THANKSGIVING WAS JUST THREE DAYS AWAY, and less than four weeks remained until the scheduled launch of Apollo 8. While most Americans got ready to celebrate the holiday, Borman, Lovell, and Anders were hard at work with the SimSup.
The focus during these pre-Thanksgiving sessions would be on two key aspects of the flight. The first, Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI), would come when the spacecraft arrived at the Moon and fired its Service Propulsion System (SPS) engine in order to slow down enough to be captured by lunar gravity and go into orbit around the Moon. The second, Trans Earth Injection (TEI), would come when the spacecraft fired that same engine to pick up enough speed to leave lunar orbit and head back to Earth. Both of these critical maneuvers would occur around the far side of the Moon, completely out of touch with the engineers on Earth who might catch any equipment malfunctions or slip-ups by the crew. More than almost anything else, it was TEI that worried the astronauts, controllers, engineers, and NASA officials. The SPS engine had no backup—if it misfired or didn’t fire at all, the spacecraft and crew could crash into the Moon, fly off into endless space, or be trapped in a slowly decaying lunar orbit that would ultimately impact the lunar surface.
The simulations began early in the morning. More than once the astronauts perished because someone didn’t fix problems correctly or in time. In those cases, the crew and controllers held a short briefing afterward, discussed how they’d failed and what could be improved, then tried again. Over and over, scenarios were run, often for full days at a time, the more catastrophic the better, until repetition began to groove instinct into all the participants, and dying helped the men learn to survive.
Even at NASA, Thanksgiving was a day for family, and Borman, Lovell, and Anders found their way home just in time to celebrate the holiday. Apollo 8 was scheduled to launch in just twenty-three days, so Thursday was the only day off the men were allowed.
By now, all three wives had decided where they’d be when Apollo 8 lifted off. Marilyn Lovell wanted to see it live, to be as close to it and as much a part of it as possible. (She had been too far along in her pregnancy to watch Jim launch on Gemini 7, but she did witness his flight on Gemini 12 in person.) And she wanted her four children to be there, too; it was something she thought they should experience as a family. That was fine with Lovell; while he knew there was a chance of disaster, he never thought about launches, or life, in those terms, and he didn’t want his children to think that way, either. A person had to take things as they came.
Lovell spread out his maps of the Moon for his children and showed them which parts of the lunar surface he’d be flying over and what the crew intended to do there. He’d even brought his children to explore the simulator at the Cape. He didn’t tell them that his mission was dangerous, or that their father might not be coming home. There was no reason to put a fear like that into children.
Valerie Anders made a different decision. Her children were younger than Marilyn’s, the flu was going around, and she didn’t want to risk having five sick kids while holed up at a hotel near Cape Kennedy. The decision to stay home in Houston made a lot of sense to Anders. Even if his kids remained healthy, he wanted them and Valerie to be home, in a comfortable and safe environment, in case a disaster unfolded.
In any event, Anders got the sense that his kids were more interested in water-skiing and playing with their friends, which was fine with him. His eleven-year-old son, Alan, told how a classmate brought his fireman father to school one day, and everyone thought that kid had the coolest father of them all; in this neighborhood, it seemed every old dad was an astronaut.
When Valerie talked to the kids about Apollo 8, she explained what their father would be doing, but she never promised that he would be okay; she didn’t want to mislead them. And they didn’t seem worried, anyway. They had other excitements to deal with, like the new color television Anders bought so his family could watch the launch, and the Life magazine photographers who were now showing up almost daily to take photos of the family doing things they didn’t do in real life, like eating ice cream together at the kitchen table.
When Borman arrived home for Thanksgiving, Susan had the house perfect and ready for him, as she always did. In the 1950s, when they were moving from base to base, she’d read and absorbed The Army Wife by Nancy Shea, a book about making a good life and a good home while married to a military man. “Every Army wife has three basic responsibilities,” the author wrote:
1. To make a congenial home
2. To rear a family of which he will be proud
3. To strengthen her husband’s morale
“Your whole scheme of life revolves around your husband, your children, and a happy home,” Shea added. Susan had been the perfect Army wife for eighteen years, since Frank had graduated from West Point in 1950, but now she wondered whether she’d be able to keep it up, whether the pressure might finally break her.
Susan believed, with one hundred percent certainty, that Frank was going to die aboard Apollo 8. Frank knew she had been drinking, but he didn’t think she had a problem because she kept such a beautiful home, raised her sons with honor and dignity, and never expressed a moment’s concern for herself. He’d never seen her drunk, not once. When he discussed Apollo 8 with Susan, she told him, “I know you’ll be fine.” Inside, she was dying, watching her life and the lives of her sons being torn apart before her eyes, her best friend being taken away forever, to a place she could never reach.
