IF THE HOUSTON Oilers had been a better football team, Fred and Ed Borman would have been occupied as their dad was preparing to sail his spacecraft around the far side of the moon. But the Oilers weren’t good at all, which left them with nothing to do during Christmas week.
Both boys worked for the football team as equipment managers in their off-hours, and since the Oilers did not make the playoffs that year, Fred and Ed were home the entire week, as the house remained filled with people, and their dad sped farther and farther away. So Susan Borman did the only thing she could think to do for her boys, which was to make their week as unremarkable as possible, and the boys did their best to go along with the routine.
Since Susan would often get up early on school days and cook them pork chops and eggs for breakfast, she did that during this holiday week, too, the smell sometimes waking several of the astronauts and their wives, who had fallen asleep in her living room while watching the coverage of the mission overnight. For the guests it was the cue to go home, shower up, make their own breakfasts and come back later in the morning.
For Fred and Ed, breakfast gave them a chance to enjoy some brief private time and eyeball their mother to detect how she was holding up. The answer, they could readily see, was not terribly well. As always, she took good care of her guests and smiled gamely for the press, so her picture in the papers looked fine if you didn’t really know her well. But Fred and Ed could read her face better than almost anyone else, and everything from the tight set of her mouth to the spooked look in her eyes spoke to them of a kind of knotted terror.
Fred, as the older son, took it upon himself to ensure that he and Ed behaved this week. Let’s not act like knuckleheads was the way he liked to put it. But the bigger problem was the simple matter of boredom, with every second of every day filled with nothing but moon talk. Having grown up with the space program, they knew no other life, and it took a lot to get them excited. They had watched the Apollo 8 launch along with the adults, but when the time for the burn out of Earth orbit arrived, they drifted from the room. They could hear their father’s voice coming through the squawk box or the TV, and during the two broadcasts back to Earth they wandered into the living room, got a peek of him on the screen—he was growing a beard, but with his sandy hair it was less noticeable than Jim Lovell’s and Bill Anders’s dark scruff—and then wandered back out.
When they could, they left the house and went over to their friends’ homes, where there were no crowds and no newsmen and the TV might not be on at all. “Going out,” Fred would shout to Susan as they were getting ready to leave, taking care not to go into the living room, where they would have to say good-bye to a dozen people they hadn’t even said hello to earlier that morning.
“Not the front door!” Susan would call back, an unnecessary reminder that the front yard was jammed with press.
The backyard was safer, surrounded by a high fence with a door that had a sturdy latch, which meant that unlike Valerie Anders, the boys had no reason to fear that a cameraman would be waiting to ambush them. And if the boys suspected that someone was lurking on the other side of the door in the fence, they would avoid it entirely, vault the farthest stretch of fence, and take the back streets to their friends’ homes.
When they arrived, an adult would inevitably ask about the mission, to which they had little to say.
“Not really thinking about it,” they would answer.
And if anyone raised the topic of the danger their father faced—which too many people seemed inclined to do—Ed would remind them who they were talking about.
“Dad’s in the air force,” he’d say, “a lieutenant colonel. There’s a cold war going on.”
Ed Borman was still only in high school, but he sounded so much like his father when he said such things that the adults who heard him could only shake their heads.
Their father, off fighting that war, would have approved.
Anyone who hoped to mark the moment when Apollo 8 entered lunar orbit would likely be disappointed. The spacecraft was set to arc behind the moon at 3:50 a.m. Houston time in the first few hours of Christmas Eve day, breaking the communications link between the spacecraft and Mission Control that had been maintained since the astronauts had climbed into their ship three days earlier. As long as there is nothing between a spacecraft and the Earth, astronauts are in radio contact. But the moon is in the way when you’re on its far side and radio waves can’t penetrate it. On the screens in Houston it would be as if the Apollo 8 spacecraft and its crew had simply vanished into space. The data stream would be reduced to nothing—all balls—and only a translunar hiss would fill the headsets.
The communications blackout would last about thirty-five minutes. Ten minutes into it, the astronauts would fire their engine for the Lunar Orbit Insertion (or LOI) burn, and that either would or would not make them satellites of the moon. Until they emerged back into the storm of radio waves streaming from their home planet, nobody on that planet would know if the three men were dead or alive.
