WILLIAM ALISON ANDERS FIRST WITNESSED AN attack from the sky by foreign invaders in 1937, when he was four years old. He was living with his parents along the Yangtze River in Nanking, China, when his father, a United States Navy lieutenant, sensed that Japanese forces would attack nearby Chinese boats. Arthur Anders told his wife, Muriel, to take their son and evacuate. After a two-day trip by train to Canton, mother and son found a hotel room, and it was there that Bill watched Japanese airplanes streak overhead and bomb ships in the Pearl River just two hundred yards away.
The next day, Bill and his mother boarded a boat and made their escape. Bill’s father stayed, manning the American gunboat USS Panay, on which he was second in command. A few days later, on December 12, 1937, Japanese aircraft attacked the Panay as it moved up the Yangtze. The United States was a neutral party in the conflict between Japan and China, and the boat, marked by American flags, was attempting to move people to safety. A bomb struck the boat’s bridge, wounding and disabling the captain. That left Arthur Anders in charge.
Despite America’s neutral standing, he ordered the Panay to open fire on the attacking aircraft. Badly injured in sickbay, the boat’s captain wanted the crew to abandon ship, but Anders wouldn’t have it. “He’s not in charge anymore, I am,” Anders said. The Panay was not outfitted to engage attacking aircraft, but Anders directed the fight nonetheless. Soon dive-bombers appeared from the smoky skies, unleashing a second attack on the damaged American boat. Still Anders ordered the crew to continue to defend, even as the Panay slowly began to sink. Realizing that crew had been injured, Anders attempted to man one of the boat’s guns himself, taking shrapnel wounds to his hands.
As Anders stood on the bridge, a piece of shrapnel pierced his throat, causing heavy bleeding and making it impossible for him to speak. Using his own blood as ink, Anders scrawled out directions to the crew on a chart, and the fight continued. Eighty minutes after the attack started, desperate men made their way to small escape craft. Anders was last off the boat and then lost consciousness. By the end, two Americans and an Italian journalist from the Panay had died, dozens had been wounded, and the sinking became an international incident. Realizing that it had committed an act of war against the United States, Japan apologized.
Arthur Anders received the Navy Cross, the highest honor bestowed by that branch for a peacetime action. The orders he wrote in blood are preserved in the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington. The prelude to the fight would remain one of young Bill’s earliest memories.
Bill’s parents, both Americans, had met in the Philippines during Arthur’s tour of duty there.
Muriel’s father was the civilian in charge of the Cavite Navy Yard, which repaired American ships. Bill, the couple’s only child, was born in Hong Kong. The family moved often when Bill was young, eventually returning to America in 1938. Through his childhood, Bill absorbed the Navy life, and he expected to attend the Naval Academy, as his father had.
When he was fourteen, Bill moved with his family to Weimar, Texas. As Arthur drove Bill to school one day, father and son spotted a biplane in a field, along with a banner hanging from a fence: AIRPLANE RIDES—FIVE DOLLARS.
A few minutes later, Bill and the pilot were soaring over open fields.
“Want to do a loop?” the man asked.
Bill nodded.
The pilot was low for that kind of maneuver, no higher than two thousand feet, but he pulled up, looped over, and managed to just miss the ground as he righted the plane.
Bill had a hard time concentrating in school that day; no matter how hard he tried to focus, his mind kept looping over Texas.
Driving home that afternoon, Bill and his father came upon the field where Bill had flown. The plane was still there, but this time it was jammed nose down into the ground, a terrible crash. When Arthur inquired, he was told two people had been killed during a ride. Bill looked at the seat he’d occupied in the now-fractured craft, and remembered how close he’d come to the ground on his loop. On airplanes, it seemed, the difference between life and death could come down to a few feet.
