DURING SUNDAY MORNING SERVICES ACROSS AMERICA, congregations prayed for the astronauts. In Rome, Pope Paul VI did the same: “We open the window and instinctively the eye, the thought, the heart, go to the heavens. We pray to the Lord for them, and for the world, which is dazed at the conquest of science and of human endeavor.” Leaving St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in League City, Texas, on the arms of her two big, rugged teenage sons, Susan Borman remained grateful for everyone’s good wishes, even as she calculated that Frank had moved another ten thousand miles away from her since services had begun.
At home, Susan climbed out of the family’s old F-150 pickup truck. Reporters were waiting on her front lawn, and she smiled and answered questions, then excused herself and went inside. Ignoring all the food left by well-wishers, she made her way to the bedroom, where she turned off the lights, lay on the bed, and listened on the squawk box for the voice of her husband.
A few miles away, Marilyn Lovell and her four children had returned to Houston from Florida. When she opened the door to her house, she was greeted by a small village of friends, babysitters, neighbors, and astronauts with their wives, all of whom had brought something to eat or to drink (including the customary deviled eggs and champagne). The first thing Marilyn did was go to each of the four squawk boxes set up in her home—in the study, master bedroom, family room, and living room. Only after she’d flipped each of them to ON did she circle back to join her company. (Both Marilyn and Susan were squawk box veterans, having listened in during their husbands’ flight together on Gemini 7.) Neither Marilyn nor the other astronaut wives understood much of the technical jargon, but all of them found comfort in hearing their husband’s voice and those of the men they knew in Mission Control.
Now, however, when Mission Control called the spacecraft with their verdict on Borman’s illness, none of the wives could hear it, nor could the media.
“We are on a private loop now,” Collins said to the crew, “and we would like to get some amplifying details on your medical problems. Could you go back to the beginning and give us a brief recap, please?”
“Mike, this is Frank. I’m feeling a lot better now,” Borman responded. “I think I had a case of the twenty-four-hour flu.”
Given that flu viruses could be contagious, that might not have been the best answer to provide.
Collins asked the commander to review the history of his illness—when it started, what symptoms he experienced, the works. Borman provided the details. Then Dr. Berry jumped on the line—the man Borman least wanted involved.
“Frank, this is Chuck. The story we got from the tape…went like this: At some ten to eleven hours ago, you had a loose BM, you vomited twice, you have a headache, you’ve had some chills, and they thought you had a fever. Is that affirm?”
“Everything is true, but I don’t have a fever now. I slept for a couple hours and the nausea is gone, and controlling the loose BM. I think everything’s in good shape now.”
“Did you have a sore throat?”
“The roof of my mouth was sore, roger.”
“And as we understand it at the moment, Frank, neither Bill nor Jim have anything at the present time except some nausea. Is that right?”
“No, none of us are nauseated now. We’re all fine now.”
Dr. Berry told Borman to take a Lomotil tablet, an antidiarrhetic. If needed, Borman was also to take Marezine, a drug used to counter nausea, vomiting, and other symptoms associated with motion sickness.
But Borman and his crewmates were more interested in what Berry had not told them to do.
He had not told them to come home. At least not yet.
Dr. Berry looked at Kraft, the flight directors, and General Samuel Phillips, director of NASA’s Apollo Manned Lunar Landing Program. Ultimately, the decision belonged to Flight Director Cliff Charlesworth, but everyone was involved in this determination. Based on what they’d all just heard, a decision had to be made now, on the spot, about aborting the mission.
The men spoke for a few moments, then motioned to Collins to radio back to the crew.
“Apollo 8, Houston,” Collins called. “We are closing this circuit down and we will be up in our normal voice loop in about five minutes. And then we will get on with the water dump.”
By which NASA meant, “Let’s keep this thing going.”
Dr. Berry and the others had determined that Borman’s illness had passed, and that if it recurred, it could be treated. Not long after, the doctor explained his thinking in a press conference, telling reporters that “this may be the type of thing that we see with motion sickness, it is just going to take some more watching to see.”
NASA’s public affairs officer announced the same to America. Listening at home, Fred Borman could only smile. He knew his father. Even if he’d suffered a heart attack and was lying paralyzed in the spacecraft, he would have ordered Lovell and Anders to continue the mission. That was his dad.
Apollo 8 was now 140,000 miles from Earth and just 100,000 miles from the Moon. In about an hour, the crew would be making its first live television broadcast. It had been more than twelve hours since Borman had taken sick. Now he felt better.