The engine burn that would settle the matter one way or another would have to be executed very precisely. As the spacecraft made its final approach before loss of signal, or LOS, its 3,800-mile-per-hour speed would increase to 5,800 miles per hour thanks to the pull of the moon’s gravity. The ship would be flying backward, with the engine bell facing forward so that the burn could act as a brake, like paddling your canoe backward in a fast-moving river, bringing the speed back down to 3,700 miles per hour. That was slow enough for lunar gravity to grab the ship and settle it into orbit sixty nautical miles above the moon.
Those were the nice round numbers that NASA gave the press, but the astronauts and the Mission Controllers preferred to work in units that were more precise, reaching far to the right of the decimal point. They had a tiny margin of error—the equivalent of standing at one end of a football field and shooting at an apple in the opposing end zone—but aiming to skin it, not hit it.
For the astronauts themselves, the final approach to the moon would be an exercise in flying more or less blind. They hadn’t glimpsed the moon since their first day in space, when they had been traveling nose forward.
“As a matter of interest,” Lovell called down at 2:50 a.m. Houston time, an hour before loss of radio contact, “we have as yet to see the moon.”
As the time to loss of signal and the Lunar Orbit Insertion burn slowly ticked away, both the crew and the ground attended to minor housekeeping chores, confirming communications settings, cockpit recorder status, trajectory details and the like. But it was really little more than busywork, a way to remain occupied during the final approach to the moon.
Finally, at sixty-eight hours and four minutes ground-elapsed time, the capcom gave the crew the official approval for the mission’s riskiest moment, the maneuver on which the entire voyage depended.
“Apollo 8, Houston,” Carr said, “at 68:04 you are go for LOI.”
“Okay, Apollo 8 is go,” Borman answered.
Carr sat uneasily in the silence that followed. As Collins had found, the cold jargon of the capcom was simply not up to the magnitude of what he had just given the crew the clearance to do.
“Apollo 8, Houston,” he finally added. “You are riding the best bird we can find.”
“Thank you,” Borman replied. Then, five seconds later, he added a small bit of sentiment of his own. “Roger, it’s a good one.”
As if on cue, Mission Control’s big map on the wide screen in the front of the room changed: after showing the translunar route for the better part of the past three days, it switched to a lunar map. The path the spacecraft would follow if the burn went well was traced across its surface.
“Apollo 8, Houston, we have got our lunar map out and ready to go,” Carr told Borman.
“Roger,” Borman said.
After that, there was little chatter until about forty-five minutes later, when Carr once more hailed the ship.
“Apollo 8, Houston,” he said. “Five minutes till LOS; systems go, over.”
“Thank you,” Borman answered. The static crackled, and then Carr spoke up again.
“Frank,” he said, “the custard is in the oven at three fifty.”
“No comprendo,” Borman said.
And then, an instant later, he did understand. It was a message from Susan, who, if he knew her at all, would be keeping the house together and keeping the guests looked after, and would, as the loss of signal and engine burn approached, also be listening to the squawk box alone somewhere, in the kitchen perhaps, maybe in the bedroom, with no one beside her to see her relief if things went well or her devastation if they didn’t. As Susan knew, public displays of powerful emotions were simply not how things were done.
Still, she could send Frank a message. So she had spoken to Carr when he was off-shift and asked him to radio up the coded declaration of family solidarity, her promise to him that she would let him handle the risky business of flying if he would let her handle the household and the children.
Now Borman smiled—a small, private smile. Perhaps Anders caught it, perhaps he didn’t. Either way, he answered for his commander, preventing Carr from repeating the message and spoiling whatever its secret sentiment was.
“Roger,” Anders said.
Shortly afterward, Carr announced the one-minute mark to LOS. Then, with only seconds remaining, the man at the capcom microphone spoke the words everyone else in the control room was thinking. “Safe journey, guys,” he said.
“Thanks a lot, troops,” Anders answered.
“We’ll see you on the other side,” Carr called.
A moment later, at exactly the second NASA had calculated, the signal cut out.
The men in the spacecraft looked at one another partly in wonder, partly in admiration.
“That was great, wasn’t it?” Borman asked. With a laugh, he added, “I wonder if they just turned it off.”
Anders liked the joke. “Chris probably said, ‘No matter what happens, turn it off,’” he added.