Bill began high school in Texas, but he moved with his family to the San Diego area to begin his sophomore year. By then Arthur had been made a Navy reservist as a result of his wartime injuries and was working at the naval training station. He and Bill played catch, took car rides, and went on San Diego Mineral and Gem Society trips; as a boy, Bill had fallen in love with natural history and geology, and he resolved to own a piece of every kind of rock in the world. Sometimes, the men would go high into the Sierras looking for specimens; it was on trips like that when Bill noticed that he was willing to travel almost anywhere as long as there was something new to find.
Bill became president of his high school’s biology club, largely on the strength of his expertise on snakes. He read books, many on science, often finishing them in one day. Instead of science fiction, Bill preferred to read about old ships from bygone eras, and about pirates and life on the high seas. Those were men who’d undertaken real adventure, who’d pushed themselves into actual, not theoretical, unknowns.
As the second-smallest student in his class, Bill found it hard to make time with the ladies (his love of science and snakes didn’t help). Despite her son’s size, Muriel encouraged Bill to play football. He suited up and was knocked flat, but he loved the feeling of getting up and realizing he had survived.
After his junior year of high school, in 1950, Bill transferred to a military prep school in San Diego. Since early boyhood, he’d envisioned a life like his father’s—defending his country on board a ship, fighting back. Military school would give him the best chance for admission to one of the nation’s service academies. In a different time, one in which America had lesser enemies, Bill might have become a geologist. Now, in the teeth of the Cold War, he headed for Annapolis.
Bill Anders arrived at the United States Naval Academy in 1951 with the ambitious goal of becoming an officer aboard a destroyer and making four-stripe captain. By Christmas, he was about to wash out. He’d skated through high school on brains alone, but that level of effort wasn’t cutting it at the Academy, even as the son of a Navy Cross recipient. An adviser warned him he wasn’t long for the place unless things changed. Anders straightened up.
Having survived his first year at the Academy, Anders returned to San Diego for the summer. There he found himself on a double date at the beach, but when he saw his friend’s date, he forgot about his own. Sixteen-year-old Valerie Hoard was about the prettiest young lady Anders had ever seen, and she had a quiet confidence beyond her age. Anders spent the day swimming alongside Valerie as she lounged on an inflatable raft, asking about her life, hearing her descriptions of how her father gave her rides on the back of his California Highway Patrol motorcycle (sirens blaring and red lights flashing). Anders never stopped to catch his breath as they toured all over Mission Bay. This guy has a lot of endurance, Valerie thought. When Anders finally dropped her off at home, he shook her hand and said goodbye.
Summer was drawing to a close, so Anders had to make the time count if he hoped to keep seeing Valerie. On their first official date, he took her to the Navy officers’ club, and then to the Starlight Bowl to see the San Diego Civic Light Opera. The next night, he took her to the Old Globe Theater for Shakespeare. It was heady stuff for Valerie, and she was impressed with this serious young man. At home, she asked her mother why Bill shook her hand after dates but didn’t kiss her. The truth was that Anders didn’t have much experience with girls and didn’t want to push his luck. That was fine with Valerie—she had other suitors to keep her company. A few days later, Anders was back at the Naval Academy, and Valerie was back in high school.
By his second year at Annapolis, Anders was rising up the class rank. He always found time to write letters to Valerie, long ones, every day, about his outlook on life, the challenges of the Academy, how he saw the world. At Christmas, when he was home, they spent every day together. Not once since the day he met her had Bill doubted that Valerie was the one for him. She was poised and gracious, self-assured even in unfamiliar situations, and seemed curious about everything. She was a popular and busy senior who hardly had time for serious romance, yet she was slowly falling in love with Anders, and he was in love with her.
The relationship did not please Muriel. She’d long thought her son should marry an admiral’s daughter—a higher grade of folk—and took the formal tea dance invitations he’d received and lined them up on her kitchen window. Valerie saw the display when she was at Anders’s house, but she also noticed something else—that he hadn’t attended a single one of these debutante parties. He just wanted to be with her.
