THE WORLD OUTSIDE THE SPACECRAFT LIT up even before the astronauts expected it.
“I’ve never seen it this bright before!” Borman told his crewmates. “You got zero point oh-five g yet?”
“Zero point oh-five g!” Lovell answered, checking a readout on the console.
“Okay, we got it!” Anders called.
The spacecraft neared 25,000 miles per hour.
“Hang on!” Borman yelled.
Out his window, Lovell could see a pink glow turning brighter by the second, and he felt the g-forces building. Temperatures rose fast around the command module as it collided with the atmosphere. The crew could only hope the heat shield would do its job; no manned ship had ever endured the heat loads Apollo 8 was about to experience.
A second later, Houston lost contact with the spacecraft as Apollo 8 became enveloped in ionized gas. On CBS, Walter Cronkite narrated over an animated rendering of the command module entering a fiery atmosphere. At their homes, the astronauts’ wives watched the broadcasts, willing their husbands home in these hand-drawn capsules.
Inside the spacecraft, the g-forces increased fast.
“They’re building up!” Lovell called.
“Call out the g’s,” Borman told him.
“We’re one g,” Lovell answered.
The men’s labored breathing could be heard on their intercom system as the forces multiplied.
“Ohhh!” Lovell groaned. “Five!” he called, straining to speak. “Six!”
Cronkite explained to the nation what the astronauts were enduring.
“Seven g’s is seven times their weight on Earth, so these one-hundred-fifty-pound astronauts weigh something like one thousand fifty pounds, would be the effect as they are pressed against their couches.”
Apollo 8 crashed even harder into the atmosphere. Despite the g-forces making it difficult to move, or even breathe, the ride was smoother than on lift-off, and the astronauts could still look out their windows and see the pink gases of the ionizing atmosphere turn a deeper reddish-blue; to Anders, he and his crewmates looked like flies caught in the middle of a blowtorch flame. In the distance, a Pan Am pilot flying in the darkness from Hawaii to Fiji watched the fireball created by Apollo 8 and estimated its cometlike tail to be more than one hundred miles long. Moments later, at maximum g-force load, the inferno surrounding the astronauts turned pure white as the temperature at the surface of the spacecraft rose to half that of the surface of the Sun. Out his window, Anders saw a terrifying sight—baseball-sized chunks of the heat shield flying off, many times larger than the grain-sized pieces NASA expected—and he waited for the heat to sear through the spacecraft and melt the crew.
But Apollo 8 did not melt. Instead, after about a minute of this peak intensity, the onboard computer automatically began to roll the spacecraft. Though the ship had no wings, its designed shape and offset center of mass made it capable of lift if positioned correctly, and now it began to climb a bit back out of the atmosphere, lowering the g-forces and cooling down in the process.
“Cabin temperature is still holding real good,” Anders called to his crewmates, sounding a bit astonished and relieved. “Quite a ride, huh?”
“Damnedest thing I ever saw,” Borman said.
Three minutes after losing contact with the spacecraft, Houston began calling to the ship, but CapCom Ken Mattingly couldn’t get through. Apollo 8 had swooped back down for its second grind into the atmosphere. The crew held on.
“How much will this one go up, do you think?” Anders asked of the building g-forces.
“Three!” Lovell called.
Twenty seconds or so later, the spacecraft had been slowed by the atmosphere to suborbital speeds and began rolling one way, then the other, as the computer steered them toward the recovery ships. It had been nearly five minutes since the crew lost contact with Houston, but now Lovell began calling home.
“Houston, Apollo 8. Over.”
Mattingly made out the voice through the static.
“Go ahead, Apollo 8. Read you broken and loud.”
Borman jumped in.
“Roger. This is a real fireball.”
One hundred thousand feet below, the USS Yorktown found Apollo 8 on its radar. A minute later, the spacecraft was at an altitude of just 40,000 feet and plummeting at a speed of about 680 miles per hour.
At around 30,000 feet, an altitude sensor fired explosives to jettison the top of the heat shield at the pointy end of the spacecraft. A moment later, two drogue parachutes shot out of the ship, making a giant thwack that Borman heard as they streaked up into the sky. The ship jolted when their lines went taut. These were not the chutes that would lower the craft to the water, but rather the smaller ones designed to stabilize Apollo 8, to keep it from wobbling and make it ready for the primary chutes. By the time they were out, the spacecraft was just 20,000 feet above the Pacific, but now its descent rate had slowed. Inside the cabin, an air vent opened to equalize inside and outside pressures.