If Borman had had even an inkling that his wife was suffering, he would have explained the mission to her, laid out maps, described how thoroughly NASA had engineered the flight, listed all the precautions that were in place. If her sons, now seventeen and fifteen, had known that their mother was so worried, they would have hugged and reassured her. But no one knew, which was just how Susan wanted it—she didn’t want anyone to suffer on her account.
As launch neared, Susan hosted a cocktail party, with many NASA folks in attendance. During a quiet moment, she pulled Chris Kraft aside.
“Chris, I’d really appreciate it if you’d level with me,” Susan said. “I really, really want to know what you think their chances are.”
“You really mean that, don’t you?” Kraft asked.
“Yes. And you know I do. I really want to know.”
Kraft respected Susan. He thought she deserved an honest answer, and he did not want to sugarcoat things for her.
Often, during meetings about Apollo 8, George Mueller had pushed a piece of paper in front of Kraft and other senior NASA managers and asked them to estimate the probability of success at each phase of the flight; doing that would then yield the chances of success for the total mission. Kraft had been amazed to find his estimate to be within 1 percent of George Low’s, and it’s the one he gave Susan as she looked him in the eye with her question.
“How’s fifty-fifty?” he said.
To Kraft, that seemed a hopeful number, given that the crew would be accomplishing so many new things at once: the first to fly the Saturn V, the first to journey to the Moon, and the first to confront the other myriad new challenges involved.
In fact, Kraft had misunderstood Susan’s question. He thought she was asking about the odds of a successful mission, in which its objectives were met and the spacecraft and systems performed as designed. He and Low had figured those odds to be about 56 percent. If he’d understood that Susan was asking about the crew’s chances of surviving the mission, he would have placed the odds higher.
And yet Susan, who believed her husband had no chance of coming home alive, was happy with a fifty-fifty shot that Frank would live.
“Good,” she told Kraft, “that suits me fine.”
That night, when Susan talked to Frank, she told him the cocktail party had been lovely.
In the first days of December, a new issue of Time magazine hit the newsstands. The cover image, set against a brilliant blue sky, showed two space travelers, one American, the other Soviet, sprinting toward the cratered lunar surface. Four words appeared on the cover: RACE FOR THE MOON.
The story inside summarized NASA’s plans to send Apollo 8 to the Moon and the Soviets’ push to send Zond 7 before the Americans could launch. Even at this late date, with just days remaining until the Soviet launch window opened on December 8, the race was too close to call.
In Moscow, the Soviets appeared to be celebrating early. Already, they had named a seventy-mile-wide crater on the far side of the Moon, photographed by Zond 6, in honor of two Soviet scientist brothers. In Florida, Anders was doing some naming of his own. Working from photos taken by unmanned spacecraft, he began assigning names to several of the most interesting and prominent craters never before seen by human eyes, ones he expected to see during his flight. Whether the International Astronomical Union would accept those designations once the crew had actually seen the craters remained to be determined.
It was around this time that Mueller asked the Apollo 8 astronauts to sign a statement confirming that they’d been properly trained by NASA. To Anders, that came as a bitter disappointment. Mueller was the boss—he should have been the one to tell the crew they’d been properly trained. Instead, he seemed to want a waiver in case anything went wrong.
By early December, the eyes of the world were trained on Kazakhstan. Cosmonauts were already at the launchpad there, awaiting the mission’s final go-ahead.
On December 8, many at NASA held their breath. If the Soviets were going to send a manned spacecraft to the Moon, this was the forty-eight-hour window during which they would do it. More than a decade in the making, the Space Race was coming down to a matter of hours.
The first day passed.
The Soviets now had twenty-four hours to make their move to the Moon.
The second day passed.
The Soviets now had just a few hours remaining. If they were going to beat the United States they had to do it now.
By midnight, it was clear that nothing had happened at Baikonur. Technically, it was still possible for the Soviets to go, even as late as December 10. But by many assessments, if they were going to go in December, they would have gone already.
For the first time since the Space Race began, nothing stood between America and the Moon.
Nearly two hundred members of the media were accredited for an early December press conference in Houston with Borman, Lovell, and Anders. They were shown film of the astronauts training and were then allowed to ask questions of the three astronauts.
A reporter asked about recent comments by Sir Bernard Lovell in which the famed British astronomer had criticized NASA for taking undue risk by flying Apollo 8.
“I have the highest regard for him and I hope he has his telescope—his radio dishes—beamed on us,” Borman said. “He’s done a great job of tracking in the past.”
When asked about the risks of the flight, Borman answered straight, as always.
“I think there are sensible risks….If we really believe what we’re doing is worthwhile, then we accept the risk. When we get to the point where we don’t believe it’s worthwhile, I’ll quit.”
In fact, Borman had already quit.
