THE CREW OF APOLLO 8 RETURNED to their quarters at Cape Kennedy on December 10. Just eleven days remained until their mission. Their schedule would be simple from this point forward: train in the simulator, study the flight plan, jog. At night, when he could find a spare moment, Borman walked outside his tiny bedroom and looked up at the Moon.
On December 15, at 7 P.M. EST, NASA began its official launch countdown, five and a half days before the planned lift-off. That gave everyone associated with the flight time to coordinate, and to fix any problems that might arise along the way. As the clock started ticking that Sunday evening, Lovell borrowed a car and drove sixty miles north along the Florida coast to a town called Edgewater, where he rang the doorbell at a house near the beach.
His mother, Blanch, opened the door. She lived here now. Her seventy-third birthday was approaching, and her son had come to celebrate early. Over dinner, Jim explained the mission to his mother. Sitting shoulder to shoulder on the living room couch, Jim sketching out his rocket’s trajectory, Blanch wearing her glasses and leaning in for a closer look, the two might have been in Milwaukee thirty years earlier, a mother and her young son who had only each other to rely on, each present for the other one’s dreams.
The next day, NASA chief Tom Paine flew to the Cape to visit with the astronauts and to deliver an important message. After dinner—and a few drinks to loosen things up—Paine spoke frankly to Borman, Lovell, and Anders, with one final statement he wanted them to remember. He laid it out like this:
First, if any of them had any reservations going into the flight, anything they hadn’t felt comfortable discussing with Chris Kraft or Deke Slayton or anyone else at NASA, even if it was nothing more than a feeling or an intuition that something wasn’t right, he should feel free to bring those concerns to Paine, and he would personally see to it that the issue was addressed and fixed, no matter what, and without consequence to them.
Second, if the crew had any doubts or worries during the mission—with how the flight was progressing, with the function of the spacecraft or systems, with anything—he should feel free to abort the mission and bring the ship back early, and Paine would guarantee a seat on a subsequent flight as soon as possible. No one, he told the astronauts, would lose his chance to go to the Moon for ending a flight in the name of safety.
Borman, Lovell, and Anders thanked Paine for the offer, but none of them expressed any concerns about Apollo 8. All of them expected it would require a hell of a lot more than a feeling or an intuition to U-turn a spacecraft bound for the Moon.
On December 17, four days before scheduled lift-off, Marilyn Lovell and her four children landed in Florida and checked in to a beachside cottage. Valerie Anders, too, had managed to make the trip, catching a ride with a NASA contractor. Valerie had come only for the day, to squeeze in a final goodbye with her husband before returning home to be with their children.
The next day, Jerry Lederer, director of NASA’s Office of Manned Space Flight Safety, spoke to a group of aviation enthusiasts in New York. Apollo 8, he said, had one safety advantage over the voyage undertaken by Christopher Columbus in 1492: “Columbus did not know where he was going, how far it was, nor where he had been after his return. With Apollo, there is no such lack of information.” There was, however, the matter of complexity. “Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and 1,500,000 systems, subsystems and assemblies,” Lederer noted. “Even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects.” For that reason, Lederer concluded, Apollo 8’s mission would involve “risks of great magnitude and probably risks that have not been foreseen.”
As darkness fell in Florida that night, Lovell took Marilyn out on a date. They didn’t go to a restaurant or a movie, but rather to a place virtually no one on Earth could access, to see one of the newest wonders of the world. And no matter how high Marilyn looked when they reached the Cape, she still could not see where the great Saturn V ended, it just kept stretching upward, more than 250 feet taller than the rocket that had carried Lovell on his Gemini missions, a colossus lit white by floodlights against an inky black sky.
“I don’t want you to worry,” Lovell said, holding Marilyn’s hand. “When we lift off, the rocket is going to tilt, it might even look like it’s going to fall over, but that’s normal, it’s exactly how they designed it. Also, the Earth is going to shake in a different kind of way. That’s normal, too.”
By the morning of December 19, just forty-eight hours before lift-off, journalists were swarming at the Houston homes of the astronauts. Valerie and Susan were gracious, smiling for everyone, their hair and makeup done, all of them expressing support and admiration for their husbands. Valerie always wore the same dress for appearances on television—yellow, with a close-fitting waist and knee-length skirt. Her mother noticed and asked her about it. Valerie had to confess: It was the only good dress she owned. Her husband was about to become one of the most famous men in the world, yet he still earned military pay, about $16,000 per year (plus another $16,000 from Life magazine), which went only so far with five children to feed.
