… the beginning of a movement that will never stop.
—Tom Paine on the eve of the Apollo 8 circumlunar flight
Had the United States not defeated the Soviet Union in the Moon Race by orbiting the moon in 1968 and then landing there the following year, history would likely know Tom Paine as the administrator who had the shortest tenure at NASA. The timing of the Apollo program, which landed twelve men on the moon, was his most fortuitous ally. He did not shape those events, but nor was he a mere minor player.
Four days after he took over as the acting administrator of NASA, Apollo 7 lifted off on a picture-perfect launch from Launch Complex 34 at Cape Canaveral.1 It was the long-awaited maiden flight of America’s brand-new spacecraft. Twenty-three arduous months had passed since the country last sent men into space. The cloud of the devastating Apollo 1 accident, though lightened somewhat, was still heavy, a not-so-subtle reminder to the nation of the pernicious nature of human space travel. The Apollo 7 launch was an emphatic response to the tragedy that had taken place on the very same launch pad just twenty months earlier. For the public, the maligned space agency now had the promising restart to the moon program that it had been waiting for. Astronauts Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walt Cunningham gave the program that shot in the arm as they orbited Earth 163 times over the next ten days.
NASA was now Paine’s responsibility. Inside the hallways of the agency’s headquarters, tension was high. As the one in charge, he had to be absolutely sure of one thing: could the Apollo spacecraft fly? NASA had no choice but to completely redesign the three-man capsule after the Apollo 1 fire.2 Managers, engineers, and the astronauts who would have to fly it had made sure, to the extent that they could, that the new spacecraft was a much safer, more reliable vehicle than the original version that had claimed the lives of three of their colleagues.
From the outside, the Apollo spacecraft looked essentially the same. But the redesigned command-service module (CSM), which was known as the Block II CSM, was actually a brand-new spacecraft. It took the better part of two years, but NASA was able to rework every subsystem to improve safety and reliability. The entire electrical system of the command module—the part of the spacecraft that housed the three astronauts—had been rewired to reduce the number of wires and junctions that could serve as potential ignition points. Fireproof beta cloth, woven from Teflon-coated glass fibers, covered the interior. A single hatch that could open quickly in a matter of seconds from the inside now replaced the cumbersome and heavy, inward-opening two-piece unit that had previously trapped the crew. And perhaps most importantly, Apollo 7 was the first human flight of a Saturn-class launch vehicle. Although much smaller than the Saturn V that would later send astronauts to the moon, the Saturn IB rocket was still the most powerful ever launched with humans onboard.
It was just one flight, but from his vantage point in Washington, it felt bigger, much bigger. What the first successful manned mission of the program did was to put the nation’s spotlight back on NASA. He was now confident that they had a spacecraft that might just actually be able to fly all the way to the moon and back. He called it the payoff for twenty months of recovery following an appalling setback, the lingering effects of which were still very much on the minds of his people throughout the agency.3 Nowhere had the tension been higher than it was in Houston and at “the Cape” in Florida.
The staid mood in the days leading up to the launch had been noticeably more melancholy compared with the almost festive atmosphere that used to surround the Mercury and Gemini launches in the early days of the space program. This time around, Cocoa Beach on the Florida “space coast” had been much quieter. The mood had been pensive, as if those who were present expected that something bad was going to happen. A renewed sense of determination now prevailed among the agency’s leadership. Acrimony within the ranks of NASA and toward its prime contractor, North American Aviation, began to fade. NASA was finally able to say it had passed a critical milestone in the Project Apollo timetable.
As he stepped up to the podium for his first official remarks as the head of the agency, Paine was cautiously sanguine. Although he would have liked to be more effusive, he reservedly called Apollo 7 simply “a very reassuring mission.”4 The fact was that his involvement on Apollo 7 had been minimal. He had taken over for Jim Webb less than a week before the launch. But the next flight would be quite different. The iconic decision to send Apollo 8 all the way to lunar orbit on Christmas 1968, in just the second manned flight of the program, turned out to be a watershed point in the nation’s quest for the moon. Although he was still new to NASA, the decision won over his doubters. It began to ratify his position atop the agency in the eyes of his peers. In retrospect, it also exemplified the boldness in decision making that was a hallmark of the American space program in the 1960s.