As the telecast time drew closer, the spacecraft’s high gain antenna was adjusted and communications checked. The antenna, comprising four 31-inch dishes, could swivel to point at Earth to send and receive tracking, voice, and television signals. When the astronauts of Apollo 7 had made their appearance in living rooms across America two months earlier, they had done so from an altitude of about 150 miles. When Apollo 8 would go live for the first time, it would do so from almost a thousand times that distance. No one knew if it would work.
Barbecue mode was halted so that the antenna could remain pointed at Earth. In the command module, the crew worked to set up a four-and-a-half-pound black-and-white RCA video camera fitted with one of two available lenses—one to show the inside of the cabin, the other to show the views out the window. If all went well, the broadcast would begin at about three in the afternoon Eastern Standard Time in the United States, when many families would be home watching Sunday’s professional football games. Borman hadn’t wanted to bring television cameras in the first place, and when the flight plan was being made, he had bristled at the idea of interrupting NFL playoff action, which he would now be watching himself if only the high gain antenna could pull in the signal from Earth.
Before the scheduled broadcast, Valerie had gathered her children in front of the family’s television and flipped on the special programming, then gone out to answer a few questions from reporters. When she returned, the TV was tuned to cartoons, a situation she quickly remedied. The broadcast began a minute later.
“Are you receiving television now?” Borman asked Houston.
On millions of sets across America, a gray screen flickered and flashed. Suddenly there was Borman, slightly blurry, diagonal, and seated at the controls of Apollo 8, his right hand on a joystick-shaped thruster control, his left hand waving to the world.
“Okay,” Borman said, moving the thruster, “we’re rolling around to a good view of the Earth, and as soon as we get to the good view of the Earth we’ll stop and let you look out the window at the scene that we see. Jim Lovell’s down in the Lower Equipment Bay preparing lunch, and Bill is holding a camera here for us both.”
Anders swung around for a view of Lovell, who was working upside down. A bag floated in the cabin nearby. Borman continued to swivel the spacecraft with the rotation thrusters.
“Okay, now we are coming up on the view we really want you to see, that’s the view of the Earth, and if you’ll break for just a minute, Bill’s going to put on the large lens. So we’ll be right back with you.”
A few moments passed as Anders changed lenses and repositioned the camera. His job was made tougher by the fact that he had no monitor to show him what he was capturing—this was strictly a point-and-hope affair.
“Houston, we are now showing you a view of the Earth through the telephoto lens,” Borman announced.
But viewers saw nothing but a test pattern of vertical gray bars. For nearly four minutes, Anders and Borman wrestled with lenses and settings. Finally, an image emerged of a bright round object out the window—Earth!—but to viewers it looked featureless and indistinct, more like the Sun. Something was preventing the telephoto lens from getting the shot.
Borman switched back to a shot of the cabin, where Lovell grabbed a bag of chocolate pudding that was floating by. Nearby, Anders made his toothbrush dance and tried catching it with his teeth. Borman, who’d argued against these broadcasts, now couldn’t hide his disappointment at being unable to share his breathtaking view of the world with the world.
“I certainly wish we could show you the Earth,” he said. “It is a beautiful, beautiful view, with predominantly blue background and just huge covers of white clouds…”
At their homes, the astronauts’ wives wished they could see more of their husbands, or even just a little color in their faces. Ten-year-old Glen Anders thought his floating father looked weird.
Anders moved in for a close-up shot of Lovell.
“Bill, you can let everyone see he has already outdistanced us in the beard race,” Borman said. “Jim has got quite a beard going already.”
Lovell turned to the camera with a big smile.
“Happy birthday, Mother!” he said.
Blanch Lovell had turned seventy-three that day, and Lovell hadn’t forgotten. Watching on television at home in Edgewater, Florida, Blanch was stunned that Jim would remember her birthday at a time like this.
A few seconds later, Borman told his audience he needed to put his ship back into barbecue mode in order to prevent overheating. There was nothing he could do to provide a better view of Earth, at least for now.
“Goodbye from Apollo 8,” he said, waving a hand.
And with that, the first broadcast from the first men on their way to the Moon went dark.
About ninety minutes after the telecast ended, Anders began to tire, yet he was still as wired as if the spacecraft was just lifting off. Needing to sleep, he requested permission to take a Seconal, which Houston approved. Floating in his hammock, he tried to will himself into oblivion, but his mind was a moving checklist, tuned to the vibration of the spacecraft and its systems. How could he make sure nothing went wrong if he allowed his mental blueprints to go dark? But the Seconal was working, oozing over his brain and melding all the sounds in the cabin—the instruments, the radio, his crewmates—into monotone.
