The crew of Apollo 8 (from left to right): James Lovell, William Anders and Frank Borman.
LEAVING THE CRADLE
Exciting, courageous and technically skillful though the events in space travel had hitherto been, if the United States could achieve the next phase of its Apollo program, then it would eclipse all of these in one fell swoop. It planned to send astronauts on a voyage to another celestial body, the Moon—a journey that would necessitate humans leaving Earth’s orbit for the first time in their history.
Apollo 8’s three-man crew were mission commander Frank Borman, Command Module pilot James Lovell, and Lunar Module pilot William Anders. The mission also involved the first manned launch of a Saturn V rocket, and was the second manned mission of the Apollo program.
Originally planned as a low-earth orbit Lunar Module/Command Module test, the mission profile was changed to the more ambitious lunar orbital flight in August 1968. The overall objectives of the mission were to demonstrate Command and Service Module performance both between the Earth and Moon and in a lunar-orbit environment, to evaluate crew performance in a lunar-orbit mission and to return high-resolution photography of proposed Apollo landing areas and other locations of scientific interest.
Frank Borman: It’s hard for us to fathom now, but the thing that’s interesting about that mission was that, I don’t know, maybe half a dozen of us sat in Chris Kraft’s office one afternoon and we went over the flight plan, to try to understand what would we do on the whole flight. And I’ve always thought, again, it was an example of NASA’s leadership with Kraft and their management style that we were able to hammer out, in one afternoon, the basic tenets of the mission.
Jim Lovell had come into the mission to replace an injured Michael Collins, who had suffered severe back problems during training.
Jim Lovell: We were going to go out to 4000 miles so that we could test the Lunar Module, the Command Module, and then come back at a high rate of speed so that, you know, we could test the heat shield and things like that. I recall this very vividly. The three of us were out at Downey at North American testing our spacecraft; and Frank got a call to go back to Houston. So Bill Anders and I still stayed out there. We were working out there. And Frank came back again, back to Downey, and said: “Things have changed.” And we said: “Viz. a what?” He said: “If everything goes all right with Apollo 7, we’ll—Apollo 8 will go to the Moon.” I was elated! I thought: Man, this is great! I mean, I had already spent two weeks in space in Gemini 7 with Frank Borman. I didn’t want to spend another 11 days, or something like that, you know, going around the Earth again. I said: “This is fantastic!”
Gene Kranz: Most of the people give the credit for Apollo 8 to a decision in August where George Low said: “Hey, you know, I think, in order to keep this program on track—we’ve got problems in the Lunar Module; it’s behind schedule, it’s overweight, there are software problems there—I think that we’ve got to go to the Moon.”
When Apollo 8 lifted off, the eyes of the world were upon the three astronauts. Kamanin wrote in his diary:
The flight of Apollo 8 to the Moon is an event of worldwide and historic proportions. This is a time for festivities for everyone in the world. But for us, the holiday is darkened with the realization of lost opportunities and with sadness that today the men flying to the Moon are not named Valeri Bykovsky, Pavel Popovich or Aleksei Leonov, but rather Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders.
The KGB (the Russian secret police) tried to stop Apollo 8 from being launched by sending a letter to Cape Kennedy saying that the Saturn V had been sabotaged. US security officials saw through the ploy.
Borman: I didn’t want—really want—the mission to get fouled up because we really weren’t certain that the Russians weren’t breathing down our backs. So I wanted to go on time.
Once in Earth orbit, the crew of the Apollo 8 Command and Service Module had a decision to make—to fire the main engine that would take the spacecraft away from the Earth, making them the first humans to leave their home world and venture toward the Moon. Michael Collins, later to be a member of the historic Apollo 11 crew, acutely observed that when Apollo 8 left Earth’s orbit for the first time, that event might in the long term be considered more important even than the first Moon landing.
Collins: I think Apollo 8 was about leaving and Apollo 11 was about arriving, leaving Earth and arriving at the Moon. As you look back 100 years from now, which is more important, the idea that people left their home planet or the idea that people arrived at their nearby satellite? I’m not sure, but I think probably you would say Apollo 8 was of more significance than Apollo 11, even though today we regard Apollo 11 as being the zenith of the Apollo program but… historians may say Apollo 8 is more significant; it’s more significant to leave than it is to arrive.
But there was a problem. What do you say when you leave the Earth for the first time—so called trans-lunar injection (TLI)?
Collins: I can remember at the time thinking: Jeez, there’s got to be a better way of saying this, but we had our technical jargon, and so I said: “Apollo 8, you’re go for TLI.” If, again, 100 years from now you say you’ve got a situation where a guy with a radio transmitter in his hand is going to tell the first three human beings they can leave the gravitational field of Earth, what is he going to say? He’s going to say something like—he’s going to invoke Christopher Columbus or a primordial reptile coming up out of the swamps onto dry land for the first time, or he’s going to go back through the sweep of history and say something very, very meaningful, and instead he says: “What? Say what? You’re go for TLI?” Jesus! I mean, there has to be a better way, don’t you think, of saying that? Yet that was our technical jargon.
Not that the Moon seemed to be getting any closer to Bill Anders:
We’d been going backward and upside down, didn’t really see the Earth or the Sun, and when we rolled around and came around and saw the first Earth rise, that certainly was, by far, the most impressive thing. To see this very delicate, colorful orb which to me looked like a Christmas tree ornament coming up over this very stark, ugly lunar landscape.
Apollo 8 entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1968. That evening, the three astronauts made a live television broadcast from lunar orbit, in which they showed pictures of the Earth and Moon seen from Apollo 8.
The reading of the Book of Genesis by the crew of Apollo 8 while orbiting the Moon that Christmas—humans farther away from home than any had been before in history—is an iconic moment.
Letters flooded into NASA from all countries congratulating the crew of Apollo 8 on their achievement. The year had been a bad one for the United States: the raging war in Vietnam; race riots; the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Senator Bobby Kennedy. Someone wrote to Apollo 8 saying: “Thank you for saving 1968.”
In the USSR academician Sedov, still referred to as the “father of the Sputnik,” told Italian journalists a day after the Apollo 8 splashdown that the Soviets had not been competing in a race to orbit or land on the Moon. Referring to Apollo 8, he added:
There does not exist at present a similar project in our program. In the near future we will not send a man around the Moon, we start from the principle that certain problems can be resolved with the use of automatic soundings. I believe that in the next ten years vehicles without men on board will be the first source of knowledge for the examination of celestial bodies less near to us. To this end we are perfecting our techniques.
The Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers issued a new decree on January 8, 1969, “On the Work Plans for Research of the Moon, Venus, and Mars by Automatic Stations.” Soon they would state in public that the USSR never wanted to go to the Moon at all. But behind the scenes it was different.