In September of 1967, nearly eight months after the Apollo 1 accident, George Low and Owen Maynard from the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office in Houston had briefed George Mueller at the Office of Manned Space Flight in Washington on a milepost schedule for Project Apollo going forward. Houston had come up with a progression of seven missions that, if successful, could land a man on the moon by the end of 1969. Maynard had assigned a letter to each of those missions:
A and B. Unmanned flights of the Apollo spacecraft
C. Manned flight of the CSM in Earth orbit
D. Manned flight of the CSM and LM in Earth orbit
E. Manned flight of the CSM and LM in high-altitude Earth orbit
F. Manned flight of the CSM and LM in lunar orbit
G. Manned lunar landing5
Since they were unmanned, the A and B missions had already flown in 1966 without much publicity. Apollo 7 then completed the C mission. The next step was to add the lunar module and test the complete Apollo spacecraft in Earth orbit. There was only one problem. The LM—that critical piece of hardware needed for the D mission—was significantly behind schedule. Mueller had wanted to fly the D mission by the end of 1968, but by June of that year, it was already apparent that the spacecraft would not be ready to fly until the following February at the earliest.
The entire timeline was critical. With the end of 1968 approaching, NASA had less than eighteen months to work with. On top of that was the critical unknown of how far along the Soviet lunar program really was. The CIA kept Paine informed on intelligence, but even they could not be certain. The Soviet Union had suffered a major setback when Chief Designer Sergei Korolev died unexpectedly in January 1966 following surgery. But he had already set into motion the development of a massive launch vehicle (publicly revealed by the CIA only after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 to be the N1, a 344-foot, five-stage rocket more powerful than even the American Saturn V) designed to send two cosmonauts to the moon in their new Soyuz spacecraft. The US knew only that the first flight of the Soyuz in the spring of 1967 had failed miserably. Veteran cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov had been killed on reentry. But the CIA could not be sure just how much ground they had actually lost.
Knowing that the lunar module would not be ready in time, Mueller wanted to use the next mission to further prove the flight worthiness of the CSM by flying it in a high-altitude, high eccentricity elliptical orbit. The farthest point on such a trajectory would take the spacecraft to the vicinity of the moon, where its response to a deep space environment could be tested, but it would remain in Earth orbit should an issue arise. In other words, they would fly the E mission but without the LM. This was a conservative but not very engaging option—essentially an elaborate repeat of Apollo 7. Even if nothing went wrong, it would not accelerate the overall landing schedule by much.
George Low, now running the Apollo Spacecraft Office in Houston, then put forth a captivating and rather daring idea: since Apollo 8 was going to fly away from Earth, why not send it all the way to lunar orbit? A December launch window (as dictated by orbit mechanics and the relative position of the Earth and moon) presented such an opportunity. If NASA could pull it off, the “C-prime Mission,” as he called it, could shave six months off the schedule. Moreover, if successful, the agency could try to put a man on the moon as early as the summer of 1969.
For the plan to work, Low and the team of Apollo managers from the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida had to persuade three people: Webb, the NASA administrator; Paine, his deputy; and Mueller, the associate administrator for manned spaceflight.
Of the three, Webb, who had been on uneven terms with the Apollo managers even before the fire, would be the toughest to convince. Mueller, who had approved the original order of the Apollo missions, would be difficult as well. The advantage in dealing with Mueller, however, was that he still had Webb’s trust, for the time being. Furthermore, he worked for Paine. Thus, in the eyes of the Apollo managers, Paine was the focal point. Convince him and the plan had a chance.6
On Wednesday, August 14, 1968, they got their opportunity. Webb and Mueller were away in Vienna, Austria, attending a United Nations conference on the peaceful uses of outer space. The largest personalities of the US space program—none more so than Wernher von Braun from Huntsville, already a world figure—gathered in the conference room next to Paine’s office at NASA Headquarters. Low got up first. He began by briefing the group on technical issues of spacecraft readiness, the status of the communications network, crew readiness, and ground support requirements. Next came a discussion of program risk and schedule.