Falling at a speed of 300 miles per hour, Apollo 8 rode gravity until an altitude of 10,000 feet, when the three main 80-foot parachutes were deployed. When their lines pulled tight, the spacecraft jerked hard. Anders worried that he’d felt only one jerk, not three. He knew that the Soviets had experienced trouble with their parachutes and that the technology, in general, was unreliable. Neither he nor the others could see the parachutes in the dark, but when Borman and Lovell checked their instruments, they could tell that the craft’s sink rate had declined significantly, indicating proper functioning of all three chutes.
With the red-and-white parachutes fully blossomed, Apollo 8’s descent rate fell to just 19 miles per hour. On board, thrusters were ignited and their tanks purged of propellant to prevent harmful substances from polluting the splashdown and recovery area. The fire spitting from the burning thrusters lit the still-dark sky, giving the astronauts their first view of their parachutes, and good reason to believe they were floating down as planned. Under the chutes’ risers, the capsule was tipped on an angle to allow it to knife into the water rather than belly-flop onto its blunt base. At an altitude of just 8,000 feet, Apollo 8 was less than five minutes from scheduled impact with the water.
Moments later, one of the recovery aircraft made radio contact with the spacecraft.
“Welcome home, gentlemen,” a crewman called to the astronauts, “and we’ll have you aboard in no time.”
At three minutes to splashdown, recovery helicopters spotted flashing beacons from the falling spacecraft. Apollo 8 was almost directly over the Yorktown, a bull’s-eye of almost unimaginable accuracy.
“Stand by for Earth landing!” Borman called from his commander’s seat.
At their homes in Houston, the astronauts’ wives stared at their televisions. For Valerie, it was thrilling to hear that the parachutes had opened—that meant Apollo 8 was somehow reconnected to Earth. But she thought, “They’re heading for a big, dark, rough ocean, and the ships still don’t know where they are.”
At one thousand feet altitude, radio traffic from the recovery forces grew so voluminous that the astronauts couldn’t communicate with one another.
“Turn him down!” Anders told his partners. “Christ, we can’t get anything done.”
Just a hundred or so feet remained. The crew braced themselves, not knowing exactly when impact might come.
Borman called to Lovell and Anders.
“Maybe we better get these—”
At that moment, Apollo 8 came in flat, not on its intended angled knife-edge, and bashed into the Pacific Ocean, its blunt end colliding against the upswell of a wave, just about the most violent impact possible. Inundated by water (and perhaps stunned by the crash), Borman could not flip the switch to cut the parachutes from the capsule, and Apollo 8 was dragged over by its chutes and turned upside down in the ocean. None of the men was ready for an impact that jarring; nothing in simulation had come close. By the time Borman came around a few seconds later and cut the lines, all three men were hanging upside-down in their straps. Garbage that had collected in the cabin streamed down on them, and water poured over their bodies and faces.
Right away, the crew believed the spacecraft had split open from the impact and was flooding with seawater. Anders got ready to pounce on the hatch and open it, then get his crewmates and himself out before the ship sank—they’d trained for that kind of emergency—but a moment later he could see that no more water was running in, and he realized that the crew had been doused not by seawater but by condensation around the various cold parts of the spacecraft’s interior. Anders could only smile at the picture: three conquering heroes returned from the Moon, hanging upside down and dripping in garbage.
Borman reached for a button and inflated three large balloons, which flipped the spacecraft back over, blunt side down. The men were now right side up in their seats, but it was too late. Sickened by the impact, the high seas, and the sudden inversion, Borman vomited all over his crewmates. It had been bad enough on the outbound journey when Borman threw up, but now his crewmates let him have it.
“Typical Army guy!” the two Navy men yelled at their commander. “Can’t handle the water!”
Television cameras showed live images from the recovery ship and one of the rescue helicopters. Cronkite removed his glasses, as if he couldn’t quite believe the journey had ended.
“The spacecraft, Apollo 8, is back, and what a remarkable trip and remarkable conclusion,” he told the nation. “The spacecraft has landed within two and three quarters miles of the carrier…Apollo 8 has ended up to this point as perfectly as it began.”
At home, the astronauts’ wives were overcome by joy, relief, and wonder. Their children hugged their crying mothers. At Mission Control, applause broke out, and a fifteen-foot-long American flag was unfurled, one that eclipsed the giant wall map that had been used for the mission. All three flight shifts were present to experience the moment. “The Star-Spangled Banner” played in everyone’s headsets.
“It is a veritable roar in here,” the public affairs officer announced. “The room is awash with cigar smoke. A number of congratulatory messages are coming across this console…I’ve never seen a degree of this emotional outpouring in any previous mission, including Alan Shepard’s…I’ve seen rallies in locker rooms after championship games, happy politicians after elections, but never, none of them do justice to the spirit pervading this room.”
