Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  The only way to do that was to fire the SPS engine against the direction of its travel, for just the right amount of time—about four minutes—and with just the right amount of thrust. If the engine fired for too short a period, or without enough thrust, the spacecraft might still slingshot around the Moon but emerge on an improper trajectory, one that might cause it to burn up on reentry into the atmosphere or miss Earth entirely. Or it might be cast out into space without enough power or propellant to reverse course and come back. Or it might enter a lunar orbit off-kilter enough to cause it to crash into the Moon. If the engine fired for too long, or with too much thrust, the results might be even worse. That would slow down the spacecraft so much that the Moon’s gravity would overcome the ship and cause it to plummet into the lunar surface. The SPS was the same engine that had failed to build up proper thrust on its test fire eleven hours into the flight, owing to the suspected helium bubble in a propellant line. Kraft and the controllers in Houston believed the problem had worked itself out, but that was just a best guess. They wouldn’t know for sure until the astronauts tried to light the engine again behind the Moon. No aspect of the Lunar Orbit Insertion maneuver was easy. In training, the crew and controllers crashed into the Moon time and time again. Sometimes controllers became so anxious that they aborted prematurely or took needless emergency action, fracturing their confidence and planting doubts about their ability to work as a single cohesive unit. So shaken did some controllers become that they sometimes denied they’d made a mistake. To Kraft, that was even worse than the error. When denials happened, he’d stop the session, take the controller aside, and say, “I don’t want any bullshit from you anymore. If you make a mistake, you say you made a mistake.” Kraft demanded truth, and he demanded that everyone perform the maneuver again and again and again. With a few hours to go, he believed his team was ready. Lunar Orbit Insertion involved an emotional component, too. After flying past the leading hemisphere of the onrushing Moon, the spacecraft would disappear behind its far side and lose contact with Earth, as all signals to and from the ship would be blocked by the Moon. For about thirty-five minutes, no one at Mission Control would have any idea whether the SPS engine had fired or performed well; no one would be able to monitor the spacecraft or its systems, no one would be able to talk to the astronauts. Controllers could only watch their clocks and hope Apollo 8 emerged from the far side exactly when it was supposed to. If it came out any earlier or later than that, something had gone wrong.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Pacing the back row at Mission Control, the lead flight director, Cliff Charlesworth, who was off duty at the time, kept thinking, I know all our guidance systems are accurate, and we tracked it properly, and all the mathematicians in the world have looked at this thing. But sixty-nine miles is pretty close… In a back room, John Mayer, chief of the Mission Planning and Analysis Division, began to receive visitors—Bob Gilruth, George Low, and other top managers, who’d arrived with a pressing, semiserious question: “How sure are you we’re going to miss the Moon?” On board Apollo 8, the crew had the same concern. Their spacecraft was now traveling more than 5,000 miles per hour. For its part, the Moon, 2,160 miles in diameter, was moving at more than 2,000 miles per hour. Could anyone really guarantee the ship wasn’t going to end up smashing into the massive orb? At one console, Flight Dynamics Officer Ed Pavelka calculated the SPS burn data Apollo 8 required for its Lunar Orbit Insertion. Nearby, Jerry Bostick, chief of the flight dynamics program, the team responsible for the trajectory and guidance of the spacecraft, watched him check and recheck his calculations, not once or twice but nine or ten times, before passing them along to Carr for transmission to the astronauts. Five minutes remained until Apollo 8 met the Moon. At home, Susan, Marilyn, and Valerie hung on every word from the squawk box. “Apollo 8, Houston. Five minutes…all systems Go. Over,” Carr radioed to the crew. “Thank you. Houston, Apollo 8,” Borman replied. “Roger, Frank,” Carr said. “The custard is in the oven at three fifty. Over.” That was a secret message from Susan to Frank. Long ago, he’d told her, “You worry about the custard and I’ll worry about the flying”—separating their duties was the only way to survive the toll a test pilot’s career exacted from a marriage and family. She’d wanted to let him know that all was good at home at a time he might need to hear it most. “No comprendo,” Borman told Carr. Susan couldn’t tell whether Frank hadn’t understood the words or had forgotten the reference. All she knew for sure was that she couldn’t reach him. Two minutes remained until the spacecraft, now moving at 5,125 miles per hour, went behind the Moon. Since lift-off, Apollo 8 had traveled 240,000 miles, and the Moon had traveled 150,000 miles, to make this rendezvous. “One minute to LOS [loss of signal],” Carr radioed to Apollo 8. “All systems Go.” “We’ll see you on the other side,” Lovell said. Outside Anders’s window, any trace of sunlight had disappeared, and as his eyes adapted to the intense darkness he began to see stars, it seemed like a million of them, so many he couldn’t even pick out constellations. The sight took his breath away.