In the summer before Anders’s third year at the Academy, he and about four hundred classmates boarded the USS Bennington, an aircraft carrier bound from the East Coast for Halifax, to see how fliers operated at sea. Also aboard was an array of fighter aircraft: Panthers, Cougars, Crusaders, and the AJ Savage, a three-engine nuclear-weapon-carrying bomber. On the first night, a young Marine pilot made a landing approach in his Cougar, floated over all the wires, and slammed into a pack of parked airplanes. Such was the surplus of aircraft after the Korean War that sailors just pushed the damaged ones overboard rather than fix them.
Hours later, an AJ Savage came roaring in and hit badly on landing. The pilot and copilot tumbled down the flight deck head over heels in their severed, flaming cockpit but somehow managed to survive; the third crewman, however, died when he was thrown under the ship.
The smoke had hardly cleared on that incident when Anders saw one of the gull wings of a Corsair fold up during takeoff. Just off the flight deck, the plane did a full roll and plummeted into the water.
Immediately, the carrier headed toward the downed aircraft to make a rescue. Anders could see the pilot in the cockpit, but it was clear the man wasn’t moving. Anders had been on the plebe swim team and could handle himself in rough waters; now he had a decision to make. He could jump in and try to rescue the pilot, or he could allow carrier rescue personnel to do what they were trained to do. The sight of the pilot, unresponsive and starting to sink, pulled on him, but he also knew the ship was moving at about thirty-five knots, he had no life jacket, and he’d have to fall about fifty feet before hitting the water. He had a thought that would bother him for years: If he did jump, he might get put on report or receive demerits. He saw a helicopter and a destroyer approaching to assist in the rescue, and in a split second he made his decision to stay aboard the ship. Rescuers couldn’t reach the scene, however, before the pilot and his airplane disappeared under the waves.
Anders hardly knew what to make of the disasters he’d seen. Navy pilots were trained to be the best in the world in combat, yet they risked their lives every day, even during takeoff and landing. Still, an airplane had the power to take the fight to an enemy with an immediacy unavailable to giant ships. It was more personal, too, just pilot and machine as one. When it came time to decide what to do with his military career, Anders wanted nothing to do with aircraft carriers, but knew he had to fly.
Anders continued to write to Valerie every day. Despite worries that she would turn him down, he bought an engagement ring and invited her to the Naval Academy’s formal Ring Dance, at which couples would dance through a replica of the cadets’ class ring. Valerie and Bill held each other close as they moved around the dance floor to the sounds of a big band. Valerie wore Bill’s class ring on a chain around her neck and the engagement ring on her hand.
Valerie still wasn’t quite eighteen. Marriage meant giving up a college education, which was important to her. It also meant making a life with a man who’d chosen a dangerous line of work. But her father chased bad guys on his motorcycle for a living, and twice he had almost been killed on the job in accidents, so she was used to living with risk.
There was also the matter of religion. Anders’s father was a strict Catholic, and his church would insist that Valerie be Catholic, too. In the end, that also seemed fine to a girl in love, and even though she was still in high school, Valerie said yes, knowing that Navy rules didn’t allow midshipmen to be married until graduation, so a yes for the future—not tomorrow, but a yes nonetheless.
As a high-ranking member of his class, Anders had options with his career. He knew he wanted to fly, and he could decide between a commission in the Navy or the newly formed Air Force (established just eight years earlier). Choosing the Navy meant operating from short carrier decks. Choosing the Air Force meant flying from ten-thousand-foot concrete runways. Anders chose the Air Force.
Shortly after graduating from the Naval Academy in 1955, Anders married Valerie in a Catholic ceremony at the naval chapel in San Diego. He then reported to Air Force flight training near the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, where he began flying the T-34 Mentor. By the next stage in training, in the much bigger T-28, he realized that he had a natural ability. Sometimes he’d invite Valerie out to a dusty crossroads and put on a private airshow for her, flying too low, testing to see how much vertical pull-up he could endure before blacking out from loss of oxygen to the brain caused by high g-forces, seeing if he could wake up before the plane went down. Valerie loved her husband’s performances. She also liked that he didn’t play things exactly by the book, that he took risks. To Valerie, the most interesting lives often seemed to go that way.