Chris Kraft had said no such thing, of course, and the Apollo 8 crewmen knew it. As the long thirty-five minutes of radio silence began, the three astronauts were disconnected from the rest of humanity in a way that no one ever had been before.
Gene Kranz stood at the back of Mission Control. Ship-to-shore contact would be briefly lost on occasion, silences that were predictable and familiar, and carried no special weight. But no ship had ever gone into the blackout that was caused by flying behind the 2,159-mile-wide bulk of the moon, and this silence felt different.
Chris Kraft, sitting at his observer’s console near where Kranz was standing, took the opportunity to pour himself a cup of tea. He walked over to the table where the hot plate and coffeepots were kept and stood next to Bob Gilruth, not only the first director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston but one of the original members of the Space Task Group, the committee established by President Eisenhower in 1958 that led to the creation of NASA.
“Ten years and a month,” Gilruth said. “There were thirty-six of us on the list, including you, Chris.”
“And now we’ve got three men behind the moon,” Kraft answered. “If we weren’t sitting here, I don’t know that I’d believe it.”
Both men gazed at the mission clock in the front of the room. The length of the blackout was not absolutely fixed. If all went well, it would last about thirty-five minutes—a bit longer if the engine fired successfully and the ship slowed to 3,700 miles per hour and settled into orbit, a bit shorter if the engine failed to fire and the ship continued to speed along at 5,800 miles per hour. If something worse happened, the men behind the moon would never emerge.
Inside the spacecraft, the astronauts were too busy to spend a lot of time thinking about all the possibilities facing them. The burn was less than ten minutes away and there was a lot to configure before the ship was ready.
The final configuring was supposed to take up four or five of the ten minutes that remained, but the crew had drilled the procedure so many times on Earth that they completed it in just two of those available minutes.
“Okay, eight minutes,” Borman said, glancing at the countdown clock.
Lovell looked around him. His crewmates did not seem tense, but they didn’t seem especially relaxed, either. “Well, the main thing is to be cool,” he said.
He gave the radar indicator a look. With the spacecraft windows facing up and the ship pointing backward, the astronauts still couldn’t see the moon. But the instruments knew that it was now directly beneath them.
“Well, I’ll tell you gentlemen,” Lovell said, “that moon is pretty close.”
“Seven minutes,” Borman said.
Borman squinted out the window and frowned. There was still only blackness. “On that horizon, boy, I can’t see squat out there,” he said.
“You want us to turn off your lights and check it?” Anders asked, reaching for the interior lighting switches.
Before he could touch them, however, Lovell called out, “Hey, I got the moon!”
“You do?” Anders asked.
“Right below us!” he said, looking through his window.
And indeed, there it was, just visible through Lovell’s backward-facing window. The ship had now traveled far enough past the leading edge of the moon that some of the ancient, gray surface stretched beyond the Apollo’s nose. The expanse was huge—a ruined, meteor-blasted beach that spread out to the right and left until it spilled over the horizons.
Jim Lovell, the first human being in history to see it, stared transfixed and said nothing.
“Is it below us?” Anders asked excitedly, pressing close to his window.
“Yes, and it’s—” Lovell began.
“Oh my God!” Anders exclaimed.
“What’s wrong?” Borman said.
But nothing was wrong. Anders was now seeing the moon for himself. “Look at that!” he said. “I see two—” He waved his hands to fill in the word craters, which, in his excitement, was eluding him. “Look at that!” he repeated.
“Yes,” Lovell said.
“See it?” Anders said. “Fan . . . fantastic.”
“All right, all right, c’mon,” Borman scolded, minding his ship while his crewmen gaped. “You’re going to be looking at that for a long time.”
“Twenty hours, is that it?” Anders asked, knowing full well that ten two-hour orbits would mean they’d be looking at the moon for a total of twenty hours. All the same, he seemed eager to reassure himself of his sublime good fortune.
Anders and Lovell settled back into their couches, and then all three men loosely fastened their seat belts to keep secure when the engine fired.
“One minute,” Borman said. Then he added, “Come on, Jim, let’s watch it real good.”
Lovell would do exactly that, since it was his job to work the computer keypad on the instrument panel and punch in the final commands for the four-minute engine burn. He checked the altitude and velocity readouts he was being fed by the computer and then entered the commands he had practiced a thousand times in simulations.