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Helping her clean would be light penance. About three hours after the television broadcast, Susan, Marilyn, and Valerie found rides to the home of astronaut Fred Haise, one of Apollo 8’s backup crew, where a get-together hosted by his wife, Mary, was under way. These gatherings had become a tradition during space flights, and forty other astronaut wives welcomed the Apollo 8 ladies with ice cream and homemade cookies. Reporters dubbed the event a “hen party.” Several hours after the wives returned home, Apollo 8 was just 35,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean and had increased its speed to 7,700 miles per hour. By now, it was clear to Mission Control that the fourteen-second midcourse correction burn done a day ago had been so accurate that no further trajectory corrections would be needed. Backup recovery forces in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans were sent home. It would now be the Pacific Ocean or bust. Four hours remained until scheduled splashdown. NASA’s public affairs officer noted “unusually high” traffic in congratulatory messages flooding into the agency. The New York Times proclaimed, “There was more than narrow religious significance in the emotional high point of their fantastic odyssey, their reading of the biblical story of creation while this world watched live pictures of the Moon televised by the astronauts from within a few dozen miles of the lunar surface.” Even acting NASA chief Thomas Paine couldn’t contain himself. As the spacecraft drew closer to Earth, he wrote to President Johnson, “It is apparent that an unprecedented wave of popular enthusiasm for the Apollo 8 astronauts is building up around the world. Laudatory editorials are in every paper.” Many were already calling the mission the greatest adventure in mankind’s history. But the ship wasn’t home yet. Apollo 8 still had to hit the narrowest of entry corridors, at just the right attitude, moving at speeds faster than humans had ever traveled. To Borman and his crewmates, reentry was one of the three maneuvers on the mission—along with launch and Trans Earth Injection—during which they were most likely to die. —Reentry into Earth’s atmosphere would officially start at an altitude of 400,000 feet, or 75.75 miles. Nothing magical happened at that point, but it’s where things would start to change in a hurry. By that time, the command module would have shed the service module, leaving Apollo 8 just a cone-shaped wedge about eleven feet tall and thirteen feet wide speeding through space. Several seconds later, Apollo 8 would have plunged 100,000 more feet, and Earth’s atmosphere would begin acting on the ship and on the crew, exerting just a tiny fraction of a single g-force. The spacecraft would be traveling in excess of 24,500 miles per hour, and the computer would take over flying duties from Borman. At that point, the astronauts could only trust that Apollo 8 was aimed and positioned right.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  —Anders had imagined he would watch the Moon closing in, as the pilots did in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, until it filled the sky. Instead, he saw emptiness. Even Lovell, with the wide field of view from his telescope and sextant, couldn’t catch a glimpse of the Moon. Due to the position of the Sun (and the glare it caused) and the position of the spacecraft’s windows (facing mostly toward black space), it had been all but impossible for the crew to spot its target. “As a matter of interest, we have as yet to see the Moon,” Lovell radioed to Houston. “What else are you seeing?” asked CapCom Jerry Carr. “Nothing,” Anders replied. “It’s like being on the inside of a submarine.” In Houston, in the middle of the night, the astronauts’ wives turned their squawk boxes just loud enough to hear without awakening friends and family who were curled up on couches and in chairs throughout their homes. One by one, these supporters awoke to help the wives through Lunar Orbit Insertion. In the fog of nerves and excitement, few realized that it was now officially Christmas Eve. Despite the hour, approaching four in the morning in Houston, visitors began to crowd into the viewing room at Mission Control. A hundred people sardined themselves into this room designed for far fewer, but all respected the flashing sign that requested QUIET PLEASE as Lunar Orbit Insertion drew near. It was time for Mission Control to make a final decision. One by one, Flight Director Glynn Lunney polled each of his controllers, looking for a simple Go or No Go. One by one, they gave him their answer. Lunney looked at Carr, who radioed to the spacecraft, now