AS APOLLO 8 MOVED THROUGH ITS fourth pass over the near side, NASA’s public affairs officer provided sundry statistics for the media, as he did periodically. The spacecraft was traveling at 3,560 miles per hour; Anders’s recent average heart rate had been 68 beats per minute, with a high of 69 and a low of 67; cabin temperature was 79 degrees Fahrenheit, two degrees warmer than an hour ago; cabin pressure was 4.9 psi. All of this looked normal to Mission Control.
One statistic that did concern Houston was sleep. When CapCom Mike Collins radioed for a status report, Borman acknowledged that the crew had managed only a couple of hours’ rest over the last sixteen hours or so.
In fact, no one had gotten much sleep during the entire flight, which had now lasted three days, four hours, and change. As long as no one was resting, Collins radioed the latest news from Earth:
“We got the Interstellar Times here, the December twenty-fourth edition. Your TV program was a big success. It was viewed this morning by most of the nations of your neighboring planet, the Earth. It was carried live all over Europe, including even Moscow and East Berlin. Also in Japan and all of North and Central America, and parts of South America. We don’t know yet how extensive the coverage was in Africa. Are you copying me all right? Over.”
“You are loud and clear,” Borman answered.
“Good,” Collins continued. “San Diego welcomed home today the Pueblo crew in a big ceremony. They had a pretty rough time of it in the Korean prison. Christmas cease-fire is in effect in Vietnam, with only sporadic outbreaks of fighting. And if you haven’t done your Christmas shopping by now, you better forget it.”
As Apollo 8 streaked over the lunar surface, newspaper reporters on Earth moved just as fast to feed the public’s insatiable appetite for astronaut stories. One article in The New York Times focused solely on the fact that each crewman was an only child. Another noted that Pan American World Airways had been inundated with requests from customers who wanted to reserve a seat on the first commercial flight to the Moon. (So far, the airline had about a hundred names on the waiting list.)
Apollo 8 passed behind the Moon in total darkness, just as it had when it arrived. When it came back around to the near side for its fifth revolution, Lovell suggested that Borman get some sleep. The commander was due for three hours of rest, and he tried to take it (though he wouldn’t risk another sleeping pill). Lovell and Anders continued their work but grew frustrated with the limited visibility on account of hazing caused by the Sun. It didn’t stop them, however, from continuing to watch the Moon.
“It doesn’t seem like we’ve hardly been here that long, does it?” Anders said.
Lovell recalled his childhood, when he’d dreamed of an opportunity like this.
“It seems like I’ve been here forever,” he said.
“You know,” Anders remarked, “it really isn’t all that…anywhere near as interesting as I thought it was going to be. It’s all beat up.”
“The things that I saw that were interesting were the new craters,” Lovell said. He liked the idea that the Moon remained alive in the heavens, that it was still changing, still becoming.
A few minutes later, the spacecraft slid again behind the lunar far side. Apollo 8 had now been at the Moon for about ten hours and was halfway through its ten orbits. Just ten more hours remained until Trans Earth Injection, or TEI, the maneuver designed to get Apollo 8 out of lunar orbit and on its way back home. Nothing worried Kraft, and many others at NASA, more than TEI. So much could go wrong, and with such dire consequences. The men back in Houston tried to remain optimistic. Around the time Apollo 8 disappeared behind the Moon (about three o’clock in Houston), a message lit up on one of Mission Control’s large data panels. In red, white, and blue letters, it read MERRY CHRISTMAS APOLLO 8.
By the time Apollo 8 launched, NASA was considering just two possible sites for a future landing mission. Both were located in the Sea of Tranquillity, to the right side of the full Moon as seen from America and other places in Earth’s northern hemisphere. NASA wanted to land during the lunar morning, when temperatures were moderate and low Sun angle would create long shadows that would help a commander discern a smooth spot on which to set down. But those conditions shifted every day on the Moon. By choosing two sites, twelve degrees apart, NASA ensured that if it had to delay launch by a day, the lunar module would still have an optimal landing site when it arrived.