That night, Valerie decided to slip out of the house with three-year-old Eric to go for some groceries. She stole out the back gate and headed for the garage but was greeted in her driveway by an ocean of reporters and bursting flashbulbs. The next day, photographs ran across the country showing Eric in his mother’s arms, sucking his thumb, along with the caption THUMBS UP FOR DAD! Valerie loved the photo, but she knew it meant she would be a captive in her own home from that moment forward.
On December 20, the day before the flight, the Soviets let the world know what they thought about Apollo 8. “It is not important to mankind who will reach the Moon first and when he will reach it,” said cosmonaut Gherman Titov, the second man ever to orbit Earth. Not many in the Soviet Union were worried. Even with the American countdown clock at T minus 24 hours, few Soviets believed NASA would be crazy enough to launch.
That afternoon, Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow, joined the astronauts in Florida for lunch. Anders suspected the visit to be a public relations stunt arranged by NASA, but he changed his mind after hearing the passion in Lindbergh’s questions about Apollo 8. After a few minutes, the four men—and Anne, also a pilot—were immersed in conversation about flying. Not one of the astronauts resented the imposition on his time. By now, there wasn’t any sense in cramming more pages from a flight manual or checklist; with twenty hours to go until launch, you either knew your stuff or you didn’t.
The conversation turned to spacewalking, and how it compared to the old barnstorming stunt of wing-walking. The Lindberghs were interested to hear that one’s sensation of altitude decreased as one flew higher, until it hardly seemed to register in space (where the familiar scenery that helped people judge distance from the ground all but disappeared), and to learn that in space there was no up or down. The astronauts were equally interested to learn of a conversation Lindbergh once had in the 1930s with Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocket engineering. It was theoretically possible, Goddard had told Lindbergh, to design a rocket powerful enough to reach the Moon, but the money required to build it—as much as a million dollars—would likely keep such a wonder in the realm of science fiction. The astronauts had a good laugh at that one.
Lindbergh performed a back-of-napkin calculation after learning how much fuel the Saturn V required to send Apollo 8 to the Moon. “In the first second of your flight,” Lindbergh said, “you’ll burn more than ten times as much as I did flying the Spirit of St. Louis all the way from New York to Paris.”
Later that day, Anders’s childhood priest arrived at crew quarters. Father Dennis Barry had come to give Anders—a devout Catholic since childhood—communion. This visit annoyed Borman, who was growing edgier as the hours to launch counted down. The longer Father Barry stayed, the more irritated Borman grew. Finally, Borman snapped.
“Are you gonna take communion every thirty seconds before the flight?” Borman asked.
“No, Frank. He’s just visiting,” Anders said.
“Well, then, get rid of the guy!”
Borman was sorry he said it, even sorrier when he saw that his remark had hurt Anders. But he thought the crew didn’t need distractions so close to launch.
Anders had more visitors coming. One was his thesis adviser and head of the Department of Physics at the Air Force Institute of Technology; the other was the man’s brother, who was a Jesuit priest. He considered both to be very good friends. Around sunset, Anders took them to the parking lot outside crew quarters, where they all lay back on the hood of a car. By now, the sky had darkened, and the men picked out the slivered crescent of the Moon in the sky.
Early that evening, his last night on Earth before launch, Lovell sneaked away from crew quarters to visit Marilyn. She’d been at a party, but when Jim called, she hurried away and met him for a rendezvous at the cottage where she and her children were staying. There he kissed his kids and pulled out a photograph. Taken by one of NASA’s unmanned lunar probes, it showed an angular mountain on the Moon. It was near the Sea of Tranquillity, one of the potential sites Apollo 8 would scout for a future landing mission.
“I’m going to name it Mount Marilyn,” he said.
Wake-up would be at 2:30 A.M. The astronauts were to eat dinner, then go to sleep. Launch, at 7:21 A.M., was just twelve hours away.
After the meal, the men called their families to say good night and goodbye. Borman spoke first to his boys, then to Susan.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” he told her. “I’ll be perfectly safe.”
“I know,” Susan said.
Before retiring, Borman knelt by his bedside to pray—the Lord’s Prayer, then a request for a successful mission, and finally that he, Lovell, and Anders do their jobs well.
But he couldn’t sleep, not for hours. He and his crew had been given only four months to train for the flight, and he was concerned about everyone’s ability to perform flawlessly. More than anything, he dreaded the possibility of having to fly the backup mission—ten endless days in Earth orbit—if some anomaly was found after launch that spooked NASA into canceling the lunar part of the journey. He did not want to leave Susan a widow and his boys fatherless, but on this account, he didn’t worry too much; he believed in the rocket and spacecraft the crew would be flying, and especially in the people who’d built and designed them. As Borman saw it, he would be flying with thousands of the world’s best minds aboard.
