ON BOARD APOLLO 8, BORMAN WASN’T certain that the crew’s message had even been heard.
“Did you read everything that we had to say there?” he radioed to Houston.
“Loud and clear,” Mattingly confirmed. “Thank you for a real good show.”
That settled, Borman got down to the matter that had concerned him for months: Trans Earth Injection. Perhaps more than any other part of the mission, Trans Earth Injection, or TEI, had haunted NASA managers, planners, and controllers. Without it, Apollo 8 could not return home.
Since entering lunar orbit, the spacecraft had been traveling steadily at about 3,600 miles per hour. And unless it could gain enough speed to overcome the lunar gravity holding it in orbit, it would never leave the Moon. To do that, Apollo 8 would need to increase its speed to about 6,000 miles per hour. Onboard thrusters weren’t nearly powerful enough to provide that kind of boost. Only the SPS engine—the same one the crew had used to enter lunar orbit—had the muscle it would take.
As before, the engine needed to burn for just the right amount of time, with just the right amount of thrust, and in the right direction, to send the spacecraft and its crew home safely. If it burned too long or too strong (or both), Apollo 8 could be hurled off into space without enough propellant to correct the bad trajectory and set course back to Earth, and would be doomed to pursue its own orbit around the Sun. If it burned too short or too weak (or both), the spacecraft could coast off into space without sufficient momentum either to return to the Moon or to fall back to Earth, or it might crash into the lunar surface, adding another crater to the Moon.
But perhaps the worst result would come if the engine failed to light at all. In that case, Apollo 8 would remain a possession of the Moon for eternity.
NASA had confidence in the SPS engine. While it had not performed well in its brief test firing at eleven hours into the flight, it had functioned twice without issue at the Moon, when it was used to enter, and then to circularize, lunar orbit. Still, that was no guarantee. With the TEI maneuver just three hours away, Kraft’s dread began mounting. Rockets, he knew, were complex, temperamental, violent machines. They failed, blew up, or shut down, often without warning. In the harsh environment of space, a rocket’s highly pressurized mélange of moving mechanical parts, which generated intense friction and heat and depended on proper lubrication and coolants and a universe of electrical connections, could go wrong in any number of ways.
While the astronauts worked to pack away loose items and prepare for TEI, Mission Control examined data from the spacecraft and its systems to determine whether Apollo 8 was ready. They broadcast their decision seventy-one minutes later, after the ship had emerged from the Moon’s eastern limb.
“Okay, Apollo 8,” Mattingly radioed to the crew. “We have reviewed all your systems. You have a Go for TEI.”
The maneuver was now just one hour and fifteen minutes away. The crew began its final preparatory procedures, running down checklists while straining to keep the bright Sun from their eyes. Much of the exchange between the men was technical and rote, indecipherable to a lay listener, but comforting in the way its call-and-response rhythms sounded like a preacher and his congregation:
Anders: Okay, let’s go to P40: P30, complete; CMC, On.
Borman: CMC is On.
Anders: ISS, On; spacecraft SCS, operating.
Borman: Right.
Anders: Test the Caution/Warning lamp; EMS mode, Standby.
Borman: Yes.
Anders: Function, delta-v set.
Borman: Right.
Anders: And have you set 1586.8?
Borman: Right.
Anders: Okay, EMS mode, Standby; delta-v set; set delta-vc.
Borman: 3501.8.
Lovell: I’ll check: 3501.8.
Borman: Okay.
Anders: EMS Function, delta -V; Nonessential Bus, Main B; cycling cryo fans—good a time to do it as any.
Anders: BMAG Mode, three, Rate two.
Borman: Rate two.
Lovell: Delta-vcg CSM.
It was now past eleven o’clock in Houston. Less than an hour remained until TEI. If all went according to plan, the SPS engine would fire at 12:11 A.M. Houston time, in the earliest minutes of Christmas morning.
At the Borman home, Susan and her sons would listen to the squawk box in front of a Life magazine reporter and photographer, and where NASA would know where to find them if something went wrong. After Valerie Anders put her children to bed, she drove over to the Borman house and joined Susan in the kitchen. Valerie and Susan liked each other, but they might have preferred to be alone at a time like this. NASA public affairs, however, had arranged this photo op, and the women went along with it. Marilyn had a touch of the flu and didn’t attend.