Both sites also satisfied other important NASA criteria for the first lunar landing. They were accessible to a spacecraft flying a free-return trajectory—a NASA safety requirement—and they existed in areas with ample level terrain, which meant a lunar module wouldn’t have to expend an undue amount of propellant hovering and maneuvering to avoid boulders and slopes before setting down.
Among Apollo 8’s tasks were to confirm that its own trajectory could be used by future spacecraft to reach these landing sites, and to get a close-up view of the areas under the same lighting conditions as the future landing mission would encounter. As Apollo 8 coasted over the first of these sites during its sixth pass over the near side, Lovell described it for Houston. Even the shadows, a critical element to judging shape, depth, and distances, looked excellent to him.
“I have a beautiful view of it. The first [landing site] is just barely beneath the vertical now, and the second one is coming up—it’s just a grand view.”
As the spacecraft moved over the second landing site, Lovell yearned to set down there; it seemed as close as the aircraft carriers he’d landed on so many times. He told himself he would come back here, not just to observe the Moon, but to walk on it.
Just before Apollo 8 slipped behind the Moon for its seventh pass over the far side, Lovell began singing to himself, as was his habit, then turned to his crewmates.
“Did you guys ever think that one Christmas you’d be orbiting the Moon?”
“Just hope we are not doing it on New Year’s,” Anders replied, his wit growing drier with each orbit. There was a dark truth behind Anders’s humor. If Apollo 8 was still here in a week, it meant the crew was never coming home.
Susan Borman knew it, too. She cleared her kitchen table, sat, and started to compose Frank’s eulogy. She needed to be ready—not like her friend Pat White, who’d been taken by surprise by the death of her husband in the Apollo 1 fire, and by the swiftness with which government officials moved in to orchestrate funeral arrangements. This time, Susan would be in charge. She would do it the way she and Frank wanted it, and the way that was right for their sons. It seemed to her a better fate for a man like Frank to die in space than to burn up on the launchpad while training, and a better fate for her, knowing Frank was in a place he’d be forever, a beautiful Moon she could see in the night, a place where she could always find him.
Just eight and a half hours remained before Trans Earth Injection. On board Apollo 8, Anders secretly hoped something would go wrong—nothing catastrophic, of course, just enough that he could show Houston, and his crewmates, how beautifully he’d mastered the spacecraft and its systems. But the ship was proving to be a jewel.
As the spacecraft readied to reconnect with Houston and begin its seventh pass across the lunar near side, Borman called out to his crewmates.
“Oh, brother! Look at that!”
“What was it?” Lovell asked.
“Guess,” Borman said.
Lovell did some quick computations. The ship was above the far side, at around 120ºE longitude, and at the most southerly part of its orbit. For Borman to react like that, he must have seen Tsiolkovsky, one of the far side’s most impressive craters, 115 miles wide, with a peak rising 2 miles out of its sunken center, and 80-foot boulders strewn about. So that’s what Lovell guessed.
“No,” Borman said. “It’s the Earth coming up.”
Through his window, Borman had caught another Earthrise, this one as stunning as the first, not just for its beauty, but for how it came to him—unexpected, ascendant, a call from home.
In Houston, Marilyn Lovell felt the need to go to church. Late night Christmas Eve services weren’t scheduled to start for several hours, but Father Raish told her to drop by anyway. When she arrived late that afternoon, the church was decorated with flowers and Christmas trimmings and burning candles. Marilyn was the only parishioner there. While the church organist played, Marilyn took a private communion, then joined Father Raish in prayer—for Jim, for his crewmates, for the mission. In just a few hours, they knew, Apollo 8 would face perhaps its most dangerous and critical test. And it would all happen just a few minutes after midnight on Christmas morning.
Only seven hours remained until Trans Earth Injection. But before the crew could get ready for that, they had to prepare for their second television broadcast from the Moon. It would occur in less than four hours, at around 8:30 P.M. Houston time, on Christmas Eve, before children’s bedtimes in America. By NASA’s estimates, more people around the world would be watching and listening than had ever tuned in to a human voice at once.
