the equations and simulations, but it had never been tried in crewed flight before. And its success depended on a team of men sitting at different consoles covering varied areas of expertise, all coordinating their efforts. Still, if anyone in the room was feeling anxious about attempting the maneuver, they weren’t showing it.
A relaxed-looking Mike Collins was working the capcom console. Collins was the right man to have on-shift at the beginning of the flight, since this particular crew probably knew him better than any other astronaut in the corps. Chuck Deiterich was at the Retrofire console, to manage the procedures in which the ship turned its blunt end forward and lit its SPS engine to enter the moon’s orbit, then later exited the moon’s orbit and, finally, reentered the Earth’s atmosphere. Jerry Bostick was at the flight dynamics, or FIDO, console, where he managed the craft’s trajectory. They were two more crew favorites and two more good choices, since the TLI burn would be in their hands.
Best of all would be the sight of Flight Directors Charlesworth, Windler and Lunney. They were three men doing the same job, but each had to be deadly serious about what the flight directors called “chasing nits”—noting any tiny glitch in the performance of any system, glitches that might make no difference at the moment but could, for the next director at the same point in the next mission, be critical.
Kranz looked around at the solid team in the humming room and then turned his attention to the great display screen with the familiar, flat map of the Earth and the track of an orbiting spacecraft inscribed around it. Soon enough—shortly after TLI—that map would change. For the first time in history, it would switch from a circular route to a translunar route, with the Earth on the left-hand side and the moon on the right and a spacecraft slowly creeping from one end of the board to the other. And then, in less than three days’ time, the map would switch again, this time to an orbital map of the moon.
Something, Kranz felt, was about to shift, something bigger and grander than one space flight or one victory in the Cold War with the Soviets. He looked forward to the exhausting business of being back on the console for all the flights to come. But today he was happy to have less to do. The change this mission would work on the world would be too beautiful to miss.
Somewhere between ninety-nine and one hundred and three miles above the Earth, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were not thinking such soaring thoughts. They were, for the moment at least, thinking about not throwing up. Borman and Lovell were hardly strangers to space. Borman had spent fourteen days there; Lovell, the world record holder for time aloft, had logged eighteen. But they had spent all of that time sealed inside a Gemini spacecraft, and its ninety-one cubic feet of habitable volume did not even permit a man to get out of his chair. Yes, they had been weightless, but they knew it was mostly because the things around them floated, not because they did themselves.
The Apollo capsule was different. It didn’t just have a comparatively spacious two hundred and eighteen cubic feet, similar in size to the interior of a large car, it had two hundred and eighteen smart cubic feet, configured in a way that allowed for maximum mobility even with three men competing for the room. There was enough clearance between seats and instrument panel for the astronauts to float over one another easily, getting from section to section or window to window with ease.
The capsule also had what was known as a lower equipment bay beneath the foot of the couches. As its name suggested, the bay was partly used for stowage, but it was also where the navigation console was located, meaning that the bay operated as an entirely separate workstation, distinct from the instrument panel. It was even big enough to provide a little privacy if an astronaut wanted to take a nap or needed to use a waste disposal bag. Those, regrettably, had not improved since Gemini.
Once the crew got to orbit, Lovell was the first to open his seat belt and pop out of his couch. He drifted down to the equipment bay to stow his helmet and promptly felt his head swim and his stomach turn over. Taking hold of a solid ledge on the spacecraft wall, he held himself steady.
“Be very careful getting out of your seat,” he called back up to Borman and Anders. Anders looked quizzical, but Borman, who had talked with Lovell about the possibility of space sickness in so big a ship, knew exactly what Lovell meant.
“Look straight ahead for a while,” Borman said to Anders. Then he opened his seat belt, too, floated down to join Lovell and felt the same sickly swoon. He remembered the steak-and-eggs breakfast he’d wolfed down that morning and fought to keep the food down where it belonged. Anders, feeling cautious now, stayed where he was for a few moments before unbuckling as well.
Motion sick or not, in the brief two laps around the Earth the astronauts would have a lot to do before the ship was fit for TLI. Borman’s job on this mission was the job of any commander, which meant he was fluent in every single system aboard the spacecraft, could fly the ship alone if he had to and bore the weight of command as well. He would have the final word on anything and everything that happened over the next six days.