Quietly Paine listened, speaking briefly now and then only when he had a question. For the next three hours, the men who ran Apollo made their case. One by one, each went to the front of the room and showed with one viewgraph after another the technical and programmatic reasons as to why Apollo 8 should take the gamble and fly to the moon before the end of 1968.
Understanding that it was a gamble, he finally looked at von Braun and reminded him that a crew had not yet even flown on a Saturn V and “now you want to up the ante.” When everyone had finished talking, he went around the table:
“Once you decided to man 503 [the serial number of the Saturn V slated for Apollo 8], it did not matter how far you went.” (Wernher von Braun)
“It is the only chance to get to the Moon before the end of 1969.” (Deke Slayton)
“I have no technical reservations.” (Kurt Debus)
“It will be a shot in the arm for manned spaceflight.” (Julian Bowman)
“The plan has my whole hearted endorsement.” (William Schneider)
“There is always risk, but this is a path of less risk. In fact, the minimum risk of all Apollo plans.” (Robert Gilruth)
Chris Kraft, director of flight operations in Houston, was the most cautious. “Flight Operations will have a difficult job here; we need all kinds of priorities. It will not be easy to do, but I have confidence.” George Low, sitting next to Paine, turned and simply said, “Assuming Apollo 7 is a success, there is no other choice.”7
Paine had to consider the alternative, which was to not fly the mission until the next launch window came up. The timing was critical. If they did not take advantage of the December launch window, the mission would have to wait until late the following spring at the earliest. It would mean a delay of close to six months.
He was new to Washington and new to NASA. In the six months that he had been with the space agency, he had managed to develop a good rapport with his closest advisers in the Office of the Administrator. This was, however, his first exposure to the entire team of Apollo managers from across the country. Sitting at the head of the large conference table, he found their confidence convincing, but was not at all sure that they were telling him everything. He later recalled that the sheer audacity of their action spoke for itself. It surprised and impressed him at the same time.
He remembered von Braun as the most vocal. The enigmatically persuasive rocket engineer, along with Eberhard Rees, deputy director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, presented him with a very strong case that the Saturn V was now at the point where the next launch could take the risk of flying with men on board. They were most confident, and they needed to be. He had made it a point to visit the pair of famed German rocket scientists in Alabama as one of the very first things that he did after joining NASA. He respected von Braun’s considerable reputation, and considered him something of a fellow visionary, but with more flair and status. Rees he looked to more as a graybeard adviser—the top-notch engineer of the World War II V-2 terror weapon, with whom he could speak on a very technical level concerning all aspects of the Saturn V. As the meeting adjourned, he said to no one in particular, “We’ll have a hell of a time selling it to Mueller and Webb.”8
Foremost on his mind was weighing the known issues against the unknown risks. A risk is a potential issue waiting to happen, and there would be plenty in Low’s proposal. He had to consider his next steps carefully. He did not want to risk breaching Webb’s trust. One option was to just wait and bring up the idea with Webb and Mueller completely off the record—talk it over with them after they had returned from their trip and see what they thought. He was, however, now also in a position where he could change the course of the US moon program. From a technical standpoint, no other option would accelerate the program in this way. By seizing the opportunity, he could elect to take the riskier path that, if successful, would provide the chance to get the US to the moon faster.
But he did not have the authority to make the decision unilaterally. Webb and Mueller would not be back in the States for another week. That was too long. He picked up the phone and called Mueller at the embassy in Vienna. Mueller reacted with disbelief. He hated the proposal. Mueller had arrived at NASA five years before Paine, but now found himself working for the new guy. He had a recalcitrant nature, one that was well known inside the hallways of NASA, something he often used to his advantage. Relying on the force of his personality, he usually got his way. Most of the time, he turned out to be right.