After earning his wings at age twenty-three, Anders was assigned to an Air Defense Command all-weather interceptor squadron at Hamilton Air Force Base near San Francisco, where he would fly the twin afterburner F-89 Scorpion. Interceptors flew to prevent enemy aircraft from penetrating restricted airspace, either by chasing them off or by engaging them in combat. Anders’s jet was armed with two rocket-propelled missiles, each with a 3.5-kiloton nuclear warhead attached—combined, it equaled about half the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. To fire the weapons, the radar operator in the backseat had to throw a switch, and the pilot in the front seat had to throw his own switch. That’s all it required. Officially, the crew needed an order from the ground, but if Anders and a buddy wanted to start World War III, they could do it on their own. “That’s the Cold War,” Anders told Valerie. “It’s up to us not to screw up.”
In February 1957, the Anders family welcomed their first child, Alan. And in July 1958, Valerie gave birth to Glen. Raising a young family in California was idyllic, with the warm weather and abundant culture, maybe too good to be true, so it came as little surprise when Anders got a new assignment: Iceland.
Valerie would stay with the kids in California while her husband moved four thousand miles away. Again, Anders’s job was to fly interceptors. This time, he would be going after Soviet bombers, long-range machines that flew missions near Iceland and the North Atlantic designed to test American air defenses. To help avoid starting a world war, his aircraft and others would be armed only with conventional air-to-air rockets, no nukes.
Early in his assignment, a Soviet bomber penetrated the eastern edge of Iceland’s Air Defense Identification Zone. Anders and his wingman scrambled into the air, afterburners blazing, and caught up with the Russian plane. Anders positioned his wingman to shoot down the bomber if its pilot gave the Americans any trouble, then flew his F-89 so close he could call out the eye colors of the Soviet crew. The Russians smiled and waved. Anders offered his own American greeting—a middle finger.
The Soviet crew kept smiling and waving, then broke back to where they belonged.
Low on fuel, Anders returned to base, knowing the incident would be important to American intelligence officers, as it was among the first—if not the very first—intercept of a Soviet bomber in the zone. On the ground, he described the event.
“Anything else?” asked a representative of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Anders feared he would be facing some discipline. Still, he had to be honest.
“There is something else,” Anders said nervously. “I probably should tell you that, you know…I gave them the finger.”
The man smiled. There was no trouble.
Anders flew more missions in Iceland, many of them risky, both for the dangerous flying conditions and for the potential conflict with Soviet bombers. Three or four months after Anders flipped off the Russian crew, another pilot in his squadron intercepted a Soviet bomber. This time, the Russians had a response to their American pursuers, and they held it up to their window—a sign printed in English—for the Air Force pilots to see.
American intel had a good laugh when they heard the story. To them, it represented the layers of bureaucracy that constituted the Soviet socialist system. It had taken more than one hundred days for the first bomber crew to report Anders’s middle finger, for word to travel through channels to the Kremlin, for analysts to decipher it, for committees to formulate a response, for other committees to approve it, for translators to put the Soviet answer into English, for orders to be given to a new bomber crew, and for the Soviet pilots to deliver it.
Their message to the Americans flying alongside: WE FUCKED YOUR SISTER.
After more than a year in Iceland, Anders was sent back to Hamilton Field in California, a welcome return for Valerie. Anders continued flying interceptor missions, this time with the nuclear-armed supersonic F-101 Voodoo, a fearsome jet capable of reaching speeds in excess of a thousand miles per hour.
At Hamilton, Valerie became even more accustomed to the stresses of being married to a fighter pilot. Men died in this line of work, she knew that, but it was always terrible to see a black Air Force car drive into base housing to deliver the bad news. Every time she saw the black car she wondered, Is my life about to change? Could this happen to us? And even as the car passed her home and stopped at a neighbor’s, she didn’t kid herself. Yes, she thought, it could certainly happen to us.