These last few hours demanded the best of the crew. The Apollo spacecraft was incredibly complex to operate, and the SPS engine was no exception. For Trans Earth Injection, there were five pages of switch settings, equipment checks, and adjustments, each of which had to be verified by a second crewman in the knowledge that one mistake could prove fatal.
But as Borman looked around the cabin, he doubted that he’d be getting the best from the crew. None of them had slept for the past eighteen hours. Each was starting to get sloppy, miss things, make mistakes. And mistakes, Borman knew, had a way of spiraling into catastrophe.
Borman told Houston he was scrubbing most of the flight plan for the next orbit.
“We are a little bit tired,” he told Collins. “I want to use that last bit to really make sure we’re right for TEI.”
On board, he made it clear to the others what he wanted.
“You’re too tired, you need some sleep, and I want everybody sharp for TEI,” he said.
Borman seemed exasperated with everybody, even the flight planners, who had loaded up the final orbits with tasks for the astronauts.
“Unbelievable!” Borman said. “The detail these guys study up. A very good try but just completely unrealistic, stuff like that. I should have—”
“I’m willing to try it,” Anders said, offering to perform some of the duties that Borman wanted scrubbed. But Borman wouldn’t hear of it.
“I want you to get your ass in bed! Right now! No, get to bed! Go to bed! Hurry up! I’m not kidding you, get to bed!”
It was a conversation many would be having in their own households this night, Christmas Eve.
Lovell and Anders kept talking about cameras and lenses instead of immediately obeying their commander. A few minutes later, Apollo 8 disappeared behind the lunar far side and lost contact with Earth. Lovell had finally gone to his hammock, but Anders was still on duty.
“Goddammit, go to bed!” Borman told him.
Anders offered a counter, and Borman exploded.
“Get going! I think this is a closed issue. Get to bed!…No, you get to bed, get your ass to bed. You quit wasting one…I don’t want to talk about it…Shut up, go to sleep, both you guys!…You should see your eyes—get to bed!…Don’t worry about the [camera] exposure business, goddammit, Anders, get to bed! Right now! Come on!…You’ve only got a couple hours, Bill, before we’re going to have to be fresh again.”
Borman clenched his teeth. In six hours, everything had to work perfectly, but all of them were getting groggy and sloppy. In his hammock, Lovell began to fear that the strain of command had finally overcome Borman. But Borman never wavered in his insistence that his crew go to sleep. A few minutes later, Lovell and Anders had gone quiet and were finally resting. It was a military chain of command, even at the Moon.
When Apollo 8 regained contact with Houston, there were just two hours—one revolution—remaining before the big television broadcast. CapCom Ken Mattingly asked for an update on the crew’s sleep. Borman reported that Lovell and Anders were currently resting, and that he’d had “about three or four hours earlier today.” In fact, Borman had managed only eighty minutes’ rest since arriving at the Moon.
During this coast over the near side, Borman radioed for a weather report on Earth. Mattingly reported that all looked well, including in the Pacific, where Apollo 8 would splash down.
“They told us that there is a beautiful Moon out there,” Mattingly said.
“Now, I was just saying that there’s a beautiful Earth out there,” Borman replied.
A few minutes later, Borman asked, “Hey, Ken, how’d you pull a duty on Christmas Eve? You know, it happens to bachelors every time, doesn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t be anywhere else tonight,” Mattingly replied.
The astronauts’ wives had settled in for the historic television broadcast, scheduled for eight thirty that evening. The astronauts’ children seemed calmer than their mothers and the family friends, and more focused on Christmas presents than on Christmas orbits.
Two of the wives chose to be home with family and friends. Marilyn, who’d never before been apart from her husband for Christmas, was asking the crowd inside her family room, “Why is everyone here? You should be home with your families!” but even though it was Christmas Eve, not a single person would leave. At her home, Valerie, who’d been apart from Bill only once during Christmas, in 1957, when he was stationed in Iceland and she was home with two babies, was bringing doughnuts and coffee to the journalists and state troopers massed on the front lawn, and getting her kids ready to listen to their dad.
