ON THE SAME day the men in Moscow were sullenly watching the broadcast from Apollo 8, others in the Soviet bloc were also turning their eyes toward the mission. The little show from deep space might not have been carried anywhere in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe, but official blackouts were only so effective and plenty of people knew that with a little artful rigging of a powerful antenna, they could pluck a forbidden signal straight out of the air. There may not have been many broadcast pirates, but more than a few of them reported what they had seen. In the West—and pretty much every other place on the planet that could pick up a television transmission—the show from the spacecraft was widely available. Though the first broadcast from Apollo 8 almost certainly did not break any records, the networks concluded that the global audience exceeded one hundred million viewers, and it was possibly two or three times that.
They watched the five-minute show in Britain, where the Sunday Times admitted, “the Apollo flight is thrilling us all.” They watched it in France, where the Journal du Dimanche called the flight “the most fantastic story in human history.” They watched it in Hong Kong, where broadcasts from Britain’s BBC were readily available even if mainland China was ignoring the mission. “HONG KONG MAN ON WAY TO MOON,” read the headline in more than one newspaper, delighting in Anders’s geographic birthplace, while overlooking the fact that a child born on an American military base was legally born on American soil.
Hours before the broadcast, Pope Paul VI, in his weekly address to the crowds at the Vatican, had Apollo 8 on his mind, too. “We accompany with our prayers the courageous astronauts, flying in space at a dizzying speed, wishing a happy success to a risky interplanetary voyage,” he said.
In the US itself, all three television networks carried the show, and they fully intended to air every minute of the five other broadcasts from space that NASA had arranged. And why wouldn’t they? The ghostly signal showing three ordinary men with ordinary names like Frank and Jim and Bill making an extraordinary journey was an entirely different kind of news from the full-color, close-up bloodshed that had been filling TV screens all year. It was a wholly good thing in an unhappy year.
But whether the run of luck would hold for the three men in the small pod hurtling through the deep void would not be known for a few more days.
As far as the people in NASA’s public affairs office were concerned, there was entirely too much conversation about balls and urine going on between the Apollo 8 astronauts and Mission Control.
Ship-to-shore communications were always a scratchy business, which was why call signs or vectors that included letters like “A,” “C” and “T” became “Alpha,” “Charlie” and “Tango” for clarity. The same thinking applied to the use of “balls.” Numbers had no rhymes that could cause problems, so it was fine to call out “one,” “two” and “three” by their proper names. But “zero,” which was even less likely to create rhyming difficulties, proved to be an irresistible target, and so aviators referred to zeros as “balls.”
For Apollo 8, the word went out that “balls” would return to a gentleman’s “zero.” Still, habit was habit and aviators were aviators, and over the course of the mission a few “balls” were still slipping through.
The talk about urine posed a more difficult problem. It went deeper than mere language; besides, there was no way to avoid talking about it. Newton’s laws of motion—particularly the ones about objects in motion tending to remain in motion and all actions having equal and opposite reactions—may have been all that was needed to get a spacecraft moving toward the moon and then keep it going even after its third stage engine had completed its work. But maintaining a true course took a little more effort.
The giant main engine—the SPS—provided a booming 20,500 pounds of thrust, and each of the sixteen little reaction control thrusters produced one hundred pounds. But physics makes no distinction between forces you want and forces you don’t, and a fine mist of urine or other wastewater venting from the side of the spacecraft could provide a tiny thrust of its own.
It wasn’t an issue anyone worried about during the carousel ride that was Earth orbit, but on what was supposed to be a straight shot to the moon, even a tiny nudge off course at the beginning of the trajectory could mean a huge error at the end. Already, less than forty-eight hours into the mission, the guidance officers were noticing a slight drift in Apollo 8’s path. As a consequence, they were regularly discussing with the astronauts how and when to schedule their urine dumps.
In some ways, Chris Kraft was glad for the development. He very much wanted to test the engine, and an SPS burn to correct the drift in trajectory provided the perfect opportunity. In Kraft’s view, it would be recklessness of the first order if the spacecraft arrived at the moon without ever having tested the main engine that would be needed to get the crew into and out of lunar orbit. If there was an issue with the engine, it was best to know that now, and have a couple of days to deal with it, than for the astronauts to learn about it only when they tried to fire the SPS on the far side of the moon, a point at which they would be completely out of radio contact with Houston. After listening in on the trajectory chatter from his observer’s console at the back of the firing room, Kraft strode up to what was known as the trench—the front row of consoles where the flight dynamics and guidance officers sat—to make his preferences known.