With ten seconds to go, he consulted the computer readout one more time. It flashed “99:20” back at him. That was the computer’s last-chance code, its way of confirming that the human being at the switch really did want to do what he was about to do.
When the countdown clock reached zero, Lovell hit the button marked PROCEED.
Somewhere behind the astronauts, the engine bell began emitting a silent roar of exhaust, slowing the ship down in its backward-facing position. Borman, Lovell and Anders heard none of that, but they felt it in the form of a subtle pressure at their backs.
“One second, two seconds,” Borman read aloud as the first moments of the 242-second burn played out. “How’s every—”
Anders, anticipating Borman’s question, responded to it before he could finish. “We got them. Pressure’s holding good.”
“Fifteen seconds,” Borman said.
“Pressure coming up nicely,” Anders assured his commander.
“All right.”
“Everything is great.”
The engine burned on and the ship continued to slow, fighting ever so slightly the tug of the moon’s gravity so it could properly settle into lunar orbit. At least that was the plan.
“Four minutes?” Borman muttered as they approached the two-minute mark.
“Longest four minutes I ever spent,” Lovell said, after nearly another minute had elapsed.
As the engine continued to burn, the astronauts could increasingly feel its effects with the pressure at their backs turning into a shadow of gravity. It was less than a single g, but for men who had been weightless for three days, it felt like much more.
“It seems like about three g’s,” Anders said.
Lovell kept his eyes on the clock and announced when there was just one minute left, then forty-eight seconds, then twenty-eight seconds.
“Stand by,” he said.
“Okay,” Borman answered.
“Five, four, three, two, one,” Anders read off.
And then, right on schedule, the SPS—the Service Propulsion System that had served, and propelled, and had now slowed the spacecraft, too—went silent.
“Shutdown!” Borman announced.
“Okay!” Lovell said with a satisfied nod.
In that moment, Apollo 8 became a satellite of the moon. The spacecraft was circling it in an elliptical orbit with—as the ship’s instruments confirmed—a high point of 169 nautical miles and a low point of just sixty, or precisely the parameters Houston had planned. And the three astronauts now orbiting the moon were the only people on or off the world who knew they had succeeded.
The silence in Mission Control stretched on, as the idle people at the consoles tapped their pencils and jiggled their feet. Many of the controllers stared at the mission clock in the front of the room. With their console screens still receiving no information at all from the ship, the clock was the only functioning data point left. So they watched it tick down.
Thirty-four minutes and two seconds after the spacecraft disappeared into blackout, Carr began hailing the ship.
“Apollo 8, Houston. Over,” he said, knowing that it was a bit too early to expect an answer, but not too early to hope for one.
“Apollo 8, Houston. Over,” he repeated thirty-three seconds later.
“Apollo 8, Houston. Over,” he repeated after fifteen more seconds.
He said it yet again after eighteen more seconds, and then thirteen more seconds and then twenty-three seconds.
At last, eight seconds later—thirty-five minutes and fifty-two seconds after LOS—the lifeless crackle in the controllers’ headsets was replaced by something that was very much alive.
“Go ahead, Houston, this is Apollo 8,” said the unmistakable voice of Lovell. “Burn complete. Our orbit 160.9 by 60.5.”
“Apollo 8, this is Houston. Good to hear your voice!” Carr answered.
In truth, the capcom barely heard a thing, since all the men around him had leapt up as one, whooping, cheering, and embracing one another in relief and jubilation. The display went way beyond what Mission Control decorum permitted. But nobody cared: decorum was lost and that was just fine. Paul Haney, the NASA commentator who was narrating the events for the early morning broadcasts, made the obvious official.
“We got it! We’ve got it! Apollo 8 is now in lunar orbit,” he shouted over the din. “There is a cheer in this room!”
It was much quieter in the kitchen at the Borman home, where Susan, as Frank suspected, had been waiting out the long lunar silence alone. But even there, the cheers from her living room were impossible not to hear.
America awoke slowly to the news that three of its countrymen were in orbit around the moon. The predawn hour of the orbital burn meant that most of the people living in the nation that had sent the spacecraft on its journey were not awake when Lovell spoke the words so many had been waiting to hear.