After he hung up the phone, Paine picked it up again. This time he called Webb. He was not as confident now, after the conversation he just had with Mueller. He would later reflect on that phone call. “I can imagine how he felt, getting a lunatic telephone call at the American Embassy there from a fellow who had been in the agency for all of six months, telling him we were going to go around the Moon.”9
Indeed, Webb reacted even more strongly than Mueller. There had been talk of schedule changes before, but none had the ramifications of this. He was furious. No way was he again going to be put into a position where he would have to defend the agency should another accident happen. He raised all sorts of objections: that Christmas was no time to send astronauts a quarter of a million miles from home, and that people were just not going to be receptive to such a radical idea. “I’ve explained all this to you!” a stunned Webb told him.
It was clear to Paine that NASA could not afford to simply dismiss the idea of orbiting the moon on Apollo 8. The space agency had to seriously consider it; too much was at stake. He tried to convey that to Webb without going into all the technical details. (He later recalled that it was difficult to talk since they were sure that the Soviet Union was monitoring their call.)10
The next day, he, Sam Phillips (Apollo program director at NASA Headquarters), Willis Shapley (associate deputy administrator), and Julian Scheer (the NASA Public Affairs Officer) met in his office. By the end of the morning, they had drafted a seven-page internal memorandum that explained his case. He had it sent to Webb using secure State Department encrypted cable that afternoon. In it, he provided details on the potential impact on the remaining Apollo schedule of changing Apollo 8 to a circumlunar mission, including flight plan options, hardware readiness, and the implication for future crew assignments. To make things easier for Webb, Scheer included a draft statement for a possible press release.
In Vienna, Webb got the memo and conferred with Mueller. Now somewhat calmer, he still questioned the pace at which this was all taking place. He dictated a response and cabled Paine back that studies should first be carried out and plans prepared so that some flexibility might be injected into the final mission decision. Webb told him that he still had many questions that would have to wait until he got back to Washington.
Paine sent more secure messages and seemed to have at least convinced his boss that the option of a lunar orbit should be kept open. After several long-distance cable exchanges across the Atlantic, Webb tentatively directed him to notify the White House that NASA was now thinking about changing the mission plan but had not yet made a decision. Arriving in his office the next morning, he put exactly that in writing and had it sent over to the White House. By doing so, he had effectively raised the bar and White House expectations such that NASA could not turn back.11
Paine later admitted that even as he lobbied for Webb’s endorsement, he had to also think that maybe the managers of the Apollo program were manipulating him from inside the agency. The timing of the meeting had been suspicious. He knew of the tension between Gilruth in Houston and Webb in Washington. With their “opposition,” Webb, out of the country, Houston might very well have capitalized on the opportunity to make their move. Never fully convinced otherwise, Paine remained skeptical. Even after Apollo 8 had flown successfully, he still thought this might have very well been the case.12
He did not know Gilruth and the people in Houston as well as Mueller and Phillips did. But he knew them well enough. On the decision about whether to go ahead with the mission, he at least trusted their judgment. Gilruth, the fifty-five-year-old aeronautical engineer who had worked his way up in the space agency to become the director of the MSC, had impressed him by how he had held the MSC accountable for its actions after the Apollo 1 fire. As a result, the space center was able to enact the right recovery actions from that tragedy. Webb, on the other hand, had lost all faith in Gilruth by this time. After the accident, he spoke to Gilruth mostly through Phillips or his deputy George Hage.
Paine wanted to see Apollo 8 go to the moon, and knew that the timing was right, regardless of Webb’s objection. The clash between the top two people at NASA over the flight of Apollo 8 soon ceased to be private. He kept the pressure on his boss regarding the decision, and interpreted Webb’s vague response to his proposal as a de facto okay. NASA’s announcement to the news media on August 19 still (purposely) de-emphasized the lunar option, as Webb wanted. The embattled NASA administrator was by now very cautious in his every move with the Johnson White House. Two days earlier, Phillips and Hage had met with Gilruth in Houston to give MSC the go-ahead to replace James McDivitt’s crew with Frank Borman’s crew.13 Once that was announced to the public, the decision for Apollo 8 to orbit the moon became a fait accompli. NASA could not turn back.