just over three thousand miles from the Moon. “Apollo 8, this is Houston. At 68:04, you’re Go for LOI.” “Okay,” Borman answered. “Apollo 8 is Go.” “You are riding the best bird we can find,” Carr said. Thirty minutes remained until Lunar Orbit Insertion. Controllers continued to make final checks of the spacecraft and its systems, and to grow more nervous by the minute. George Mueller had thought 69 miles was cutting it far too close to approach or orbit the Moon. “You don’t know that you’re that accurate,” Mueller had told Kraft when the mission was planned. “You don’t know that you can hit the Moon within sixty-nine miles as you’re aiming at this thing two hundred and forty thousand miles away. You don’t know that your radar is that good. You don’t know that your tracking is that good.” Kraft agreed that orbiting at a higher altitude would decrease the chance of error and catastrophe. But that wouldn’t have allowed NASA to best prepare for a lunar landing. So 69 miles it would be. Mueller wasn’t the only one worried.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  But the most ominous possibility was also the simplest: that there might be something NASA and doctors did not know or understand about humans going to the Moon. In that case, it would be hard even to guess at a remedy, if there was a remedy at all. Despite their uncertainty, the managers and Dr. Berry had to make a decision. If Borman had been made sick by radiation, a virus, or some unknown cause related to lunar travel, it was likely his crewmates would become sick, too. It would be difficult enough to justify continuing the mission with one astronaut in trouble. To continue with two or three out of commission was unthinkable. The decision makers began to discuss aborting the mission and returning the crew. On board Apollo 8, Borman, Lovell, and Anders awaited the verdict. An hour later, the call came in. The bosses had made up their minds. Chapter Sixteen [image file=Image00007.jpg] EQUIGRAVISPHEREDuring 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.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  The seven hundred–plus manual controls functioned just as they would during an actual mission. An astronaut could spend years poring over diagrams and schematics, but he would never know a complex machine like the command module without spending time inside its landlocked twin. Any segment of a mission could be replicated, any situation reproduced, any scenario played out. The astronauts could “fly” the simulator just as they would the real spacecraft, working through segments of their lunar journey in real time. Any mistakes and they’d know it. And they wouldn’t be the only ones. Seated outside the simulator were a set of NASA employees who served as instructors. They were the ones who programmed scenarios into the simulator, and who watched the astronauts’ every move on their consoles, ready to make critiques and corrections. Leading the team of instructors was the Simulation Supervisor, or SimSup. One of his jobs was to teach the astronauts the correct sequences and procedures for every part of the flight, from liftoff to lunar orbit to splashdown. His other job was to kill them. Space flight was inherently complex and unpredictable—crews were nearly certain to encounter problems with the rocket and spacecraft during their mission. To give them a fighting chance, the SimSup would unleash an arsenal of emergencies, failures, malfunctions, and conflicts into the simulation, forcing the crew to learn to survive, showing them the consequences of every wrong move. It would do no one any good to take it easy on them. Only by theoretically endangering the lives of the men inside the simulator could the SimSup hope to save them during actual flight. In this way, the best SimSups had a streak of the devil inside them. Flight controllers and others involved in the mission would also work with the SimSup and instructors. Astronauts in the simulator at the Cape would be able to talk to controllers in Houston, to launch specialists in Florida, even to ground stations in Australia. The simulation was nearly as elaborate as the actual flight. The crew of Apollo 8 knew they had to be ready. —Borman, Lovell, and Anders ate a predawn breakfast together, joking about how close they’d have to sit in the simulator, threatening whoever dared show up without brushing his teeth. The Sun was just rising when they arrived at the command module simulator at Cape Kennedy. It was Monday, September 9, 1968, less than fifteen weeks before Apollo 8’s scheduled mission. Despite the early hour, the room was crowded with flight controllers and technicians, many of whom were in their twenties, some just out of college. At age forty, Borman and Lovell were nearly twice as old as some of the men gathered around the simulator; even Anders, at thirty-four, seemed an elder statesman here. As test and fighter pilots, the astronauts had flown cutting-edge machines, but even they needed time to process the sight of the Apollo simulator.