Some of the controllers and personnel had also brought along triangular flags with a white numeral 1 sewn in, to indicate victory over the Soviets. Someone at NASA, however, suggested that that might not be the most magnanimous of displays, and the men agreed. Instead, they waved American flags, which to many of them said it all.
In Rome, Pope Paul VI, who’d watched the splashdown on television, knelt in a prayer of gratitude. In Communist Cuba, state news covered the return of the spacecraft. World leaders began writing notes of congratulations to America.
In the capsule, Borman, Lovell, and Anders were still covered in vomit and garbage. The spacecraft had come through unimaginable heat with almost no effect on cabin temperatures, but now, bobbing on the waves, it began to grow hot inside, likely from retained heat sizzling upon impact with the water. Temperatures soon subsided, however, and Anders began to appreciate how beautifully the heat shield had worked. The huge chunks he’d seen flying off during reentry had really been just granular in size; surrounded by an ionized haze, and streaking by at thousands of miles per hour, they had appeared through his window like fiery baseballs.
The crew worked to remove their straps while helicopters circled above. Recovery forces itched to get to work, but NASA protocol required them to wait for the break of dawn and the onset of natural light, in about forty-five minutes, so all they could do was hover, close in, and shine lights around the bobbing capsule. Men armed with rifles scanned the waters to make sure no sharks were in the area during recovery time.
Just before first light, several swimmers dropped from their chopper into the water. When they reached Apollo 8, they affixed an inflatable collar to the spacecraft, stabilizing it and providing a platform on which to step and work. Through a window, one of the swimmers flashed a thumbs-up to Anders, who returned the gesture. While the Yorktown moved toward the recovery scene, one of the helicopter pilots radioed the astronauts with a question.
“Is the Moon really made of green cheese?”
“No,” Anders replied. “It’s made of American cheese.”
Soon after, the Yorktown called to the capsule asking what the astronauts might like for breakfast. The answer was unanimous: biscuits, steak, and eggs.
As daylight broke, three swimmers worked to open the spacecraft’s hatch. When it lifted, one of the swimmers stuck his head inside, only to recoil as if repelled by a force field. He soon found his feet and, along with the others, helped the crew of Apollo 8 out of the capsule. As they stepped onto the inflatable platform around the spacecraft, none of the three astronauts could imagine a smell sweeter than the fresh sea air—a smell they’d known forever and yet was new to them today.
A helicopter dropped a life raft into the water, and one by one, the astronauts climbed inside. The helicopter then lowered a basket-shaped net for the crew; one at a time, they were hoisted into the chopper. Anders was the last to go. Looking up at the helicopter, it struck him that almost everything on Apollo 8 had been designed with great redundancy, yet here he was, at the very end of his journey, hanging over the ocean by a single wire.
It was 11:14 A.M. Houston time when the helicopter closed its door. Looking back down toward his spacecraft, Borman gave thanks to the scalded machine, an exquisite piece of design and daring. A moment later, the chopper dipped its shoulder into the yellow-pink new sky and headed for the Yorktown. On the carrier, hundreds of crew dressed in Navy whites jammed the decks, eager for a glimpse of the returning pioneers.
On board the helicopter, a crewman handed Borman an electric razor. NASA had figured out how to get three men to the Moon and back again but still hadn’t perfected technology that would allow men to shave without polluting the command module with stubble. When Borman had asked to arrive at the aircraft carrier clean-shaven, a portable electric razor on board the chopper was the best NASA could offer. Soon, Borman was whisker free.
On television sets at their homes, Susan, Marilyn, and Valerie watched as the helicopter slowed to a hover over the deck of the Yorktown and then set down. Ship’s crew ran out, ducking their heads, to secure the chopper to the deck. After the rotors stopped, a short stair platform was brought to the aircraft door, and a red carpet was unrolled at the foot of the stairs.
The door opened and the three astronauts stepped forward, first Borman, then Lovell, then Anders. They smiled and waved, overwhelmed by the roar of the hundreds of sailors on board the ship, each of whom was away from home for Christmas, just as they were. A giant American flag held by the Navy color guard danced in the ocean breeze. In the sound and the moment, Borman’s mind traveled back in time, over all the training and planning that had been done for Apollo 8, over the thousands of people who had worked so hard for this audacious mission, and he thought about how so few of them would ever be recognized like this, and how so many of them deserved to be.