Above, Lovell told Houston he was going to throw a switch and…
“Jim—not that one!” Anders cried, wide awake, thrusting up a hand and stopping the action.
It wasn’t that Anders didn’t trust Lovell. But Lovell had been a later addition to the crew (after replacing Collins) and hadn’t had the opportunity to learn the command module the way he and Borman had. Long ago, Anders had determined not to tolerate much help on systems from Lovell, despite a deep respect for his crewmates’ competence and capabilities.
Anders finally drifted off, for perhaps an hour, then shook off the effects of the sleeping pill, climbed back into his seat, and started working again. By now, Houston understood that the sleep schedules they’d engineered into the flight plan had long since drifted away. From this point forward, the crew would sleep according to their needs.
The astronauts spent the next several hours cruising, checking their systems and navigation, and looking back at an ever-shrinking Earth. At around forty hours into the flight, CapCom Jerry Carr radioed a news bulletin to Apollo 8. After 335 days of captivity, torture, and starvation, the crew of the American ship USS Pueblo had been released by their captor, the Communist government of North Korea.
In January 1968, the Pueblo, a U.S. Navy intelligence-gathering ship disguised to look like a fishing vessel, had deployed to waters just outside North Korean boundaries. She’d been sent on a covert mission to intercept military communications from that Communist regime, but just a few days into the operation, crews from several North Korean gunboats opened fire on the American ship, killing one crewman before boarding the Pueblo and taking its remaining crew, including the commander, prisoner.
President Johnson considered several hard-line responses but opted to try diplomacy first. His advisers fashioned fallback plans in case the United States needed to take military action. One of those plans, code-named Freedom Drop, called for the use of nuclear weapons to obliterate Communist troops that might storm into South Korea during an American attack.
Negotiations for the release of the crew stretched on for months. Held in miserable conditions, many of the Americans were interrogated, beaten, tortured, and threatened with execution. Commander Lloyd M. Bucher was put before a mock firing squad in order to obtain his confession, which he refused to make. He was then told his crew would be executed, one by one, until he acknowledged American guilt—which he finally did. After American officials signed a confession and apology, the North Koreans agreed to release the crew.
“The big news right now,” Carr radioed to the spacecraft, “…is that all eighty-two crewmen of the Pueblo have been returned. They walked across the Bridge of Freedom Monday night.”
“Wonderful!” Borman replied.
Anders had a different reaction. He was happy for the Americans who’d been released, but he couldn’t help but compare the incident to the one his father had endured. Arthur Anders had defended the USS Panay from an unprovoked Japanese air attack in 1937, refusing to give up his ship, manning guns and returning fire even as he was gravely wounded. By contrast, the Pueblo hadn’t even fought back. There were good reasons for that—the crew hadn’t been trained well for combat, were not well armed, had been taken by surprise, and were outnumbered. But all that had been true of the Panay, too. It was hard for Anders not to wonder whether the crew of the Pueblo might have tried a little harder, as his father had.
Out his window, Anders looked toward Earth, now 165,000 miles away. From here, it was hard to pick out North Korea, or South Korea, or any countries at all.
The astronauts continued to sleep in fits and starts as the flight neared its two-day mark. In Houston, the wives maintained their squawk box vigils, listening for telltale signals in their husbands’ voices—the subtle cues they first learned to hear when the men were teenagers—that would reveal how they really felt. So far, everyone seemed to sound good, though Susan, Valerie, and Marilyn each wondered if her husband was getting enough to eat.
At nearly forty-seven hours into the flight, Lovell provided a status report to Mission Control. Each of the men today had ingested between 40 and 60 ounces, or “clicks,” of water (so called for the squirt gun contraption that dispensed it), along with some rehydrated and solid foods. By now, the crew had discarded NASA’s feeding plan as completely as it had the sleeping plan. They were supposed to eat four meals a day, but it was clear that Lovell’s appetite was biggest and that each man preferred some foods to others. The crew took to swapping—Anders would trade almost anything for apricot cubes, Lovell for bacon squares. No one could give away his beef and egg bites, which left a pasty coating on the tongue. Much of the food had to be reconstituted, either by injecting water into pouches or by mushing it with saliva in one’s mouth.
At Mission Control, the doctors were not yet convinced that Borman, or even his crewmates, were operating at full strength. By their estimates, the astronauts still hadn’t consumed enough food or water, or slept enough hours. But what was NASA to do? They were dealing with three grown men, each of whom was risking his life for his country, who now didn’t want to eat their beef and egg bites. If the men began to starve, they’d eat.