Several days earlier, he’d told NASA that he wouldn’t fly in space after Apollo 8. Since becoming an astronaut in 1962, his mission had been simple: to beat the Soviets to the Moon. If all went well, Apollo 8 would do that. To risk another lunar journey just to pick up rocks or add a fraction to mankind’s knowledge about the Moon didn’t seem worth it after the battle had been won.
As he answered questions and made the media laugh, few could have predicted this sudden turn in Borman’s career. He was the consummate astronaut, a man for whom the mission always came first. Those who knew him best, however, might have guessed that there was an additional reason for his decision to hang it up after Apollo 8. By now, consciously or otherwise, Borman had come to see the stress his career placed on Susan, and he couldn’t have any more of that.
After the press conference, the astronauts prepared to fly from Houston to Florida, where they would live for the remaining two weeks before their launch. This would be their last chance to say goodbye in person to their wives and children.
Borman and Lovell said farewell to their families at home, wished them a merry Christmas in advance, and told them they’d celebrate the holiday after they returned to Earth. Anders did the same, but then he gave Valerie a small package. It contained an audiotape. He asked that she play it in the event he didn’t make it back. Anders was a private person and didn’t tell anyone what he’d said on the tape. It began, “You children and your mother are the most important…” Much of the rest of it came down to this: expressions of love for Valerie and the kids; a reminder that he missed them already; a hope that Valerie would marry again in the future; and an assurance that he’d died doing what he wanted to be doing.
At the Cape, the men checked in to their new quarters, each getting a tiny room with little more than a steel bed and a steel desk, but with a large adjoining living room to share. Framed copies of classic paintings competed with lunar maps for space on the walls. It was a comfortable, if cramped, existence, and one deemed necessary by NASA to prevent the crew from catching bugs or viruses from the outside world that might short-circuit their ability to fly. The sole luxury came in the form of a personal chef.
No sooner had the astronauts arrived at the Cape than they had to pack their bags again. Lyndon Johnson had invited them and their wives to the White House for a formal dinner and send-off, just twelve days before the flight. System checklists and countdown procedures swimming in their heads, the astronauts boarded a charter flight to Washington. Doctors didn’t like the idea. The Hong Kong flu pandemic—which would kill more than thirty-three thousand in the United States alone in a six-month span—was reaching its peak, and the astronauts were supposed to be in quarantine. When a NASA doctor tried to object, LBJ issued a Texas-sized Who the hell does he think he is? For the crew of Apollo 8, there was a silver lining—a last, unexpected chance to kiss their wives goodbye.
As the astronauts flew to the White House, the family of one of the thirty thousand Americans killed so far during the fighting in Vietnam prepared for their own visit to the nation’s capital.
On October 31, 1967, just a month before he was to return home, Captain Riley L. Pitts of the U.S. Army led his company on an assault of a Vietcong position in the dense jungle of Ap Dong, South Vietnam. After enduring withering fire, Pitts threw his body on top of an enemy hand grenade and waited to die. When the grenade failed to explode, Pitts moved his company forward, putting himself in the direct line of enemy fire until he was cut down in a hailstorm of bullets.
As the crew of Apollo 8 arrived with their wives at the White House, Capt. Pitts’s widow, Eula, laid out a dark suit and a bow tie for her five-year-old son, Mark, and a fine white blouse for her seven-year-old daughter, Stacie, at their home in Oklahoma City. The next day, the president would make her husband the first African American officer ever to receive the nation’s highest military decoration, the Congressional Medal of Honor. Millions of Americans considered astronauts to be the epitome of American courage. To Borman, Lovell, and Anders, that label better belonged to men like Pitts.
Joining the crew of Apollo 8 and their wives at the black tie gala were twenty other astronauts, Chris Kraft and Wernher von Braun, and former NASA chief James Webb, who was to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom later in the evening. Also present was Charles Lindbergh, who’d stunned the world when he flew nonstop from New York to Paris in 1927. To many at NASA, despite his controversial political views, Lindbergh was a pinnacle aviation hero, a man who had taken to the skies to do the impossible.
Before dinner, a small concert was staged in the East Room. When Valerie Anders took her place in the audience, she was dismayed to hear dozens of people coughing and sneezing. This is so stupid, she thought. They are putting this crew at risk. And yet there was no escape for any of them. So they stayed, droplets of the Hong Kong flu and who knows what else atomizing into the room.
During dinner, Kraft got to talking to Lindbergh about airplanes, a nuts-and-bolts conversation between one of the great original aviators and an old flight test engineer. Seated nearby with the president, Borman stole glances toward Kraft’s table, envying the conversation he was missing. He also noticed that LBJ seemed irascible, describing his annoyance at a press corps—and maybe an entire swath of the American public—whose criticism of his Vietnam policies seemed to have beaten him down. Listening to the president rail against the media, Borman felt empathy for Johnson, not just for the stigma of Vietnam that would attach to his legacy, but for how it must feel to be a man in the final days of his standing, knowing that soon he would never again matter in the way he once had.