Lovell had been tapped as navigator, and given that Apollo 8 would travel much farther than any other craft in the history of space exploration, that was no small responsibility. While the computer had all the coordinates it would need for the flight stored on magnetic tape, that mechanical brain still needed a human brain to confirm what the machine thought it knew before the main engine or even a single one of the sixteen smaller thrusters could be fired.
Both the computer and Lovell had the location of thirty-five stars committed to memory. These navigational coordinates were every bit as accurate—and every bit as primitive—as they were for the sailors who used them centuries ago. Lovell would need that knowledge whenever the ship had to make a maneuver of any kind, and there would be a lot of them. He was also the keeper of all the computer’s other commands, especially the firing instructions that would be used when the main engine would make its critical burns. If there was a crew member who would call the lower equipment bay home for much of the six days ahead, it was Lovell.
Anders’s role was somewhat improvisational. Part of his responsibility would be to serve as mission photographer, a job that was far more important than merely serving as Apollo 8’s history-keeper. The reason for orbiting the moon a full ten times was not only to take the gravitational measure of the dangerous mascons, but also to get three sets of eyes and some first-rate film cameras scoping out possible landing sites for the missions to follow. And he would take as many photos as his many rolls of photographic film could hold.
Until the time to do that work came, he would also oversee the command module’s life-support systems. It was straightforward enough work—monitoring oxygen, heaters, water flow and more—though it came with little margin for error. The very term “life-support systems” made clear what would happen if those systems failed.
Now, as Anders unbuckled, he surveyed his meters and immediately spotted a problem. The pressure indicator on the glycol system that was supposed to cool the instruments was way too low.
“Boy,” he said, partly to himself, “it’s way down there. Something’s fishy.”
“We’ll take a look,” Borman said, running the spacecraft’s schematics in his head. “Are we in primary?” Borman asked, referring to the setting on the instrument panel, as opposed to a setting that read the secondary, or backup system.
“Oh, we’re in secondary.” Anders flicked the switch to its proper setting. “It’s okay.”
Borman drifted over, glanced at the indicator and smiled as the pressure rose to normal. The error was harmless, both men knew. All the same, Anders was annoyed at himself. This kind of blunder never would have happened if he’d been flying his LEM.
This wasn’t the only mistake early in the mission. None of the three men had yet removed the yellow life vests they wore during liftoff, a safety precaution in case they had to end the mission on the way into orbit and ditch in the ocean. As Lovell floated past the base of Borman’s seat while checking on the navigation panel, his life vest’s activation lever caught on a protruding rod. A loud pop and hiss sounded and the vest began billowing up on his chest.
Lovell looked comical, but the situation was not. Under normal circumstances—on Earth, in other words—it would be easy enough to deflate and stow the life vest. But the vest had been inflated by a small canister of pressurized carbon dioxide, and releasing a big blast of CO2 in a small, enclosed space with a limited supply of breathable air was not a good idea. The spacecraft was equipped with air scrubbers—square canisters the size of a large cookie tin filled with crystalline lithium hydroxide that would absorb CO2 before it could build up to dangerous levels. But, like sponges, the canisters would eventually become saturated and then have to be swapped out with a fresh one. Dirtying up the first filter on the first day of the mission was a bad way to begin.
In short order, Lovell figured out an elegant solution. He floated over to the closest thing to a proper bathroom the spacecraft had—the urine station in the lower equipment bay. Like the system aboard the Gemini, the station was nothing more than a tube attached to a funnel at one end and a small reservoir in the wall at the other. The urine would flow from the astronaut, through the tube and into the reservoir. A twist of a knob would then vent the unwanted liquid into space, where it would flash freeze into Schirra’s spangly Constellation Urion.
Lovell removed the funnel from the end of the tube, opened the life jacket valve, fitted it in its place and then vented the CO2 invisibly overboard. When he was done, he folded the vest and stowed it in the storage area. Over the next six days, all three men would have to move around the small cabin a lot more carefully, but the mission’s first serious problem was solved.