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  During the final two revolutions, the astronauts would get ready to fire the SPS engine again, this time to gain enough speed to get the spacecraft out of lunar orbit and on its way back to Earth. As before, the firing would be done over the far side of the Moon, out of contact with Houston and the rest of the world. It was another critical maneuver: If it misfired, the ship could crash into the Moon or fly off into the void. If it failed to fire, Apollo 8 would become a possession of the Moon. Forever. But if all went according to plan, the spacecraft would escape lunar orbit and begin its fifty-seven-hour journey home. In the flight’s last minutes, the service module containing the engine would be jettisoned, leaving the astronauts in the cone-shaped command module they would ride the rest of the way to Earth. A short time later, the capsule would begin reentry into Earth’s atmosphere at near 25,000 miles per hour. No human had ever attempted such a thing, and it had to be virtually perfect or Borman and his crew wouldn’t survive. Angle of attack was everything. Apollo 8 needed to enter a corridor that spanned just two degrees. That was equivalent to finding exactly the right ridge on a coin that had 180 ridges grooved into it. (By comparison, a United States quarter dollar has 119 ridges.) If the spacecraft came in too shallow, it would skip off the atmosphere like a stone on water, going into a large elliptical trajectory around Earth without enough oxygen or electricity on board to get back for another attempt at reentry. If it came in too steeply, it would grind so hard against the atmosphere that the resulting heat and deceleration would burn up and tear apart the capsule. But if it came in just right, the atmosphere would slow the capsule down enough to allow it to survive reentry into the atmosphere and plunge toward Earth. Two degrees—anything on either side of that and the crew was dead. If Apollo 8 survived reentry and if its heat shield succeeded in preventing its incineration in temperatures that would reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit—half that of the surface of the Sun—the triple canopy of parachutes would deploy and the capsule would splash down in the Pacific Ocean about forty-five minutes before first light. The astronauts would stay inside until a Navy recovery crew reached them. By that time, Apollo 8’s historic voyage would have ended, after a little more than six days. Borman looked at the other men in the room. Each wore the same expression: We know this is impossible, but we still think it can work. He appreciated their commitment and expertise, but he thought they’d planned too much for the crew to do—every hour seemed loaded with tasks, duties, obligations, checks. “Forget the TV cameras,” Borman said. “It’s a distraction.” “No way,” Kraft said. “This is history, Frank.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Test-firing the SPS, they argued, could screw up Apollo 8’s trajectory, fouling its path to the Moon. But Kraft wouldn’t back down. “Fire that thing and I’ll get it back on trajectory for you,” he assured them. “But I want that engine to run before we get to the Moon.” And that was how the flight plan stood until about an hour before the test was to run. Now controllers doubled down on their concern that the spacecraft would be thrown dangerously off course by the two-and-a-half-second burn. They urged Kraft to abandon the plan. Doing so would have been highly unorthodox—NASA’s practice was to preplan flights down to the minutest detail in order to avoid surprises and unknowns. Kraft held firm, and he was the boss. “We’re going to do it, so let’s do it,” he said. The astronauts spent the next hour preparing for the burn. Inside the spacecraft, Lovell was singing random songs to himself. (Borman was accustomed to Lovell’s singing from their time together aboard Gemini 7; for his part, Anders seemed too busy to notice.) When the moment came, Borman began his countdown. At five seconds, the computer’s display flashed 99—a request to go ahead with the test. Lovell reached forward and pressed the Proceed key. The SPS engine lit, and the crew felt a gentle push forward as the spacecraft gained speed. After 2.4 seconds, the engine cut off, just as programmed. A few minutes later, the Public Affairs Officer made a happy announcement. “The burn was completely nominal in all respects.” And for a minute or two, even Kraft believed it. Chapter Fifteen [image file=Image00007.jpg] AN ASTRONAUT IN TROUBLEIt was Saturday evening in Houston, eleven hours after launch, and Valerie Anders needed to get out of her house. With squawk boxes still chirping, she asked the family’s au pair to watch her five children, then slid out the back door, careful not to make a sound lest the swarm of media camped out on her front lawn discover the subterfuge and follow her on her mission. She arrived at her destination about ten seconds later—the neighboring home of astronaut Charlie Duke, whose family was hosting a Christmas party that night. The eggnog was flowing, and best of all, CapComs Mike Collins and Jerry Carr were in attendance, and they gave Valerie the skinny on the flight. Everything, they assured her, looked smooth so far. Five miles away, at Mission Control, Chris Kraft was pacing. The SPS engine had not worked properly. Thrust buildup had been slow, and overall thrust had been too low. These were results NASA had never seen in tests, and they presented big problems for Apollo 8. An explanation, and a fix, had to be found soon, or lunar orbit might be impossible. One thing Kraft did not intend to do was inform the crew, at least not yet. There was nothing the astronauts could do about it anyway.