As their lives in the public eye demanded of them, both women were dressed beautifully. Susan wore an ice-blue dress, a beige cardigan draped over her shoulders, a bangle bracelet on her wrist, and pearls around her neck. Valerie was in a robin’s-egg-blue dress with scalloped rickrack at the neckline, a white cardigan embroidered with colorful flowers on her shoulders, and an elegant watch. Each had her hair done in a beauty shop set. A giant lunar map lay spread over Susan’s table, a pack of cigarettes on top of that. At her own home, Marilyn stayed close to her squawk box and her friends, trying to stay as optimistic as Jim had seemed when he’d told her in August that everything would be okay.
As the wives settled in, Mission Control began to fill up with off-duty controllers, media, and others, until the place was again packed shoulder to shoulder, just as it had been when Apollo 8 first disappeared behind the Moon. Everyone there knew what to expect next.
At 11:42 P.M., Apollo 8 would begin its final scheduled pass behind the Moon, losing contact with Houston. Twenty-nine minutes later, while still out of communications, the SPS engine would fire, increasing the spacecraft’s speed enough to leave its orbit and set course for Earth and its splashdown point in the Pacific Ocean. It would have been easier for the flight controllers had TEI occurred on the near side, where they could monitor the ship and talk to the crew, but orbital mechanics dictated that the break for home occur while Apollo 8 was on the far side. By design, the rocket would burn for about three minutes and eighteen seconds. If all went well, Houston could expect the spacecraft to emerge around the near side at about 12:19 A.M. If the rocket had malfunctioned, or had failed to fire, it would come out later than that, perhaps by as much as eight minutes. NASA possessed some of the world’s most powerful computers, but it would be a simple clock that first told them whether their men were coming home.
Ten minutes now remained until Apollo 8 would disappear behind the lunar far side. Kraft and Low stood together in silence. If something happened to the astronauts—if the ship blew up or crashed into the Moon or flung itself off on an unrecoverable trajectory—NASA couldn’t do anything about it, and they wouldn’t even know about it until after it happened.
In 1961, Kraft had been the flight controller on Mercury-Redstone 2, the first planned launch of a hominid into space. The passenger was a chimpanzee named Ham, and Kraft had become attached to him. By the time the rocket launched, Kraft regarded Ham as crew, and he celebrated Ham’s safe return.
In the seven years since, Kraft had felt a personal responsibility to every man who risked his life aboard a NASA spacecraft. But all of them had been just a few hours from home in case of emergency. Now Kraft was about to say goodbye to three extraordinary men he both liked and admired, powerless to help them when they were days away from Earth, when they might need help most.
The countdown to loss of signal went under a minute. Susan chewed on her pearls while Valerie took several deep breaths.
At 11:42 P.M. Houston time, Apollo 8 slipped behind the Moon, and radio contact with Earth went dead.
Each of the astronauts was ready to come home. For Borman, America’s mission to beat the Soviets to the Moon wouldn’t be complete until the crew had returned safely. For Lovell, making it back meant a chance to return to the Moon, not just to see it but to walk on it. Anders, who’d been so interested in lunar geology, had seen all there was to see of Earth’s satellite and didn’t think he’d overlooked anything during his ten times around. All three of them missed their families.
“It’s been a pretty fantastic week, hasn’t it?” Borman asked his crewmates.
“It’s going to get better,” Lovell said.
“I hope this baby holds out for another two and a half days,” Anders said. “It sure has performed admirably, hasn’t it?”
None of the men had dwelled on what awaited them if the SPS engine didn’t perform. If test pilots and fighter pilots thought like that, they would never climb into a cockpit. But none of the men could say he hadn’t thought about being marooned in lunar orbit, or how he’d spend his remaining time—perhaps four days—before dying. In fact, Borman had been asked about it before launch.
“I don’t know how I’d want to spend my last days,” he’d told reporters. “I think that’s something you decide when it happens. If the engine doesn’t work, we’ve had a bad day.”