The TLI burn that would propel the Apollo out of Earth orbit and orient it toward the moon’s orbit awaited the astronauts exactly two hours, fifty minutes and forty seconds into their mission—near the end of their second Earth orbit. It would require extraordinary precision. For that reason, neither the astronauts nor the onboard computer would execute it. Instead, the burn would be directed by the room-size computers at Mission Control.
The way the physics works, flying away from Earth is more like climbing uphill from Earth, with the ascending power of speed battling the downward pull of gravity. Take off going a little too fast and you’re going to win that tug-of-war—but if you miscalculate and miss the moon, you’ll fly off into space and be adrift forever.
Slowing down just a bit too much means you will ultimately lose that gravitational battle, so if your trajectory is far off and you miss the moon entirely, you will simply arc over and head back home like a ball thrown high in the air that falls back to the ground. If you miss the moon by only a little, you’ll be moving slowly enough to surrender to the moon’s gravity, at which point you’ll whip around the far side and get hurled back to Earth. In the first case, you’ll make a U-turn in empty space; in the second case, you’ll speed around the traffic cone of the moon. Either way, you remain on what flight planners called a free-return trajectory—and either way, you’ll be heading home, never having entered the moon’s orbit.
Until the burn took place, Lovell, for one, was content to claim a few minutes of downtime and drift from window to window while reacquainting himself with the singular view of the Earth, slowly turning below his spacecraft. It was a vista he’d seen over the course of 330 orbits the first time he was in space; he would see it for a far briefer spell on this flight, but especially since Apollo had five windows to Gemini’s mere two, he wanted to make the most of his opportunity.
“Gee, this is the best flight I’ve ever had,” he said with a wink to Borman, a comradely reminder of the grind the Gemini 7 mission had been. He looked out the window again and caught a bright flash as the nighttime side of the Earth gave way to the day. “Here comes the sun,” he announced.
“Where?” asked Anders, eager to see as many sunrises and sunsets as possible during their brief stay in the Earthly neighborhood.
“Well, take a look,” Lovell said, waving him over to the window. “It crept up on us.”
Though Borman stole a few glimpses of his own, he was not partial to the idea that his crew would spend their limited time in orbit sightseeing. But since they were so busy with the windows, he reckoned that he might as well put them to work there. Given how central lunar mapping was to the mission, a lot would ride on keeping the multipaned windows clear, and that would not be easy. Any moisture clinging to the exterior windows that had been carried up from Earth would flash freeze in the vacuum of space.
“Let’s give Houston a window status report as far as contamination,” Borman ordered. And so they did, reporting on specks of dust or smudges that shouldn’t have been present.
“You’re looking good, Apollo 8,” Mike Collins said. “We don’t have anything for you. We are just standing by.”
The remainder of the standby time ticked slowly away. To avoid bothering the crew, Collins held his tongue; instead, he listened to the chatter on Mission Control’s internal loop as the other controllers confirmed that the computers and guidance system and third-stage tank pressures were all what they should be. Finally, twenty-three minutes before the critical burn, Charlesworth, who was in the flight director’s seat for this first shift, gave Collins the high sign: it was time to signal the astronauts that their ship was fit to leave home. Collins nodded.
“All right, Apollo 8,” he said. “You are go for TLI. Over.”
“Roger,” Borman answered, his voice without inflection. “We understand we are go for TLI. Over.”
Collins sat back in his seat. He was startled to discover that what should have been one of the most thrilling moments of his life was actually one of the most unsatisfying.
Three human beings, he reflected, were about to tear themselves away from the close gravitational grip of Earth, and in three days’ time they would surrender to the gravity of another celestial body. No living creature had ever done that before. There ought to be an oompah band. There ought to be fireworks. There ought to be some way to mark the moment. Instead, there was just this dull, flat little scrap of language: You are go for TLI.
But the jargon was deliberate: it was designed to hollow out those very feelings of momentousness, because feelings like those could be distractions when you needed to focus only on the task at hand. Elsewhere in Mission Control, Jerry Bostick, at the flight dynamics console, allowed himself a flicker of the forbidden wonder.