In much of the rest of the world, which was considerably deeper into its day, the response was different. Television networks all over Western Europe interrupted their morning and afternoon broadcasts with news from the moon. The Netherlands had a special hunger for the story, and even the radio stations that usually broadcast only music suspended or interrupted their programming to carry regular updates on the mission. Iran’s state-controlled television network covered the story steadily and live, as did Tehran’s main radio station. In Libya, a nation that had been established seventeen years prior to the day, huge rallies celebrated both the country’s independence and Apollo 8’s astonishing feat. Accounts of the successful orbital maneuver were even reported faithfully in the Soviet Union. The news was not announced there until an hour and fifteen minutes after Apollo 8 sailed back around the near side of the moon, but by the standards of the state-run Soviet press, that was almost as good as live.
If the crew of Apollo 8 hoped to take some time to reflect on their remarkable circumstances, they would have to do so during the quiet intervals while circling the far side of the moon. For each of their spacecraft’s ten orbits, the astronauts would be in radio contact with the ground for nearly ninety minutes, and during those intervals there would be too many chores to attend to and too much chattering in their ears. Worse, a TV broadcast had been planned for the first orbit on the near side of the moon, meaning that hundreds of millions of people would be listening to and watching the goings-on in the ship. Americans who missed the broadcast due to the early hour would be able to see it on what would be a near-continuous loop throughout the day.
During the first few minutes of blackout after the orbital burn, the astronauts thus allowed themselves what they knew would be the brief luxury of mere sightseeing. The flight plan called for the spacecraft to roll over and fly upside down for most of its twenty hours in lunar orbit, since upward-pointing windows would be useless if you were trying to map the moon that lay below. Borman executed a series of thruster maneuvers to spin the ship around, filling the windows with nothing but moon. All three men peered out, and at first all three men said nothing.
Nearly 4.5 billion years earlier, a passing protoplanet had collided with the infant Earth, knocking it to the cockeyed 23-degree tilt that would one day give it its seasons. The collision sent up a great debris cloud that, for a short time, gave the planet a ring. Within a few eons, the ring coalesced into a moon. That new satellite would soon become gravitationally locked to the Earth, meaning that it would always keep one side facing its parent planet and the other side pointed out to space. Less than a billion years after the moon formed, the first one-celled organisms appeared on Earth. It would be another two and a half billion years before multicelled organisms, some with rudimentary light-sensitive eyespots, followed, and on dark nights those spots may have registered the photons pouring down from the brightly lit moon. Later, other organisms with better eyes—and in one case, a mammal with a big brain and opposable thumbs and a consuming curiosity about the nighttime sky—would come along, too. And in all of that time, not a single human eye had ever seen the side of the moon that the six eyes belonging to the astronauts in the Apollo 8 spacecraft were seeing now.
Those men were there on a mission, and if they were given to wonder, which they surely did, they kept it mostly to themselves. But it was evident in their tone and in the long silences between their words. Those words, however, were mostly about the job they were there to do, which was to understand the science, not gawk at the spectacle.
“Boy,” said Lovell softly, blinking at the bright light of the sun, which was still directly overhead and reflecting off the lunar surface. “There’s no shadows in those craters at all.”
He scanned back and forth across the surface, comparing the huge, dusty world he was seeing with the two-dimensional maps and photos taken by telescopes and lunar satellites he had been studying for so many months. Almost immediately, Lovell knew where he was. “We’re passing over Brand right now,” he announced, recognizing the forty-mile-wide crater that had been informally named for rookie astronaut Vance Brand, who had been on Apollo 8’s support crew and had earned himself a little recognition.
Then—bigger, more brilliant—came a one-hundred-mile crater, one of the most conspicuous features left over from one of the most violent hits the lunar farside had ever sustained. “Is that Tsiolkovsky?” Lovell asked no one in particular, knowing full well it was. Studying maps of the moon and not being able to recognize Tsiolkovsky Crater would be like studying maps of the United States and not recognizing Florida. But Lovell was asking anyway, less out of confusion than out of simple incredulity that he was here at all.