In December 1960, the Anders family welcomed a third child, Gayle. Around the same time, Anders began to get itchy. Interceptor work was interesting, but he didn’t feel pushed to his limits, not in body or mind, in a way that would make for a satisfying long-term career. In 1961, he went to see Chuck Yeager at the Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California. Pushing unproven airplanes to their limits demanded a new level of intellectual engagement, raw bravery, and adventure; to Anders, that sounded like the life he wanted.
Yeager was impressed by Anders’s flying credentials but urged him to go back to college and obtain an advanced degree in science or engineering, since that’s what the Air Force was looking for in test pilot candidates. Anders followed the recommendation and applied to the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. He requested a program in either aeronautical or astronautical engineering, but administrators put him in nuclear engineering. To cover his bases, Anders enrolled in a night school program in aeronautics at nearby Ohio State University.
Over the next two years, Anders studied, fathered another child, Gregory, and learned more about nuclear energy and radiation. In 1962, he graduated second in his class with a master’s degree in nuclear engineering. He submitted his application for test pilot school, but now the school wasn’t accepting new students. Dejected, he chose to go to the Air Force Special Weapons Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to work on a radiation shielding project and instruct pilots in jet aircraft. All the while, he waited for an opening at the test pilot school. Valerie took an astronomy course at the University of New Mexico, just out of fascination with the subject, a baby on her hip.
In June 1963, Anders was driving in his Volkswagen Microbus when he heard a news broadcast on the radio. The announcer said that NASA had decided to add a third group of astronauts. Anders met every one of the agency’s requirements: age limit thirty-five, two thousand hours flying time in advanced jets, maximum height six feet. “Must also be a test pilot,” the man said. Anders’s heart sank. “Or the applicant must possess an advanced degree.” Anders wondered if he’d heard the last part correctly. He pulled over to the side of the road and waited, through twelve minutes of commercials and bad music, for the next newscast. He had heard correctly—one needn’t be a test pilot to apply. He wrote down NASA’s address. He’d been interested in astronauts since the Mercury 7, the United States’ first group of astronauts, had arrived on the scene four years earlier, but space travel had never seemed possible for mere fighter pilots. Now, things had changed.
It would be his dream job in many ways. Joining NASA would give Anders the intellectual stimulation he craved, the chance to fly the most advanced machines ever built, and the opportunity to become an explorer, a space-age version of Charles Lindbergh or Vasco da Gama, the New World voyagers he’d always admired. And he could bring back unknown rocks from his journeys to the Moon.
And there was another benefit, one that resonated with a man whose father had fought back against America’s attackers, even when the United States wasn’t formally at war: He could do more in space than anywhere else to help defeat the Soviet Union.
That night, Anders wrote a letter in longhand to NASA describing his qualifications: world’s greatest pilot; can solve all space radiation problems; jet instructor; great guy. Valerie typed draft after draft after draft. They sent the final copy, by certified mail, the next day. It arrived with four thousand other letters penned by astronaut hopefuls.
To Anders’s amazement, he was asked to report, along with about a hundred others, to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, for a physical. There, he was put through a battery of tests, not just physical but psychological.
Near the end of the process, only twenty-eight finalists remained. Anders had to appear before the so-called Murder Board, a group of final interviewers that included current astronauts, Chris Kraft, and a doctor. He had little trouble with the questions from the space people. The doctor was another matter.
“Well, Captain Anders,” the man said, “your record looks pretty good. But we’re worried about this concussion you had in the past.”
Anders had never suffered a concussion. Could the doctor be trying to trip him up? Test him? Or maybe the doctor had another applicant’s records and believed he was interviewing a different candidate.
Anders’s mother had taught him never to lie. But she’d also reminded him that he needn’t always blurt out the full truth, either. On the spot, he formulated an answer.
“Sir, I’ve never been bothered by a concussion.”
“Bothered” was the key word. That was true.
On his thirtieth birthday—October 17, 1963—the phone rang in the Anders home. Valerie handed him the receiver. It was Deke Slayton calling with a job offer. Anders never did figure out if the doctors had been looking at the wrong guy’s records. And as Slayton offered him a job, he was much too happy to care.