NASA had considered a plan for a lunar rescue mission should something catastrophic happen. It involved sending a single astronaut to the Moon in his own command and service module, atop his own Saturn V, which would stand ready to launch at Cape Kennedy. Once in lunar orbit, rendezvous and rescue would involve complex maneuvers that would also place the rescuing astronaut at risk. Such a contingency would add significantly to the agency’s already massive budget. In the end, the idea was scrapped.
NASA hadn’t bothered training the astronauts on how to handle being stranded at the Moon, or being flung off irretrievably toward the Sun, or any other hopeless scenario. It hadn’t supplied them with a suicide pill or any other means of putting an end to their lives. But the crew knew how things would end for them. About a week after TEI failed, the canisters of lithium hydroxide used to purge exhaled carbon dioxide from the cabin would run out, causing the men to grow drowsy, fall asleep, and suffocate.
None of them intended to waste that week, though they did not discuss the matter aloud. Almost certainly, they would have continued to make observations of the Moon, providing as much detail as possible for Houston. They would also have continued to wear a biomedical harness, to give NASA and its doctors information about what happens as one meets his end in space. And they would have radioed home to say goodbye to their parents, wives, and children, and told them how much they loved them.
But they might not have waited to suffocate.
Satisfied that their work had been done, the crew likely would have decided together to shut down their communications, then vent the spacecraft by opening a pressure relief valve. Doing so would cause an immediate loss of oxygen in the cabin, a fast loss of consciousness, and a painless death.
For now, the astronauts could only hope that that wouldn’t be necessary.
Twenty minutes remained until the SPS engine was scheduled to fire for TEI. Ordinary people might use this time to say something profound, or perhaps to bid their companions goodbye in case things went bad. But NASA had selected Borman, Lovell, and Anders for a reason: This rare breed of man could, at once, love his wife and children and life with all his heart, yet still climb atop an unproven rocket and fly to the Moon. So as the clock counted down to ignition, it wasn’t mortality and love these men were discussing.
“Tell you one thing these flights are good for,” Borman said. “An old fatty like me, I bet I’ve lost a lot of weight. I didn’t eat much those first two days, and I didn’t—didn’t even get much to eat today.”
“Pretty sunrise,” Anders remarked.
Inside Mission Control, there was little anyone could do but wait. Soon, people began talking and milling about.
That made Kraft furious. He got on his intercom and told anyone who could hear him to shut up so that he could pray or do whatever the hell else he could dream up to make sure Apollo 8 came out on the other side of the Moon when it was supposed to.
A few minutes later, the clocks in Mission Control read midnight. It was now Christmas Day in Houston, much of America, and the world. No one had ever been farther from home on this important family day than Borman, Lovell, and Anders.
From their windows, which faced toward the lunar surface, it appeared to the astronauts as if they would be headed for trouble when the rocket lit.
“It looks to me like I’m going to burn right into the ground,” Borman said.
But the men didn’t have time to worry about that. They’d long since maneuvered the spacecraft to the attitude NASA had calculated. They had faith that the agency had gotten it right.
Just thirty seconds remained until TEI.
“Flight recorder going to record,” Anders called.
He’d made this flight believing he had a one-third chance of dying. Trans Earth Injection had been a major part of that calculus.
“Stand by to start ullage,” Lovell called.
Lovell believed that at certain points in life, a person just had to have faith.
“Two valves,” Borman called.
Borman had come for America, because he believed it was the greatest country on Earth and he would have died in order to protect it.
In Mission Control, people could barely breathe.
It was this moment that had so shaken James Webb when he heard of Low’s plan. It wasn’t just that the mission allowed only four months’ preparation rather than the usual year and a half, or that it required manning a rocket that had flown only twice (and experienced myriad problems the second time), or that the crew would have no backup if the SPS engine failed, or that so much would have to be done for the very first time. What had shaken Webb most deeply was the idea that if the crew of Apollo 8 were stranded in lunar orbit on December 25, no one would ever look at Christmas, or the Moon, the same way again.
Five seconds remained until Trans Earth Injection.
Inside the spacecraft, the number 99 flashed on a display, asking the crew for the go-ahead to light the SPS engine and begin the burn. If no one pressed the Proceed key, ignition would not occur.
Lovell looked to Borman, and Borman nodded.
Lovell reached forward.
He pressed Proceed.
And then there was only silence.