Around midnight, ground crews began to pump each of the three stages of the Saturn V with liquid oxygen, an oxidizer necessary for combustion. Ribbons of white vapor danced as the warm Florida air boiled away drops of the liquid oxygen from vents in the tanks. Fuel was next. Three weeks earlier, the Saturn V’s first stage had been filled with 209,000 gallons of highly refined kerosene. Now liquid hydrogen was added to the second-stage booster (260,000 gallons) and to the third-stage booster (69,500 gallons). Added to the 437,000 gallons of liquid oxygen in the stages, the fully fueled rocket would hold nearly a million gallons of propellant and would weigh 6.2 million pounds, all with the explosive potential of a small nuclear bomb.
At 2:36 A.M. on Saturday December 21, 1968, Deke Slayton knocked on the bedroom doors of the astronauts and told them it was time.
The men took hot showers, then walked down the hall for a cursory physical exam. After being pronounced fit by a team of doctors, they made their way to the breakfast room, where they were joined by Slayton, George Low, Alan Shepard, astronaut Harrison Schmitt, and two of their three backup crew, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (the third member, Fred Haise, was working inside the spacecraft setting dials and switches).
In heaping quantities, the astronauts’ personal chef served filet mignon and scrambled eggs (steak and eggs was the traditional send-off meal for astronauts), toast, coffee, and tea—a deliberately low-residue meal, and the last real, hot food that the astronauts would consume for the next six days.
After breakfast, the crew of Apollo 8 made their way to the suiting room. If astronauts could have flown in thirteenth-century chain mail, they might have preferred it to NASA’s space suit. All of them, however, understood its necessity. The custom-tailored one-piece suits could be pressurized, and they were made fireproof by Teflon cloth. Layers of Mylar, Dacron, and Kapton protected from heat, while other layers provided cooling and controlled pressure. In all, these suits contained more than twenty layers of protective materials, enough to do battle with a universe that becomes hostile to humans just a few miles above Earth’s surface. Fully dressed, the suit’s wearer looked like a futuristic version of the Michelin Man and walked a bit like Frankenstein’s monster, but the suit could be his lifeline during a space flight if the cabin lost pressure.
A team of technicians, dressed in surgical masks to avoid spreading germs, descended on the astronauts, ordering them into their long johns and biometric sensors (to transmit physiological data to Houston), then helping them don their suits. Borman’s equipment specialist would be Joe Schmidt, an all-around good guy, and the same sergeant who’d helped him into his pressure suit so many times at Edwards Air Force Base, where Borman had been a test pilot. The two were old hands at this kind of dance.
To enter the space suit, Borman had to shimmy and shake his way in through a tight zipper opening in the back of the garment, favoring no limb over any other lest the rest of him be left behind. After he popped his head through the neck ring, oxygen and cooling hoses were attached to blue (input) and red (output) valves at his torso. The next piece went on easily—a soft cap like the ones worn in the 1930s by barnstorming pilots, the men who gave rides to kids like Borman, Lovell, and Anders. (NASA’s caps, however, were woven with state-of-the-art communications gear—no yelling above the wind required.) Gloves were affixed and secured. Finally, a transparent bubble helmet was attached to the neck ring. (Borman’s head was so large that his helmet cost an extra $45,000 to build.) Now fully kitted up, with pure oxygen flowing into their suits from portable ventilators, Borman, Lovell, and Anders were already separated from Earth, the only three men on the planet who needed the planet no more.
On the way out of the suiting room, Lovell’s technician gave him a pocket handkerchief to dress up his space suit, while Schmidt presented Borman with a small paper Christmas tree. The gifts weren’t intended to be brought on board, but it was the thought that counted.
Carrying their briefcase-sized oxygen ventilators, the crew of Apollo 8 lumbered down a long hallway, waving to a photographer as they made their way to the elevator that would carry them to the building’s exit. Television cameras and a small group of well-wishers greeted them as they left the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building and boarded the astronaut transport van for the first leg of their journey, an eight-mile ride to the launchpad. Emblazoned on the van’s inside door was the figure eight insignia Lovell had designed for this mission, along with a reminder in bold red letters: NO SMOKING.