Only, Susan Borman was not at home. To find respite from reporters and commotion, she’d taken her sons to a friend’s house in Houston to eat dinner and watch the telecast in peace. There, she thought back to 1951, to the only time she and Frank had ever been separated at Christmas.
Frank had been ordered to the Philippines for fighter pilot training. On Christmas Eve, his transport ship stopped in Hawaii. He’d never missed Susan more than on that night, nor she him. Susan presumed she wouldn’t hear from Frank for days, but he resolved to find a phone. Only the Royal Hawaiian Hotel had one in the vicinity, so Frank went into the phone booth in the lobby, dialed the operator, and asked to place a call to Arizona. “I’m sorry, all the phone lines have been booked for months,” the operator told him. Years later, Frank would remember this as the lowest moment of his life to that point. A well-dressed gentleman must have noticed the expression on his face. “What’s wrong, Lieutenant?” he asked. Borman explained. The man introduced himself as the hotel manager, then gave Frank a key and told him to use the phone in one of the rooms. “Talk as long as you want,” he said. Frank offered money but the man refused. Soon, Frank and Susan were talking and saying “I love you” and wishing each other a merry Christmas. Their call lasted for more than an hour. Now, seventeen years later to the day, Susan remembered that call, and how close she had felt to Frank despite their distance, and from outer space, Frank remembered it, too.
One of Apollo 8’s objectives was to investigate the effects of mass concentrations, or “mascons,” on a spacecraft’s orbit. These areas of increased density in the Moon’s crust, primarily caused by massive asteroid impacts, subtly altered a ship’s trajectory (by changing the gravity field) and, if not compensated for, would eventually cause it to crash into the lunar surface. As it looked now to Mission Control, the mascons were detectable, but their effect on Apollo 8 was slight. Future lunar modules, however, would be flying much lower, and be more subject to their influence.
As the spacecraft traveled yet again behind the Moon, one hour remained until the broadcast. Even now, the astronauts weren’t sure how they wanted to run it.
“I don’t think we ought to screw around with this,” Borman told his crewmates. “We’ve got to do it up right because there will be more people listening to this than ever listened to any other single person in history.”
They had long known that they would need words worthy of the moment. The astronauts had tossed around ideas in the weeks leading up to the flight, but none had seemed appropriate. They considered telling a Christmas story, but the flight was important not just to Christians but to all faiths, and to humanity. They thought about invoking Santa Claus, but that didn’t seem serious enough for such a historic occasion. Changing the words to “Jingle Bells” was silly. But they’d had no better ideas. And time was running out.
In early December, with just two weeks remaining until launch, Borman had asked a friend, a sensitive and intellectual man named Si Bourgin, for help. Bourgin put his mind to the problem but wasn’t happy with his ideas. In turn, he approached Joe Laitin, a former war correspondent, and gave him twenty-four hours to find the right words. Laitin worked deep into the night, also to no avail. At 3:30 A.M., Laitin’s wife, Christine, made a suggestion. It was her idea that was forwarded to Borman, who showed it to his crewmates. All three astronauts agreed that they’d found the right message. From that point forward, the men spoke about it to no one, not even their wives.
Inside Mission Control, every square foot was packed with NASA personnel. At their homes in Houston, the astronauts’ wives gathered around television sets with children, friends, and family, gifts for their husbands wrapped and placed under twinkling Christmas trees, awaiting their return. In sixty-four countries, a billion people—more than one-quarter of the world’s population—joined them, pushing close to their own televisions and radios, waiting to hear what the first men at the Moon would say on Christmas Eve.
At 8:30 P.M. Houston time, CBS cut away from The Doris Day Show to Walter Cronkite, and other American television networks also interrupted their normal programming. Four minutes later, dark horizontal lines wobbled on viewers’ screens. A small, bright orb shone in the upper left part of the picture—likely Earth, but no one could tell for sure.
“This is Apollo 8, coming to you live from the Moon,” Borman said.
He explained to viewers how the crew had spent Christmas Eve—doing experiments, taking photographs, firing their thrusters—and promised to show everyone a lunar sunset. But first, he wanted to talk about the place he and his crewmates had been circling for the past sixteen hours.