“They’re leaving us,” he muttered to no one in particular. “We’ve got these guys headed out of orbit.”
In the spacecraft, Borman and his crew did what the flight plan directed, which was to return to their couches and buckle their restraints. There would be no need for anyone to stand on their shoulders; this time, the belts would simply prevent them from drifting out of their seats. Once the engine was lit, the acceleration would create just enough gravity to settle them back in place.
“All right, gentlemen,” Borman said to Lovell and Anders, “let’s get set for this.”
The astronauts scanned their instruments and saw nothing amiss in alignment or fuel pressure or anything else. Then, just as their training called them to do, they scanned their instruments again. All seemed in order.
At the five-minute mark before TLI, Collins called the crew. “Apollo 8, Houston,” he said. “You’re looking good down here. Everything looks good.”
“Roger, understand,” Borman answered.
As those final five minutes melted away, the spacecraft and the ground held their silence as best they could.
“Apollo 8, Houston, coming up on twenty seconds till ignition,” Collins said, his eyes on the clock. “Mark it,” he called out. “You’re looking good.”
“Okay,” said Anders.
“Roger,” said Borman.
Lovell gave Anders another encouraging smile, then turned to Borman, who did not glance back. The commander’s eyes were fixed on the instrument panel clock and the ignition light next to it.
“Nine, eight, seven . . . ,” Borman announced, then counted in his head for a digit or two. “Four, three, two . . . ,” he resumed.
Behind them, the crew felt a rumble. Fifty-nine feet away, the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen flowed from their separate tanks and mixed in the combustion chamber. As the ignition system engaged, the exhaust exploded out of the third-stage engine bell—silent in the vacuum of space, it created a low, vibrating rumble inside the spacecraft.
“Light on,” Borman called. “Ignition.”
“Roger, ignition,” Collins said.
The expected shadow of gravity nudged the crew from behind. Instruments throughout the command and service module, tuned like seismographs to every change in velocity or orientation of the spacecraft, twitched in reaction to the sudden acceleration, turning what they recorded into digital signals and displaying them on the instrument panel. Far more precise sensors—written into the brains and vestibular systems of the astronauts themselves, the result of years and years of flying—reacted, too.
“Boy, it’s going off in yaw,” Borman said, not liking a slight slewing to the side that both his gut felt and his alignment indicators confirmed.
“It’s okay, the DAP is fine over here,” Anders said, referring to the digital autopilot.
Lovell was busy minding the other axes in which the spacecraft could drift. “What’s your attitude at—” Lovell began to ask.
Anticipating the question, Borman cut him off. “Fine, forty-five . . .”
“OK,” Lovell said.
“And the tank pressure?” Anders asked.
“Tank pressures are good,” Borman said.
“OK,” Anders answered.
For five minutes and twenty seconds, the men alternated between silence and necessary chatter. The engine burned and the ship slowly began to climb that gravity mountain from the Earth to the moon.
Now toward the end of the burn, it was Lovell’s job to keep his eyes fixed on the instrument panel clock. He called off the three-minute, two-minute and one-minute marks to shutdown.
“Thirty seconds to go,” he called.
Then: “Ten seconds. Really fine.”
Then: “Five, four . . .”
He trailed off.
Finally, three seconds later, just as suddenly as the engine had roared to life, it went completely still. The only sound that filled the cockpit now was the whirring of the cabin fan, the breathing of the three men and the crackle in their headsets from the command center. Yet they were leaving the Earth behind at an unheard-of 24,200 miles per hour.
“Okay, we got SECO right on the money,” Borman said as casually as if he were announcing that he’d just picked up the mail.
“Roger,” Collins said, “understand SECO.”
The moment was marked. Once again a bit of chill jargon—meaning “sustainer engine cutoff,” or shutdown of the spacecraft’s big motor—stood in for whatever emotions the men had been born to feel but had fought and trained not to feel.
In Mission Control, Gene Kranz, exercising the privilege of the spectator, allowed himself to feel plenty. Standing at the back of the room, he watched as the big map on the wall changed: now it showed the long journey ahead. Three men had broken away from the planet. The first mission to the moon had officially begun.