Forty-eight hours into the flight, Apollo 8 was two-thirds of the way to the Moon. By then, it had slowed to a velocity of just over 2,400 miles per hour, about 10 percent as fast as when it departed its parking orbit around Earth. That kind of reduction frustrated thirteen-year-old Jay Lovell, who’d thought it just about right when the spacecraft had been going more than 24,000 miles per hour when it left Earth orbit.
It was now just past sunrise on Monday morning in Houston, and Valerie Anders was awake and feeding her five children. “My dad will be one of the first men on the Moon,” six-year-old Greg told her. Through her front window, Valerie could see the mass of reporters on the lawn, already gathered in the near-freezing December air. She made them a pot of coffee, which she put in her garage along with a stack of cups. And she sent eleven-year-old Alan to rake leaves in the yard.
At the Borman home, Susan still couldn’t eat. Her sons began to worry. “You’ve gotta have something,” they said, but Susan couldn’t stomach it. Fred took up a forkful of potato salad delivered by some good soul.
“Open up for the airplane!” he said, making the food swoop and loop with engine sounds, which was just what Susan had done for him when he was a little boy. If the method had been good enough for Fred and Ed, now it had to be good enough for their mother. She laughed, opened up, and took a bite.
That morning, the Borman boys threw on some camouflage gear, grabbed their shotguns, and left the house to go duck hunting. The embedded Life magazine photographer sensed a great shot and asked Susan to pose with the boys before they hit the road. She did, reaching somewhere for the smile that had earned her an offer from the Ford modeling agency when she was in college, and finding it, if just for the moment.
The boys sneaked out through the back fence, where they rendezvoused with Fred’s car, which he’d parked near a neighbor’s house. They intended to go to a friend’s farm in the country, but by that time the press had gotten wise to the teenage Houdinis and gave chase. Fred mashed the gas pedal to the floor, making several tight turns and leaving the reporters in the dust. Two days earlier, Frank Borman had become the fastest man in history. Yet the boys knew that their father would have reached an arm down from space and strangled them if he’d known they’d been speeding.
In Timber Cove, Marilyn Lovell’s concern had shifted to her son, Jay, who had begun to complain of stomach pains. Spiriting him to a neighbor’s car and hiding him under blankets to avoid being trailed by the media, she drove to NASA, where doctors attributed his symptoms to the excitement that comes from having a father on his way to the Moon. While Marilyn and Jay were gone, two-year-old Jeffrey did his best to stand in for his mother, opening the door and answering questions from reporters while wearing a plaid jumper and his toy astronaut helmet, occasionally looking skyward in case his dad flew by. Now 186,000 miles above him, Apollo 8 was at precisely the distance at which it took light (and radio transmissions) one full second to reach Earth. If Jeffrey had seen his father flying by, the image would have come from history, not the present.
By the looks of things, Apollo 8 was in cruise mode, so Valerie Anders decided to visit Mission Control—for a change of scenery, and to feel closer to Bill. There she took George Low’s hand and told him how grateful she was that Bill and his crewmates were being looked after so well. Low’s blend of intellect and calm had made him a favorite of Valerie’s, and his was the perfect hand to hold while she watched the green blip on the distant screen inch closer to the Moon.
A few minutes later, she heard Bill announce that he was going to “take a little snooze here for a while” and then sign off. She smiled and whispered something to a NASA official, who walked over to the public affairs officer, who in turn walked over to Collins. Shortly after that, Collins radioed to Borman aboard Apollo 8.
“Paul tells me Valerie is over here and wishes Bill a happy nap.”
“Okay, thank you,” Borman answered. “Tell her that he makes us tired sometimes, too, will you?”
Collins laughed.
“Roger. I will deliver a modified version of the message.”
At 53 hours into the flight, the guidance and trajectory specialists in Houston were delighted by the precision of the journey. After Apollo 8 left Earth orbit, Houston had planned for up to four midcourse corrections for the coast to the Moon. But the first, accomplished during the brief test of the SPS engine about eleven hours into the flight, had been so accurate that the next two were dispensed with. Now, as they neared the Moon, only one tiny adjustment would be required, and that would use the spacecraft’s small control thrusters.
The second live television broadcast was scheduled to begin in an hour. Despite the best advice from experts—on filters, lenses, switches, brackets, interior lighting, and exposure levels—Borman remained skeptical.
“I bet the TV doesn’t work,” he told Collins.
Just before 3:00 P.M. EST, with Apollo 8 at an altitude of 200,000 miles, the crew got ready to transmit. A few seconds later, a rounded edge appeared on television screens across America, then disappeared. Collins radioed instructions to the spacecraft, but the screen stayed gray.