“We need that SPS engine to work, and I very much want to see it burn before we go behind the moon,” he announced.
Then he turned and left the trench, and the engineers set about doing the only thing they could do—whatever Kraft told them. They ran the numbers for the maneuver and found that it would be an almost absurdly minor exercise. The necessary course correction would require a pulse of the SPS lasting slightly longer than two seconds.
Still, Houston called the maneuver up to the ship and the astronauts prepared to execute it. Anders, sitting in his right-hand seat, read off the steps for a burn from the flight plan, and Lovell, in the equipment bay, punched them into the computer—knowing, from the months of simulations, what Anders would read off before he actually did it, but abiding by the call-and-response rules that governed any burn of the engine. Borman, in the left-hand seat, counted down. Then the engine lit and the ship bumped forward; 2.4 seconds later, the exercise was over.
“Like a big spring,” Borman said, surprised at the sudden lurch, but otherwise shrugging it off.
Kraft reacted very differently. The second the engine was lit, he saw an anomaly in the data. It was exactly the sort of problem he’d feared, exactly the reason he’d wanted a burn. It didn’t look like much unless you knew exactly how the data was supposed to look, and Kraft did know. The problem, an issue with the flow of chemicals, was minor enough that they could have overlooked it, but the entire point of their jobs was to see everything and overlook nothing. Actually, this brief SPS burn cleared out the problem as it properly purged leftover helium from the lines. Now the fuel lines would be entirely clear. Kraft nodded in satisfaction, cast a stern look at his trench controllers, and returned to his observer’s console. Observing every single thing going on in the room was exactly what he would continue doing until the three astronauts were safely home.
Nobody expected the Apollo 8 command module to be anything like a pleasant place throughout the mission, given that three grown men would be confined in it for six full days. But no one expected it to get quite so ripe quite so fast. Borman’s space sickness had gotten the journey off to a disagreeable start, and things had gone pretty much downhill since then.
Urine dumps would still be made as needed, but with the trajectory to worry about, the exact meaning of “as needed” would change. No longer would the wastewater be vented outside as soon as it left the astronaut’s body; instead, the urine would be stored in sealed plastic bags. But the bags were never sealed quite well enough to prevent the singular smell, if not the liquid itself, from leaking out. And for every bag that was filled and stored, the odds that one of them would be bumped and ruptured increased.
The stuffiness inside the ship was another problem. The temperature on any one part of the exterior skin of the spacecraft varied from about 200 degrees below zero to 200 above, depending on whether that section of the exterior was facing the glare of the sun or the deep freeze of shadowed space. To keep things balanced, the spacecraft would spend most of the flight in what was known as passive thermal control—or PTC—mode. This was nothing more or less than a slow, one-revolution-per-minute rotisserie roll that would be initiated with a single burn of the thrusters and would continue indefinitely until there was a counter thrust.
But inside, the cabin temperature hovered at about 80 degrees, thanks mostly to the sunshine streaming periodically into the windows. The spacecraft had heaters, but beyond a fan to circulate the interior atmosphere, there was nothing to cool the air.
The astronauts’ personal equipment had problems, too. Their slipper-like boots began to fray almost immediately after they put them on, and Borman and his crew worried that a loose thread could snag on something or throw a switch inadvertently. So they shucked the booties and got by with their socks. Then there were the headsets. When the astronauts were sealed in their pressure suits for liftoff, they wore black-and-white fitted hoods under their helmets, with the earpieces and microphone built right in, nicknamed “Snoopy hats” after the popular beagle in the Peanuts comic strip. They were supposed to use ordinary headsets, which would be less hot, for the rest of the trip, but those had proven impossibly glitchy, so it was back to the black-and-white fitted hoods. The Snoopy hats may have cost them a measure of dignity, but they gained them a lot of function.
Getting adequate rest was often an issue for astronauts, but fortunately both Borman and Lovell found that sleep came relatively easily. In the Apollo spacecraft, many of the operations were automated, so Houston allowed the astronauts to sack out simultaneously if they wanted, and the lower equipment bay included sleeping bags that could be rigged like hammocks.
But Borman did not care for the idea of simultaneous sleep shifts. It felt like negligence, like falling asleep at the wheel of a speeding car, even if there was nothing remotely nearby to hit and no accelerator or brake to mind. So on the second night in space the commander forced himself to stay awake while Lovell and Anders slept. At about the forty-hour point in the mission—it was 11:00 p.m. in Houston—Jerry Carr, who was manning the capcom console, tried to keep Borman company, chatting about the weather and the news.