He and Borman continued to scan the ground rolling slowly below, picking out other craters, too: Scaliger, Sherrington, Pasteur, Delporte, Necho, Richardson. Once just cartographers’ marks on flat pieces of paper, they were now solid formations of dirt and rock and ancient lava flows, the entire history of the moon written in its wounds. Meanwhile, Anders began bouncing around the cockpit, excitedly collecting his lenses and cameras and film magazines.
“I’ve got Mag D,” he said, after darting down to the equipment bay and grabbing some film. “And this lens,” he added, snatching up a seventy-millimeter camera and lens in one hand and displaying it to Borman and Lovell. He gathered the brackets that would be attached to the windows to hold the cameras, then reappeared carrying it all heaped in his arms.
Borman watched him warily. Three men in so cramped a space reminded him of a crowd of monkeys in a small room, and any errant move could cause a switch to be bumped or a circuit to be broken without anyone noticing.
“Hey, look, just slow down. Take your time, okay?” he ordered.
Anders complied as best he could and spent the minutes until reacquisition of signal assembling his gear a bit more patiently. The twenty hours they’d be spending in lunar orbit would, he knew, go fast. And although Anders hadn’t trained to be a photographer, it was the job he had been handed and he was determined to do it fully and well.
When contact with the ground was at last reestablished and the Mission Controllers had finished their brief, noisy celebration, the capcom and the crew spent the time they had before the television show confirming the spacecraft’s orbital coordinates and the status of the SPS. Anders then unpacked the TV camera and positioned it at the window, preparing to begin the live broadcast to the portion of the world that was awake.
This time, the camera’s lens would not be pointed back at the indistinct blob of a planet that, the last time the TV audience had seen it, was 180,000 miles away and growing steadily smaller. Instead, it would be taking in the surface of the moon a scant five dozen miles below. By then the sun’s angle was growing more acute, and Anders had installed a filter that would take advantage of that fact, meaning that the craters and rills and scarps and cliffs that were currently casting sharp shadows would be discernible even on television screens a quarter million miles away.
Once the broadcast from the ship began, the TV signal came first to the movie-theater-like viewing screen in Mission Control. The spacecraft was at that point passing over the Sea of Fertility, the 522-mile-wide plain on the eastern limb of the moon formed by a vast lava bleed that resulted from a meteor hit four billion years earlier.
Almost as one, the TV producers signaled their networks to flick the switches that would spill the feed out to their broadcast centers and from there, to the world beyond. Jerry Carr knew that was his signal to start the show.
“Apollo 8, Houston,” he called up, affecting a jauntiness that was clearly for the benefit of the television audience rather than the astronauts. “What does the ol’ moon look like from sixty miles? Over.”
“Okay, Houston, the moon is essentially gray, no color,” Lovell answered. “Looks like plaster of paris or sort of a grayish deep sand. The Sea of Fertility doesn’t stand out as well as it does back on Earth.”
Lovell continued to narrate the features crawling past his window. After the Messier and Pickering craters came the Pyrenees Mountains, named after the snowy, far prettier range separating Spain from France. Then, as the ship sailed over the shore of the Sea of Tranquility, Lovell saw another landmark. The spot was significant to NASA because it might be used as an approach point for a later landing, but it mattered to Lovell for a more personal reason.
“We can see the second initial point,” he said, “the Triangular Mountain.”
The Triangular Mountain was the prosaic name NASA had assigned the potential approach point, but Lovell thought of it as Mount Marilyn. He had promised his wife that he would give it that name, and now he decided to call the formation that for the rest of the mission. It might be informal, and it might cause confusion among the NASA mapmakers, but the more Mount Marilyn got used on the air-to-ground loop, the likelier it was to stick.
The broadcast continued for a few minutes more, taking the crew—and by extension, the audience—over more craters. Lovell peered ahead to the shadowed portion of the moon, which lay well forward; squinting, he tried to see if, in the absence of sunlight, the darkened hemisphere that was approaching might be discernible in the faint light reflecting off the Earth and back to the moon.
“I can’t see anything in earthshine at this present time,” he said.
He used the word casually, familiarly, but to the viewers it was not remotely familiar. “Earthshine”—a word that had no meaning until today, until humans had gone to a place where earthshine existed and mattered. It was a wonderful notion, and one the television audience might have taken a moment to savor. But suddenly, seemingly with no warning, the feed from the moon cut out.