Suddenly, an orb drifted dead center into the middle of the picture, and the shape of clouds and continents sharpened into view. For the first time in history, mankind was looking back at itself—at all of itself. Every human culture and language and idea and conflict and difference fit into a single picture.
In Mission Control, in living rooms, in hotels and bars and bus shelters across America, in the astronauts’ homes, people fell silent.
Then Lovell spoke.
“Houston, what you are seeing is the Western Hemisphere. Looking at the top is the North Pole. In the center—just lower to the center is South America—all the way down to Cape Horn. I can see Baja California, and the southwestern part of the United States. There’s a big, long cloud bank going northeast, covers a lot of the Gulf of Mexico, going up to the eastern part of the United States, and it appears now that the East Coast is cloudy. I can see clouds over parts of Mexico; the parts of Central America are clear. And we can also see the white, bright spot of the subsolar point on the light side of the Earth.”
The broadcast was in black-and-white, so Collins asked about the colors.
“For colors, the waters are all a sort of a royal blue,” Lovell said. “Clouds, of course, are bright white. The reflection off the Earth is much greater than the Moon. The land areas are generally a brownish, a sort of a dark brownish to light brown texture.”
Watching out the window, Anders almost forgot the camera in his hand. To him, Earth seemed almost to transcend reality, its color and brightness and clarity beyond what one could see when one was actually on the planet. He could hardly imagine a more beautiful image.
After a few more minutes, Lovell added to his description.
“Mike, what I keep imagining is, if I’m some lonely traveler from another planet, what I think about the Earth at this altitude, whether I think it’d be inhabited or not.”
“Don’t see anybody waving, is that what you’re saying?” Collins replied.
“I was just kind of curious whether I would land on the blue or the brown part of the Earth,” Lovell said.
“You better hope we land on the blue part,” Anders chimed in, causing an eruption of laughter at Mission Control.
Near the end of the twenty-two-minute telecast, Collins asked Borman a question millions of people had on their minds.
“How about the Moon, Frank? Is it visible through one of your other windows? Could you get it visible with a small maneuver?”
“Negative,” Borman answered. “I think we’ll have to save the Moon for another time.”
A few minutes later, the show came to a close. So compelling was the view of Earth that the crew hadn’t once thought to turn the camera on themselves.
“Okay, Earth,” Borman said. “This is Apollo 8 signing off for today.”
And with that, the astronauts disappeared back into the sky.
The astronauts’ younger children dispersed when the broadcast ended, running outside to play, fixing sandwiches in the kitchen, pulling toys from their toy chests. Hearing the clamor of the reporters on their lawns, Susan and Valerie went outside their homes to answer questions from the press. Only Marilyn didn’t move from her spot in front of the television. She just stared at the screen, trying to process the distance between her and her husband.
Focus at Mission Control turned to the giant projection screens at the front of the room. By the estimates of trajectory and orbital mechanics specialists, Apollo 8 was about to cross what some called the equigravisphere, the point at which Earth and Moon exert an equal pull of gravity. It had taken until now, about five-sixths of the way to the Moon, to reach the equigravisphere, a testament to the dominance of Earth in its finely balanced relationship with its smaller satellite. There would be nothing to mark the place in space, no bump or jolt to the spacecraft. But in its silence, the crossing would make a thundering announcement—for the first time, man had become captured by the pull of another celestial body.
The men in Mission Control had bet on the event; the winner would be the one who most accurately predicted the moment of crossing. It wasn’t an easy guess, as the line changed depending on the distance between Earth and Moon at the moment, the phases of the Moon, and other factors. But controllers would know it when the moment arrived, because for the first time in more than two days, the spacecraft would stop slowing down and begin to gain speed.
At around this time, Mission Control received a visit from Marilyn Lovell, who’d hitched a ride with a NASA representative. In the viewing area, Robert Gilruth, the director of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center, greeted her and sat down to talk. Perhaps he sensed her apprehension, or maybe he was just being friendly, but he did not rush off to attend to his pressing duties, even at this historic moment.
At 55 hours, 38 minutes into the flight, all eyes in Mission Control, including Marilyn’s, turned to the big screens. Controllers checked the numbers—Apollo 8 was 202,700 miles from Earth, but its speed, about 2,200 miles per hour, was no longer dropping. Moments later, a light flashed on the screen.
“My God,” one of the young computer specialists said. “Do you know what we just saw?”
And the room, transfixed, did know. The light meant that Apollo 8 was no longer a part of this world.