Then Borman fell silent and looked out his window. The home planet, so much farther away than it had been during the first broadcast, hung before him.
“Boy, Jerry, that Earth is sure looking small.”
“Roger,” Carr answered. “I guess it’ll get smaller, too.”
Borman smiled. “Yes,” he answered softly, “we’re getting along pretty good.”
About eight hours into Apollo 8’s third full day in space a remarkable milestone would be reached. The crew wouldn’t see it happen and they wouldn’t feel it happen—they’d still be soaring silently through space with more than a half a day to go before they reached the moon—but it would happen all the same. At precisely fifty-five hours, thirty-nine minutes and fifty-five seconds mission-elapsed time, the astronauts would cease being people of the Earth and instead become people of the moon.
By the time the spacecraft passed the 200,000-mile mark, the power balance between the parent planet and its little moon would shift. At that point, the increasing pull of lunar gravity would at last overcome the greater, but fading, pull of Earth’s gravity, meaning that the uphill march would become a downhill plunge, and the spacecraft’s speed would once again begin increasing. After that moment, it was physically inevitable that Apollo 8 would at the very least whip around the far side of the moon. Perhaps the crew would succeed in entering orbit; perhaps their engine would fail them and they would be tossed back home by lunar gravity; perhaps the engine would overburn and they would crash into the moon. But whatever happened, Borman and his crew would become the first humans in the history of the species to see the lunar farside.
Several hours later, it was time for Apollo 8’s next broadcast. Tuesday at 3:30 p.m. would normally be a poor slot for any TV show, but it was December 23—schools were closed and plenty of businesses were already shuttering for the holidays.
Progress in the mission meant progress in the quality of the pictures the crew was able to send home. The planet outside the spacecraft’s window was still grainy and without color, but a proper polarizing filter sharpened the image considerably, as did simply holding the camera still. This time, the blurred picture of the Earth seemed almost to sizzle into focus.
Before the broadcast began, Borman fired his thrusters to stop the rotisserie roll so that Anders, who would be handling the camera again, could fix it squarely on the Earth. Then Borman looked out at the view and was struck by what he was seeing.
“We are looking at the Earth right now and there is a spectacular, long, thin band of clouds,” he said. “It’s absolutely spectacular, going all the way—or almost halfway—around the Earth.”
“Roger, we would like you to repeat that during the TV narrative,” Collins said, “and we would like you, if possible, to go into as much of a detailed description as you poets can possibly muster.”
Poetry would not be quite what the audience would get today. But if the people viewing the broadcast looked hard and squinted properly, the slightly better picture made it possible actually to see the clouds and landforms of Earth that the astronauts were describing.
When the show began, Lovell played narrator. “What you’re seeing,” he said, “is the Western Hemisphere; at the top is the North Pole.”
After allowing that information to register, he continued. “Just lower to the center is South America, all the way down to Cape Horn.”
After another pause, he said, “I can see Baja California and the southwestern part of the United States.”
Whether the audience could actually make out the shapes described by Lovell wasn’t the point. It was the fact that they had the chance to try, to see their home planet from a remove of 200,000 miles and make of it what they could, just as the astronauts were doing.
Exactly as Houston wanted him to, Lovell went on to talk about the Earth’s colors, describing where the brown of desert gave way to the blue of water and the white of clouds. Then, at least a little transported by it all, he gave the ground a bit of the poetry it had requested.
“What I keep imagining is if I am some lonely traveler from another planet, what I would think about the Earth from this altitude,” he said, “whether I would think it would be inhabited or not.”
“Don’t see anybody waving, is that what you’re saying?” joked Collins. After having asked for the lyricism, he now seemed to be laughing it off.
But Lovell would not be denied a whiff of wonder. “I was just kind of curious if I would land on the blue part or the brown part of the Earth,” he mused.
“You better hope we land on the blue part,” Anders said.
“So do we, babe,” Collins answered.
Lovell smiled and went back to the more straight-up work of describing without reflecting. Privately, however, he decided that he was at that moment about as happy as he’d ever been.
The broadcast finished about seventeen minutes after it began. Before long, Collins called up to them once again. “By the way,” he said, “welcome to the moon’s sphere.”
“The moon’s fair?” Borman asked, not quite making him out through the static.
“The moon’s sphere,” Collins corrected. “You’re in the influence.”
Silently, invisibly, the gravity of the Earth—in the grip of which the human species had always lived—had handed Apollo 8 off to the gravity of the moon. The crew’s long lunar plunge had begun.