NASA assigned each of its new astronauts to a specialty. Anders focused on radiation and environmental controls—cabin pressure, temperature, carbon dioxide, and so on.
He also focused on potholes. After complaining about the condition of the roads near his new house, the town council named him street commissioner, a job he would hold, concurrent with his job as astronaut, for the next two years.
Early in training, Anders gravitated toward two of his fellow new astronauts, Walt Cunningham and Rusty Schweickart. All three men had an intellectual bent, and all three were interested in space science. Not one had been a test pilot. Together, the trio tackled the single most vexing question at NASA: How does a new astronaut best position himself to get selected as soon as possible for a space flight? After careful analysis, they determined to increase their physical fitness, become more expert in their specialties, and further master the science of space travel.
None of it made a ripple. To Anders, it seemed the more he and his pals tried, the more invisible they became to Slayton, the man who assigned astronauts to flights.
And then it dawned on Anders. Slayton considered him, Cunningham, and Schweickart to be nerds. Slayton didn’t seem to give a damn about Anders’s advanced degree in nuclear engineering, or Cunningham’s doctoral work in physics, or Schweickart’s research on upper atmospheric physics at MIT. He certainly didn’t seem to appreciate that Anders had signed up for extra geology field trips. Selection appeared to come down to two criteria: seniority and one’s standing as a test pilot. And that wasn’t good news for Anders or his friends.
It all struck Anders as unfair, but he still had to look for an edge. It seemed to him that Slayton, an avid hunter, liked astronauts who joined his hunts. Anders had little interest in shooting game, but when an invitation to an antelope hunt went out, he signed up. Slayton and at least a dozen astronauts packed rifles and flew to Lander, Wyoming. On arrival, each was given a single bullet; it was a one-shot hunt, and that’s all the ammunition they were allowed. Anders wasn’t going to shoot at an antelope unless he was certain he could hit it. And yet he knew he couldn’t return to camp with an unfired bullet; nothing would cement the view of him as a square more than that.
After a time, he spotted an antelope walking peaceably a few hundred yards away. Anders had been on the Air Force pistol team and was a good shot. He hated to do it but aimed his rifle and fired. His bullet tore into the antelope’s hindquarters, sending the wounded animal running and bleeding.
Anders followed the trail, then killed the antelope with his knife, all the while apologizing to the poor creature and thinking, “This is the last goddamn antelope hunt I’m going on.” He knew astronauts were supposed to do manly things. But he also knew a hunt like this wasn’t him. He determined never to go on another.
Back in Houston, another astronaut, Alan Bean, joined Anders, Cunningham, and Schweickart in their unofficial group. Bean had been a test pilot, but as an avid painter, he seemed more artist than warrior. By now, Anders should have realized it didn’t pay to look like an egghead, but since he and his friends weren’t being put on crews anyway, they decided (with the exception of Bean) to enroll at Rice University to pursue PhDs. For all Anders knew, he was destined to sit on the sidelines forever.
His fortunes, however, changed in early 1966, when he became CapCom for Gemini 8. (CapComs, or Capsule Communicators, were the astronauts at Mission Control who communicated by radio with the crew.) A few minutes after Anders came on duty, pilot Dave Scott radioed to Control from space.
“We have serious problems here. We’re—we’re tumbling end over end up here.”
The spacecraft was rolling violently out of control while in orbit around Earth. Suddenly NASA was face-to-face with disaster. While Anders calmly relayed information from Mission Control and reassured the astronauts, commander Neil Armstrong battled to regain control of the ship by using the craft’s reentry thrusters. Several agonizing minutes later, Gemini 8 had been steadied. The mission was terminated early and the crew survived. Anders didn’t think he’d done anything special; he’d just stayed cool under pressure, and it was Scott and Armstrong who deserved credit for a terrific save. But after Gemini 8, Anders registered brighter on Slayton’s radar.