As the van made its way to the pad around 4:30 A.M., a NASA official drove Marilyn Lovell and her four children to a sand dune about three miles from the launch site, the closest NASA allowed observers to be for lift-off. The family were alone when they arrived, except for the coffee and doughnuts NASA had waiting for them. It was still dark. Marilyn pulled a pack of Pall Malls from her purse. Often, she and Susan Borman met in the mornings for a cup of coffee and a smoke, but Marilyn was solo today, so she shook a cigarette loose and lit up by herself. In Houston, the Borman and Anders families began to wake and get ready for a day glued to their televisions.
Upon reaching Pad 39A, the astronauts exited the van and bent backward, straining in their suits and helmets to get a view of the behemoth before them. From a distance of just a few yards, the Saturn V was mythically tall. The idea that it could move, never mind fly, seemed impossible from up close.
The astronauts walked to the middle of the launchpad, then boarded a small service elevator built into the crisscrossed steel beams of the service tower, which carried them thirty-two stories into the air. Then they walked across an access arm to a small loading area, where technicians would make a final check of the space suits. From there it was a short walk for the astronauts across a small metal bridge and into the spacecraft. It was 4:58 A.M., still dark outside. From his vantage point, Lovell couldn’t help but think of the old astronaut joke—How does it feel to sit atop a vehicle built by the lowest bidder?
A NASA staffer gave the signal for the astronauts to start loading. Borman went first and, after some maneuvering, settled into the left-hand seat of the command module, lying flat on his back as an airline pilot would if his airplane were tipped back onto its tail. A technician gave Anders a hug, then sent him, too, into the spacecraft, where he took the right-hand seat in the small cabin. As Anders worked to get himself settled, Lovell looked down to the ground 320 feet below. He could see the lights of the press corps as they arrived at their designated sites, and all of a sudden it hit him: These NASA people are serious. They’re going to send us to the Moon. My God, we really are doing this. He took a deep breath, then walked across the bridge, put his feet through the hatch of the spacecraft, and lowered himself into the seat between Borman and Anders.
Technicians closed and secured the hatch on the Apollo 8 spacecraft at 5:34 A.M. Inside the cabin, the countdown clock read T minus 2 hours, 17 minutes and counting. Lying flat on their backs, there wasn’t much the crew could do to help things along. Borman wished NASA could just get the damned thing into the air, but knowing that wasn’t possible, he wished for something more realistic—that the launch would actually occur. He didn’t want another episode such as John Glenn endured in the Mercury days, when his flight was scrapped with twenty-nine minutes to go. If a guy was going to suit up and climb aboard with his nerves on edge, the least a rocket could do was go up.
In the command centers at the Cape and in Houston, controllers took their places, settling in to legacy aromas of stale pizza and burnt coffee, checking their consoles and lists and running through their responsibilities as they had done for the past four months in their offices, at dinner with their families, in bed after their wives had fallen asleep. The Cape would be in charge of the launch (since they would be on scene), then turn over command to Houston shortly after lift-off. Both command centers vibrated as hundreds of controllers moved into position.
At the helm would be Flight Director Cliff Charlesworth, in charge of the flight from the ground. Charlesworth could take any action he deemed necessary to ensure the safety of the crew and the success of the mission. The CapCom—always a fellow astronaut—would do most of the communicating with the crew of the spacecraft as it flew, and he would be the crew’s advocate in Mission Control. The facility would operate around the clock in eight-hour shifts, as long as the mission lasted. Each team of flight controllers was designated by a color. The primary CapCom, Mike Collins, was on Charlesworth’s Green team and would cover launch through to the historic TLI maneuver.
Overseeing them all in Houston would be Chris Kraft, the director of flight operations. Even now, Kraft might have been the most nervous of them all. He’d been with NASA since its inception in 1958. More than anyone else, he knew how much could go right—and wrong—when men left Earth.
The astronauts occupied themselves by checking switches, confirming checklists, and eavesdropping through their headsets on launch personnel. They could not hear NASA public affairs officer Jack King, whose baritone voice and slight Boston accent had kept the world updated live on launch countdowns since the Mercury flights. Borman, Lovell, and Anders shivered in their space suits, their cabin freezing in the still-chilly morning air.
The astronauts could do little more than wait. Through a tiny porthole in front of him, Borman watched two seagulls flying around the spacecraft and checking out the strange, tall bird—the Saturn V—that now shared their sky. From his middle seat, Lovell scanned the instrument panel and admired the detail of the Apollo simulators; nothing inside the command module looked or felt different from what the crew had practiced with on the ground. And in a testament to the cool that runs through the bloodstream of fighter pilots, Anders fell asleep, ready to awaken when things got good.