NASA had again scheduled the moment that the broadcast would stop, but again no one at the agency had thought to prepare a proper sign-off. There would be another broadcast, during the ship’s ninth orbit, and perhaps something better could be planned for then.
After the show ended, Borman was relieved to be able to get back to work. He was delighted with the job his main engine had performed, but it would be needed again for the Trans-Earth Injection—or TEI—burn during the blackout after the tenth revolution to get the spacecraft out of the moon’s orbit and back on its way to Earth. NASA had promised to keep him apprised of the data readouts from the LOI burn to determine if there had been any hidden problems like the earlier helium bump.
Borman glanced over at Lovell and Anders, who were still allowing themselves a few more moments to sightsee.
“While these guys are looking at the moon, I want to make sure we have a good SPS,” he told the capcom. “How about giving me that report when you can.”
“Sure will, Frank,” Carr replied.
Before the beginning of every revolution, or orbit, Borman would wait for an official okay from the ground that the spacecraft was fit. If he didn’t get that assurance, Borman would assume that his ship was not fit, and he would fire his engine and aim for the home planet earlier than planned.
Apollo 8 slipped back into lunar silence one hour and forty-eight minutes after it had emerged. The blackout would again be thirty-five minutes long, and when the crew reappeared and began the second revolution, there would be more landmark sightings to take, particularly of some of the other landing zones NASA was considering beyond the Sea of Tranquility.
There would also be craters to spot and name. There would be craters named for the Apollo 1 astronauts lost in the fire—Crater Grissom, Crater White and Crater Chaffee—and for other astronauts who had died before ever getting to space. There would be craters for Bob Gilruth, Chris Kraft and Jim Webb, NASA aristocracy. And, of course, there would be craters Borman, Lovell and Anders, far in the south lunar hemisphere.
Finally, some craters would be named on the fly. When they flew past a small formation, Anders declared, “We will call it John Aaron’s,” referring to a twenty-five-year-old Mission Control whiz who oversaw the spacecraft’s environmental control systems and impressed nearly everyone who worked with him with his native smarts.
Aaron, sitting at his console, popped his head up and smiled—and Anders seemed almost to know it. “If he’ll keep looking at our systems, anyway,” the astronaut said.
“He just quit looking,” Carr said with a wink at Aaron, who promptly went back to work.
By the time the ship slipped into its fourth blackout, the astronauts were clearly exhausted. All three men had been awake throughout the entire final approach to the moon and the harrowing LOI burn. Now, with seven more revolutions to come and the TEI burn less than fifteen hours away, there was little chance that they would be able to relax and get some sleep before the homeward cruise.
Anders, perhaps more than all of them, had a very crowded schedule. He was barely a quarter of the way through his photography checklist, and toward the end of the fourth blackout, he needed Borman to maneuver the ship so that he could bring the proper landmarks into focus.
Borman gripped his thruster handle and pitched the ship up slightly. The spacecraft was now positioned in such a way that for the first time, the astronauts could see all the way to the horizon of the moon, beyond which lay a huge swath of black sky. None of the men had thought about what that would mean—that when they came around the near side of the moon and once again established a straight line of radio communication between them and the Earth, they would also establish a straight line of sight. That, in turn, would allow for a view of their home planet rising above the bleak lunar plains.
“Oh my God!” Borman suddenly said. “Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!”
The two other men looked out their windows. Just as Borman said, the blue-white ball that was home to everything they knew—home to every creature and thing and event that had occurred or existed across the entire expanse of Earth’s history—was hovering over the pitted wreck that was the lunar landscape. The astronauts had seen the Earth and they had seen the moon, but this was the first time they had seen them together—the ugly, broken world beneath them and the lovely, breakable one in front of them.
It was Anders who shook himself from his reverie first, struggling to remove the black-and-white magazine from his camera and replace it with something that would better capture what he was seeing. “Hand me that roll of color, quick,” he said to Lovell.
Anders took several shots. But only one of the images would matter. Only one, now hidden invisibly inside Anders’s camera, would eventually move people to understand that worlds—like glass—do break and that the particular world in the photograph needed to be cared for more gently than humans ever had before. That was the picture—the one that would be called “Earthrise”—that rested inside Bill Anders’s camera.
But on Christmas Eve day, 1968, nobody knew it.