Webb knew that another catastrophic accident on the scale of Apollo 1 would mean the end for him at the agency. It would also, in all likelihood, collapse the empire that he had built. He thought it was a bad decision—even after the mission turned out to be an unparalleled success a few months later. He questioned just where disagreement stopped and insubordination began. Webb and Paine remained close, but on the Apollo 8 decision, they fought.
Paine had no regrets. He later compared Webb’s inaction during that critical juncture of Project Apollo to the similarly strange actions of Admiral Horatio Nelson. The British flag officer from the history books of the American War of Independence had lost his right eye fighting the French:
I remember[ed] it was a case of Nelson’s holding the telescope to his blind eye. I felt it was better to preserve the option to fly C-prime lunar orbital. I was protecting the policy decision when all the technical people felt that lunar orbit was better for the whole program. If the Soviets flew their lunar orbit or circumlunar flight in January [1969], and we hadn’t done anything about ours, Jim Webb would have been attacked for turning down our opportunity. I did it to protect him. … Furthermore, there was no way that [NASA] could secretly take such actions.14
The decision was risky. It was risky for Paine on a personal level and risky for NASA as an organization. If anything went wrong, the political and public repercussions would be most severe, perhaps even irreparable. His foremost technical concern was with the spacecraft’s main engine—the large rocket engine at the back of the service module called the service propulsion system. A failure would strand the astronauts in lunar orbit. In October, he again asked Mueller for the engineering qualification numbers. Mueller went over the test history with him: only four in 3,200 firings had failed, dating back to the early prototypes. Most importantly, said Mueller, the engine had never failed to fire in its final production design version.15
As December approached, Paine talked again with Rees and von Braun. Of everyone involved in the discussion, it was they who had sold him on the mission, but they had never downplayed its difficulty.16 Apollo 8 would be highly ambitious on a number of levels. It would be the first mission in which all program elements had to function together. It would also be the first human flight of the Saturn V launch vehicle. Here on Earth, it would be the first “all-up” test of the Manned Space Flight Network that would track and communicate with the spacecraft all the way to the moon and back. The mission would be the first exposure of an Apollo spacecraft to the deep space environment. Ambitious, yes, but if all went well, six months could be saved.
On Thursday, November 7, Mueller convened an internal NASA certification board review. They concluded that all systems were go for a December launch. Another review three days later by the team of industry contractors reached the same conclusion. The next day (Veterans Day 1968), Paine held the final go/no-go meeting in Washington. He had earlier asked Mueller to brief the mission plan to Donald Hornig, science advisor to President Johnson, since Mueller and Hornig knew each other. Mueller told him that the White House was on board with the launch. Gerald Truszynski, NASA’s associate administrator in charge of the tracking networks, then got up and presented a short briefing that declared the Manned Space Flight Network ready. Lieutenant General Vincent Huston reported that the Defense Department was ready to support recovery operations in the Pacific. One by one, Phillips, Low, Kraft, and Rocco Petrone, director of launch operations at the Cape, all reiterated their support. The three-hour meeting raised no new concerns for Paine.
After all the others had left, he walked back to his office, picked up the phone, and called mission commander Frank Borman. The crew was “100 percent go,” Borman said without a pause. That was the final confirmation—Paine just needed to hear it for himself from the person who was going to command the mission. He hung up the phone, read the letter of record over one more time, took out his pen, signed above his name, and approved the mission.17
As soon as he signed the paper, he picked up the telephone and called President Johnson’s chief of staff, James R. Jones, with the news. Jones walked the few steps to the Oval Office and quietly put a note on Johnson’s desk. By happenstance, Lyndon Johnson was meeting with President-elect Richard Nixon at that same moment. Johnson paused, read the note, said not a thing, and showed it to Nixon. Although presidential historians would chide Johnson in the years to come as one who mismanaged by micromanaging the Vietnam War from the Oval Office, in the space arena, “he never questioned our decisions,” according to Paine. “We let him know after the fact and that was that.”18
Paine later revealed to journalist Robert Sherrod that he was certain the decision would engender political accusations. Opponents suggested that it was a deliberate move by NASA to present a space spectacle to send an unpopular president out on a high note. He was ready for those attacks and was prepared to defend the space agency. The Johnson administration was indeed in a political mess by the summer of 1968, plagued by a plethora of domestic and foreign problems. But no pressure of any sort ever came from the White House. In fact, Paine did not have to use his prepared statements because negative publicity never materialized, as the moon mission captured the imagination of the public worldwide.