“The Moon is a different thing to each one of us. I think that each one of—each one carries his own impression of what he’s seen today. I know my own impression is that it’s a vast, lonely, forbidding type existence, or expanse, of nothing. It looks rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone, and it certainly would not appear to be a very inviting place to live or work. Jim, what have you thought most about?”
“Well, Frank, my thoughts were very similar,” Lovell said. “The vast loneliness up here of the Moon is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth. The Earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space.”
Anders chimed in.
“I think the thing that impressed me the most was the lunar sunrises and sunsets. These, in particular, bring out the stark nature of the terrain, and the long shadows really bring out the relief that is here and hard to see in this very bright surface that we’re going over right now.”
Suddenly NASA lost the picture from Apollo 8, and so did the rest of the world. But the audio remained clear, and Anders continued to describe some of the landmarks he was seeing as Mission Control struggled to regain the visual. Soon the picture returned, this time a view out a different window, one that showed the clear arc of the grayish-white Moon against the pitch-black lunar horizon. Anders described the various craters he could see as the spacecraft glided overhead.
“Actually, I think the best way to describe this area is a vastness of black and white, absolutely no color,” Lovell said.
“The sky up here is also a rather forbidding, foreboding expanse of blackness, with no stars visible when we’re flying over the Moon in daylight,” Anders added.
For the next several minutes, the astronauts continued to describe what they were seeing—mountains, craters, landmarks, the brilliance of the Sun’s reflection. At one point, Anders became so enthused about describing the evolution of craters that Borman had to remind him, off air, “Hey, Bill, you’re not talking to geologists.” Anders changed windows for a better view, only to have the audio nearly overcome by static as the spacecraft flew over the Sea of Crises. Soon, however, things cleared up near the Sea of Fertility.
“How’s your picture quality, Houston?” Anders asked.
“This is phenomenal!” CapCom Mattingly replied.
“We’re now going over…approaching one of our future landing sites,” Anders said, “selected in this smooth region to…called the Sea of Tranquillity…smooth in order to make it easy for the initial landing attempts in order to preclude having to dodge mountains. Now you can see the long shadows of the lunar sunrise.”
The scheduled television time was winding down, and there was one important thing left to do. As the spacecraft moved across the Sea of Tranquillity, Borman motioned to Anders.
“We are now approaching lunar sunrise,” Anders said, “and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.”
No one at Mission Control, or anyone else, had any idea what these men were about to say.
The astronauts’ wives and children and friends leaned forward.
While the Moon continued to move across television screens, Anders began.
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness.”
Anders was reading the first words from Genesis, the first book of the Bible.
Lovell continued the passage.
“And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’ And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.”
Borman continued.
“And God said, ‘Let the waters under the Heaven be gathered together unto one place. And let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. And God called the dry land Earth. And the gathering together of the waters He called seas. And God saw that it was good.”
Borman paused.
“And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.”
A moment later, television screens around the world went dark.
Inside Mission Control, no one moved. Then, one after another, these scientists and engineers in Houston began to cry.
The agency had allowed the crew to choose what to say to the world on Christmas Eve—no oversight, no committees, not even a quick glance on the day before they’d departed. It had come as a complete surprise to them.
In his studio at CBS, Walter Cronkite fought back tears as he came back on the air.
At a house party in Connecticut, novelist William Styron told himself to remember the scene. He had had to persuade his host, the composer Leonard Bernstein, to watch the broadcast. Bernstein considered the space program an overhyped waste of vast American treasure, but he’d bent to the wishes of his guest. As the astronauts read from Genesis, the raucous party went still. Styron would never forget the emotion on Bernstein’s face during Borman’s parting words, a look he would describe years later as “depthless and inexpressible.”
Watching in Houston, Susan Borman wept. Marilyn Lovell gathered up her kids and they walked, not drove, past the holiday lights in Timber Cove, slow enough to remember them all.Valerie Anders told her children, “That was for the whole world.”
Across much of the globe, people streamed outside and looked up, trying to pick out the three men who’d just spoken to them, knowing it was impossible, but trying all the same.