Not long after, he was assigned, along with Armstrong, to be the backup crew for Gemini 11. He then joined Frank Borman’s crew after the Apollo 1 fire in early 1967. Along with Mike Collins, he and Borman would man Apollo 9. (Owing to problems caused by a bony growth between his neck vertebrae, Collins would later be replaced by Jim Lovell.) The flight would be a high Earth orbit checkout of the full Apollo spacecraft. It wouldn’t go to the Moon, but it would put Anders in position to make that journey—and to walk on the lunar surface—on a subsequent Apollo flight.
Anders spent long stretches away from home during training. Valerie was raising their five children (the family had welcomed another son, Eric, after Anders joined NASA) in El Lago, a small town near Houston where many astronauts lived, making Bill’s paycheck go seven ways. One day, Anders calculated the amount of time he spent with each of his kids: eleven minutes per week per child. He regretted it, and didn’t consider himself to be a good father because of all the time he spent away. But for now, beating the Russians was more important than being an ideal family man.
Valerie saw it much the same way. She would have preferred her husband to be home more often, but she believed in NASA’s mission, and in winning the Space Race. Even if it wasn’t easy running a household by herself, things never got boring for Valerie. She was interested in science and technology, and in astronomy, so she watched with special interest as America worked its way to the Moon, and she made sure her kids watched, too.
One day she took all five of them to Ellington Air Force Base to see Bill fly the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, or LLRV, the closest thing engineers could build to approximate the lunar module astronauts would land on the Moon. It was the weirdest ship any of them had ever seen, with a gimbal-mounted J-35 jet engine, sixteen lift rockets, and seating for the pilot that looked like an outhouse without a door. Tubular arms and legs jutted in every direction. Together, the jet engine and lift rockets could simulate flying in one-sixth gravity—equal to that on the Moon. Anders and Neil Armstrong took turns as pilot, making it look as if they were descending to the lunar surface. Aboard the ship, Anders felt like NASA’s golden boy, one of the few who’d already been chosen to land on the Moon.
When the flying ended, three-year-old Eric picked up a loose screw and swallowed it. NASA doctors took X rays—a child never received a more state-of-the-art examination. It was a day unlike any Valerie had experienced.
Twenty-four hours later, on May 6, 1968, a system failure caused Armstrong to lose control while he was flying the LLRV. At an altitude of less than two hundred feet, the machine pitched sideways and plummeted toward the ground. Armstrong ejected just moments before the craft impacted and burst into flames. Even with his parachute, his descent lasted only ten seconds. When Anders told Valerie the story, she didn’t get upset or ask her husband to reconsider his mission. She thought, as she often did, This is the life we’ve signed up for.
In August 1968, Anders told Valerie that he was going to the Moon. Though the mission would be rushed, it seemed to her like an opportunity. She couldn’t escape the feeling that America was in very bad shape. She’d seen the endless television coverage of race riots, Vietnam protests, and assassinations, and asked herself, Where is our turning point? Where are we going to find hope? As a stay-at-home mom with no help, Valerie was busy from morning to night, taking care of her five children, mowing the lawn, trying to make ends meet on her husband’s military salary—she had little time to figure out how to save America. But she knew that the chance for Apollo 8 to rise to a near-impossible challenge could be a positive statement in the country’s crushingly negative year.
Not long after Bill began training for Apollo 8, Valerie ran into George Low at a social event. They didn’t speak of the new mission, but Valerie could see in Low’s eyes that he had reservations about Apollo 8, that he’d contemplated what a huge step this was for NASA, that he knew how much could go wrong. She felt for him. What a difficult position he must be in, she thought, to be responsible for all this.
As the launch date for Apollo 8 grew nearer, Anders had even less than the usual eleven minutes per week to give to each of his children. On one rare day off, he woke his family early and took them to water-ski behind the tiny boat he owned, one with a 40-horsepower motor. In a few weeks, he would be riding an engine 4 million times more powerful than that, but for now, it was all the power he needed, enough to last for an entire day.