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  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. Chapter Twenty-Two [image file=Image00007.jpg] PLEASE BE INFORMED—THERE IS A SANTA CLAUSSusan Borman, Valerie Anders, and Marilyn Lovell had been told that if all went well, their husbands would regain contact with Houston at about 12:19 A .M ., the moment their spacecraft came around the lunar far side. That was still five minutes away. Seconds had never passed so slowly. It wasn’t much easier for those at Mission Control, and especially for Chris Kraft. All he could do now was wait. Now, just one minute remained until Apollo 8 was due to regain contact with Earth. Any longer than that, and it meant something had not gone according to plan. In Australia, technicians at the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station made certain their antenna was pointed accurately. (NASA needed a station in Australia, and elsewhere around the world, to ensure that the spacecraft could be “seen” at all times no matter where the Earth was in its rotation.) At just the moment Mission Control expected to acquire a signal, Australia reported receiving one. A wave of excitement washed over the room, but Houston still had to confirm it. CapCom Ken Mattingly called to the spacecraft. “Apollo 8, Houston.” There was no answer. Mattingly waited a full eighteen seconds, then called again. “Apollo 8, Houston.” Still no answer. Susan Borman and Valerie Anders were silent. There was no sound in the Borman home but for the squawk box, and their husbands’ voices were not coming out of it. Everyone there—Susan, her boys, the visitors—were just waiting to hear an astronaut’s voice, which was now overdue. Twenty-eight seconds later, Mattingly tried again. “Apollo 8, Houston.” There was only silence. At her home, Marilyn Lovell told herself that Jim had said everything would be okay. This time, Mattingly allowed nearly a minute to pass before making his next call. “Apollo 8, Houston.” Again, nothing came back from the spacecraft. Mattingly tried a fifth time, forty-eight seconds later. Still no answer. Almost four minutes had passed since the ground station in Australia had picked up a signal from Apollo 8 from behind the Moon—an unthinkable delay. Then, over the static and hiss of the radio connection, a voice came through to Mission Control. “Houston, Apollo 8, over.” The voice was Lovell’s. “Hello, Apollo 8,” Mattingly answered. “Loud and clear.” “Roger,” Lovell said. “Please be informed—there is a Santa Claus.” “That’s affirmative,” Mattingly said.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Traveling at 12,500 miles per hour about 11,000 miles above Earth, the astronauts stowed the last items still loose aboard the spacecraft. Given the huge g-forces of reentry and the jarring of the impact with the water, it was critical for the crew not to allow anything loose that could damage the cabin, or themselves. Thirty minutes later, network television interrupted regular programming to cover reentry and splashdown. In Houston, it was just past 9:00 A.M. on December 27. All three astronauts’ wives were watching their televisions at home, listening with one ear to the network anchor, the other to a squawk box. Inside the spacecraft, the crew cut off the oxygen flow from the service module, which they would soon leave behind. Their capsule now depended on its own small tanks for oxygen, a supply that wouldn’t last much longer than the time required for a successful reentry and splashdown. Borman checked to confirm that the spacecraft was in its proper attitude. Fifteen minutes before the planned reentry, Borman engaged a pyrotechnic sequence that severed cables and connections between the command and service modules, then blew apart the tendons that kept the two modules connected, a violent jolt that shook the astronauts. The service module had been Apollo 8’s lifeline, housed its SPS engine, made every mile of this historic journey. Its built-in jets fired to thrust it away from the command module, lighting the sky in a final goodbye. Only six minutes remained until reentry. Even now, the astronauts didn’t wear their space suits or helmets, and wouldn’t the rest of the way, a decision NASA had allowed so that the crew could equalize their eardrums manually as the pressure in the spacecraft rose during its descent through the atmosphere. Inside the cabin, the crew was pointed backward and upside down, the windowed nose of the module facing back out toward space as they hurtled, still weightless and strapped in, at more than 20,000 miles per hour toward Earth’s atmosphere. At launch, six days and two hours