By 7 A.M., network coverage of the launch had gone live on televisions and radios across America and the world. As the countdown clock ticked under an hour, a crowd gathered around the color television in the living room of the Borman home. Susan, her two sons, Frank’s parents (who had arrived at three A.M. and now fidgeted nervously on the couch), and family friends had come to watch the launch. Joining them were a Life magazine photographer, along with the wives of seven other astronauts, some of whom had brought deviled eggs and champagne. Though she smiled for newspaper photographers while scratching the tummy of the family’s shaggy dog, Teddy, Susan’s insides were in knots. At every chance, she hurried back to the squawk boxes NASA had installed in her home so that she could listen directly to the communications between Apollo 8 and Mission Control.
At the Anders home, Valerie scrambled to round up her five children, seating them atop the toy box in the playroom where the family kept their new color TV. Joining them were Bill’s aunt and uncle, several family friends, and the wives of some of the other astronauts (Bill’s parents were at home in San Diego to watch the launch). Valerie tried to stay in the moment, absorbing everything, even the fear, full of hope.
Among those watching the countdown from behind a giant window at the Launch Control Center at the Cape was backup crew member Neil Armstrong, who couldn’t get over the moxie NASA had shown in conceiving the mission. The Saturn V had never been flown with men aboard and had suffered profound problems on its second and most recent test. To put a crew on that rocket now, and to point that crew at the Moon, seemed astonishingly aggressive—and wonderful—to him.
Just twenty minutes remained until launch. For miles along the Cape, thousands of cars and motorcycles and buses and campers jammed the beaches and roadways, a quarter of a million people standing on hoods or in sand or on one another’s shoulders, craning their necks for a view of the rocket, passing binoculars back and forth, checking their watches every few seconds. An eighty-year-old woman from South Dakota, who’d traveled in her son’s trailer to witness the launch, said, “Those men, what they will do! And I have lived to see it. I am still alive to see it.”
“T minus 7 minutes, 30 seconds and counting, still aiming toward our planned lift-off time,” King told a riveted nation.
In the morning light, the view from the spacecraft became clearer. For several minutes, Anders watched a mud dauber wasp build a nest on the capsule window.
At T minus 5 minutes, the access arm and loading area pulled away from the spacecraft and retracted. At Mission Control in Houston, Chris Kraft stared at a giant color screen that was broadcasting a view of the spacecraft. He had always considered launch to be the riskiest part of manned spaceflight, and that was true even with proven rockets. Now, feeling scared to death, he watched as his agency prepared to catapult three good men from the planet aboard the most powerful machine ever built, despite the fact that this machine had never lifted a living thing, not even a mealworm, off the ground.
At T minus 3 minutes, 6 seconds, computers took over full checkout of the rocket.
In the Borman and Anders homes, hands were squeezed tight. On the sand dune, Marilyn Lovell huddled with her children. Photographers from various media outlets were stationed with all three families, pressing shutter buttons and swapping film rolls as fast as they could, desperate not to miss a moment.
In Mission Control, Flight Director Cliff Charlesworth and CapCom Mike Collins watched the monitors. George Low, the man who’d conceived a mission the Soviets still didn’t believe would fly, breathed deeply as the clock showed just one minute remaining.
At T minus 60 seconds, all three stages of the Saturn V were fully pressurized.
“Twenty seconds,” Jack King announced to the world. “We are still Go at this time.”
Storms of white vapor began to billow near the base of the rocket, liquid oxygen boiling off during the Saturn V’s final moments on Earth. Inside the spacecraft, Borman felt the rocket sway a bit in the wind.
“T minus fifteen,” King called, “fourteen…thirteen…twelve…eleven…ten…”
Heart pounding, Borman’s left hand remained gripping one of the spacecraft’s controls, ready to twist it to the left and abort the mission in case of a catastrophic problem. The three men listened to propellant pumping through the engine manifolds. On the beach, Marilyn reminded herself that the rocket would lean when it took off, just as Jim had warned.
“Nine…We have ignition sequence start, the engines are armed!” King said, as a fury of orange-yellow flames lit beneath the rocket and exploded against the launchpad.
“Four…”
“Three…”
Flames spread from beneath the rocket and erupted out to the sides, a typhoon of fire awakened and screaming as the ground began to shake.
“Two…”
A man-made thunder crashed into people and windows and buildings for miles around.
“One…”
Borman loosened his grip on the abort handle. He would have rather died than twist it by accident in the violence unfolding beneath him.
“Zero. We have commit…We have…”
King paused for a moment, as if he didn’t quite believe what he was seeing.
Susan Borman, Marilyn Lovell, and Valerie Anders didn’t breathe.
At 7:51 A.M., King called it.
“We have lift-off.”
And Apollo 8 began to move.