Anders lost his balance for a moment when the astronauts finally made their way down the stairs, not an unexpected result after more than six days of weightlessness. Watching at home, Valerie thought that her husband looked skinny. It was the smiles that convinced the women that their husbands really were home safe. By now, Marilyn was so spent from the stress of the past week that she had little voice left and even less energy, but she couldn’t remember ever feeling so happy. “He’s beautiful,” she did manage to tell reporters. “I know that’s no way to describe a man, but he looks just beautiful.”
At a nearby microphone, the Yorktown’s commander, Captain John Fifield, welcomed and congratulated the men. Taking the microphone, Borman addressed the ship. Millions of people watched around the world.
“We’re just very happy to be here and appreciate all your efforts, and I know you had to stay out here over Christmas and that made it tough…We can’t tell you how much we really appreciate you being here, and how proud it is for us to participate in this event, because thousands of people made this possible, and I guess we’re all just part of the group. Thank you very much.”
Surrounded by sailors, the astronauts made their way across the flight deck, then down an elevator to the hangar deck and into the ship’s sick bay for a medical evaluation. For his part, Anders was in no shape for an inspection. As part of his plan to avoid defecating in space, he’d asked NASA doctors to prescribe a low-residue diet before and during the flight, and his plan had worked so well that he hadn’t had a bowel movement during the entire mission. Now he needed to find a toilet.
He located a cabin just in time. As nature began to have its say, there was a pounding on the bathroom door.
“Major Anders! Quick! You’ve got to come to flag bridge. The president is going to call in five minutes. Move it!”
Anders was torn between his duties. He could only answer to the higher power.
“I’m not going!” Anders yelled to the man. “Tell him I’m on the toilet and I’m not going.”
There was no way Anders could risk losing control of himself while talking to the president of the United States. A minute later, one of the ship’s doctors ran in with a portable telephone and passed it through the bathroom door to Anders. Borman and Lovell picked up their own extensions, likely in sick bay, surrounded by physicians, stethoscopes, and syringes.
Less than a month remained in Johnson’s presidency. Five years earlier, he’d taken over from his slain predecessor, a president who’d made an impossible promise: to land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. Johnson might have been forgiven for backing off Kennedy’s commitment. Instead, he’d charged forward.
“You’ve seen what man has really never seen before,” Johnson said to the astronauts. “You’ve taken all of us all over the world and into a new era. And my thoughts this morning went back to more than ten years ago…when we saw Sputnik racing through the skies, and we realized that America had a big job ahead of it. It gave me so much pleasure to know that you men have done a large part of that job.”
And it gave Borman, especially, the same kind of pleasure. He’d gone to the Moon because of his love of country, and because he felt it was important to beat the Soviets in the race to get there. He’d always told himself his mission wouldn’t be done until he and his crewmates were standing on the carrier deck. Putting down the telephone after speaking with President Johnson, he knew he’d made it.
After the call, seventeen doctors, researchers, and medical technicians inspected the astronauts, taking blood, conducting tests, making sure all was well. Even a psychiatrist got his turn, looking for signs that such profound separation from home and family and Earth might have disturbed the men’s psyches. Other than some stiff legs—and Lovell’s lingering tendency to let go of things in midair and expect them to float—everyone checked out fine. Following their medical examinations, the crew were allowed to phone their wives; even from a distance of several thousand miles and through the thick static, these women never sounded so close.
The astronauts made their way back to the flight deck to thank the crew of the Yorktown and to meet with the swimmers who’d made the recovery. While shaking hands, Anders recognized the man who’d first opened the hatch of the spacecraft.
“That was really great, Corporal,” Anders said. “I noticed, though, that when you poked your head in you fell backward. Was it the way we looked?”
“No, sir,” the man replied. “It was the way you smelled.”
The astronauts had a good laugh about that one.
By now, it had been several hours since splashdown. In Houston, Susan, Marilyn, and Valerie tried to adjust to the idea that they needn’t worry anymore, that today was now just a regular Friday. At Mission Control, it was finally time to celebrate. Consoles were unplugged and data secured, and many of the controllers and managers returned to the haunts that had been bridges for the endless nights and years they’d spent working to get to the Moon. Some went to the Singing Wheel, some to the Flintlock, others to the Holiday Inn across from NASA in Houston. Most everyone drank and smoked cigars and raised toasts. At the Flintlock, John Aaron and Rod Loe, who’d worked with Anders to write mission rules and procedures, stood at the bottom of the stairs, not yet ready to go up and join the party.
“What are you guys doing?” a friend asked. “Why aren’t you upstairs?”
Loe thought it over for a moment.
“We’re just standing here thinking how proud we are to be Americans,” he said.