The year 1968 had been a long one for the space agency. But with Apollo 8, NASA took a gamble and it paid off. Paine was convinced that any ploy by critics of NASA on Capitol Hill or in the media would have only ended up backfiring had there been an accident on the flight. He remembered the flight as a very good thing for the country that year: “History will record that I think anybody would have done what we did. It was the sensible and right thing to do, and of course, the success of the mission vindicated it. But it was in the back of my mind that there would be people who might allege politics here.” He was a scientifically minded man, an engineer. He thought in technical terms, and his decision was a technical decision. He considered the politics, of course, but only after the technical justification had allowed it to be germane. Inside NASA, people knew that Apollo 8 had bought valuable time and maximized the chance for a landing attempt the following year. His dear friend Robert Seamans went one step further and called the Apollo 8 decision the tough decision of the Apollo program.19
The stark, desolate face of the moon astounded the first human beings who saw it from lunar orbit. As Apollo 8 circled the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, astronaut Bill Anders described its dull gray, cratered surface as “a sandbox all torn up by children at play.”20 In an unscripted moment on live television, the crew took turns reading the Creation account from the book of Genesis.
Paine thought primarily of the Apollo 8 crew, and of Frank Borman in particular. He would call Borman an invaluable asset to the American space program after seeing his performance before a joint session of Congress after the mission. He was impressed enough to recommend Borman to Vice President-elect Spiro Agnew as his first choice to be the executive secretary of the Space Council in the new Nixon-Agnew administration.21 When Borman turned that down, Paine asked him to be his liaison to Congress and a personal emissary to NASA’s international partners.
The wholly unpredicted, worldwide outpouring of support for Apollo 8 confirmed Paine’s belief in American exceptionalism. He encouraged the flag-waving. “People everywhere have taken this not as an American triumph, but merely that America was the very affluent, wealthy, capable country that had the will and the resolve to carry this Apollo program out, [and] that really we were doing this for all mankind and in the name of all mankind.”22 The payoff was about more than American dollars and cents. He called the mission “poetic,” an uplifting Christmas present that the space-faring pioneers of America gave to the world that turbulent year. Most gratifying to him was the reaction from the Soviet Union. Ten cosmonauts sent congratulatory telegrams. Many leading Soviet scientists praised the accomplishment. Moscow, in an uncharacteristically conciliatory move, called the flight “a feat to be remembered for the ages.”23 It gave the world a brief respite from the images of Vietnam, the Tet Offensive, the My Lai massacre, the ugly urban riots, the shocking assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the many other tired headlines of 1968.
Overnight, Apollo 8 vindicated NASA in the eyes of the public. Paine praised the mission as one that proved “we did know what we were doing; we were able to carry out the commitments we had made to the American people.”24 In his words,
In the cynicism and disarray that had followed the assassinations, the cities, student unrest, Vietnam, the convention, and all the rest, I think that the country had lost sight of the fact that meanwhile, out in Houston and down at Cape Kennedy and in Southern California, the space agency was steadily moving ahead. It came almost as a surprise to people that all of a sudden, after not flying men for a long time, we were suddenly able to carry out this very advanced mission. It was not a surprise to us. We had been working on it.25
His defining moment at the agency came just six months after President Johnson appointed him as the deputy administrator, a fact that did not go unnoticed by space insiders. Looking back, Chris Kraft recalled that, from his vantage point in Houston, it suddenly became simpler to get things done through Washington. “We knew we had a friend in Paine.”26