Borman, Lovell, and Anders dined on lobster tails and roast beef that evening with Captain Fifield, then collapsed in comfortable beds made up with crisp, fresh sheets, getting their first good sleep in more than a week. The next morning, they enjoyed steak and eggs with some of the Yorktown’s officers.
That day, December 28, the astronauts boarded a carrier plane and flew from the Yorktown to Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. From there, they transferred to a C-141 transport plane for a flight of more than eight hours to Houston. For Anders, it would be the longest flight he’d ever endured other than the one aboard Apollo 8.
The plane reached Ellington Air Force Base after 2:00 A.M. on Sunday, December 29. Hundreds from NASA, and three thousand well-wishers, many holding banners with congratulatory messages, were there to greet the astronauts, who were clean-shaven, dressed in blue coveralls, and wearing baseball caps. Under a half Moon, Borman, Lovell, and Anders found their wives and children, gave them red and purples leis from Hawaii, and pulled them close. Eight-year-old Gayle Anders gazed at her father, grateful to have him back and not sure she should ever let go. The Borman boys wore ties and beamed at their dad. The Lovell kids orbited their father, pushing close for his attention, never staying on his far side for too long.
Borman stepped up to a microphone, his wife’s red lipstick smudged across his face. “Thank you for coming out so early in the morning to welcome us,” he said. Lovell added, “At two in the morning, I expected to get in my old blue bomb and go home.” (Lovell’s “blue bomb” was the family’s no-frills 1962 Chevy Biscayne.) The astronauts thanked the crowd and their families at a microphone, greeted NASA’s managers and controllers, and smiled for photographers. One boy in the crowd told his friend, “I know they didn’t have radiation because I just shook their hands.” Then it was time for the astronauts to go home.
But that wasn’t proving so easy. The crowd pushed forward, surrounding the crewmen and their families, thrusting dollar bills to be autographed. In the surge, Bill Anders became separated from Valerie; NASA staff scurried to reunite the couple, but no one seemed to mind such a short separation, least of all the two of them.
Each of the families finally climbed into their car and drove off. In their rearview mirrors, the astronauts could see throngs of people waving goodbye until they’d pulled out onto the Houston roads and there was only black night behind them.
None of the men said much about his trip as he drove home. They just said how happy they were to be back, that all had gone as perfectly as could be imagined, and that they felt lucky. None of them was inclined to philosophize about the trip—not yet, anyway. Over the years, these men had become expert at coming home from missions, forgetting about the risks they’d just undertaken, getting on with their day. No other kind of men could have climbed into such unproven flying machines. These were the kind of men NASA had always wanted.
When Borman, Lovell, and Anders opened their front doors, they found Christmas trees still glowing and presents waiting for them, and they knew that this was just how their homes had looked on Christmas Eve when they had been 240,000 miles away at the Moon, and they knew that this was how their homes would have looked no matter how long it might have taken them to return.
The next morning, as the Bormans sat down for breakfast at the kitchen table, Frank asked the boys about football and hunting, and demanded to know why dog food had been left in the bowl while he was gone. As for Edwin’s broken thumb—by the look on their dad’s face, they knew there had better be a good explanation for that. When the family opened presents, Susan found a new dress Frank had bought for her before he’d left for the Moon. He’d always loved shopping with her, and knew her style and size.
In the days that followed, it seemed the world talked only about Apollo 8. A New York Times editorial called it “the most fantastic voyage of all times.” The Washington Evening Star announced that “Man’s horizon now reaches to infinity.” The Los Angeles Times said the mission “boggles the mind.” And Time magazine rushed to change its iconic Man of the Year cover from THE DISSENTER to ASTRONAUTS ANDERS, BORMAN, AND LOVELL.
Even the Soviet Union could not hide its admiration. Apollo 8, the nation said, “goes beyond the limits of a national achievement and marks a stage in the development of the universal culture of Earthmen.” In a congratulatory note, several Soviet cosmonauts lauded their counterparts for “the precision of your joint work and your courage.”
Telegrams for the astronauts poured in by the thousands. One, however, stood out from the rest. It came not from a world leader or celebrity or other luminary, but from an anonymous stranger.
It had traveled over whites-only lunch counters in the South, through jungles in Vietnam where young men fell, over the coffins of two of the America’s great civil rights leaders. It had blown across streets bloodied by protesters and police, past a segregationist presidential campaign, into radios playing songs of alienation and revolt. It had made its way through ten million American souls who didn’t have enough to eat, alongside generations that no longer trusted each other, into a White House where a no-longer-loved president slept.
It read:
THANKS. YOU SAVED 1968.