earlier, Apollo 8 weighed 6.2 million pounds. Now just 12,000 of those pounds remained. Looking out his window, Borman got a send-off from an old familiar face. “Look who’s coming there, would you?” he said. “What?” Lovell asked. “The Moon.” A minute later, Borman checked his indicators. “Well, men, we’re getting close.” “There’s no turning back now,” Anders said. “Old Mother Earth has us,” Lovell said. Two minutes later, Anders noticed a change in the view outside his window. “What is that?” he asked. Borman and Lovell, the old spaceflight pros, decided to have a little fun with the rookie. “That’s right, you’ve never seen the airglow. Take a look at it,” Lovell said. “You can’t get your [astronaut] pin without seeing the airglow,” Borman said. Apollo 8 plunged, blunt end first, toward Earth at more than 24,750 miles per hour, breaking below one hundred miles altitude and pushing its crew faster than any humans ever had traveled.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  The image disturbed Borman, yet he was ready, at a moment’s notice, to drop the same kind of bomb on the Soviet Union if that’s what America deemed necessary. In 1964, Deke Slayton, the man in charge of crew assignments, teamed Borman with Jim Lovell to be primary crew for Gemini 7. The mission was planned as a fourteen-day Earth-orbital flight, the longest space mission ever attempted, intended primarily to test human endurance in space and to conduct a cascade of medical experiments. During training, Borman and Lovell averaged more than twenty days a month away from home. When Borman got time off, he spent it with his family at home in Houston, taking Susan and his sons hunting and fishing. (Susan doubted she could bring herself to shoot a deer, but after Frank and the boys bought her a rifle, she had no trouble taking the shot. Frank never figured out whether she missed on purpose; to him, it meant everything that she tried.) To learn to water-ski, he and Susan checked out a book from the library, then took turns driving the boat, pages flapping in the wind. He loved how fast Susan took to it, even as he struggled. His boys delighted in how their father, a master of the skies, could barely swim. To make it to his sons’ junior high football games, Borman pushed NASA’s T-38 jets to their operational limits on Fridays after work, then ran to the hamburger stand Susan operated at the games, ready with his order in hand. On Saturday, December 4, 1965, Susan and her two sons arrived at the VIP area at Cape Kennedy for the launch of Gemini 7. At 2:30 P .M ., the Titan II rocket fired. As it rose in a column of white smoke and orange flame, Susan held on to her boys but looked away. Photographers captured the image—a good mother, a woman overwhelmed. Six minutes later, Gemini 7 was in orbit around Earth. Susan and her sons boarded a bus to the airport to go home. Out the window, Frederick and Edwin searched the sky for a glimpse of their dad’s rocket ship. Despite being confined to a cabin no larger than the front half of a Volkswagen Beetle, the longer Borman and Lovell flew, the more they liked each other. Every day, over and over, they sang “He’ll Have to Go,” a 1959 country ballad by Jim Reeves. “Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone,” they crooned; “Let’s pretend that we’re together all alone.” After eleven days in space, Borman and Lovell received visitors. Approaching like a white star, Gemini 6, which had just launched from Cape Kennedy, closed to within one foot of Gemini 7, proving that two ships could rendezvous in space (a necessary maneuver for flying a lunar landing mission, in which astronauts would use a lunar module to shuttle between an orbiting spacecraft and the Moon).

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  On August 28, the Democratic Party voted against adopting an antiwar plank to its platform. The peace candidate, Eugene McCarthy, refused on principle to address the convention, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey secured the nomination. A crowd of ten thousand rallied in Grant Park. Tempers flared, and soon billy clubs and boots were flying. Rennie Davis, one of the organizers of the demonstrations, was beaten unconscious. Thousands began to march to the site of the convention, but they were turned back by National Guardsmen, some brandishing automatic weapons and grenade launchers. That left the protesters outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue, where they remained into the night. By the thousands, they shouted epithets and profanities at police, delegates, politicians—anyone in charge—and to many it no longer sounded like free speech or the expression of opinion, it sounded like America had burst, and the bile that discharged flowed uphill on one of America’s most exclusive streets, seeking higher and higher levels so that Humphrey would hear it in his twenty-fifth-floor room, and LBJ would hear it at his ranch in Texas. The police stood there taking the worst of it. In ordinary times, a person cursed at a Chicago cop at their peril. Yet peril seemed to be what the demonstrators wanted most. After thirty minutes, the police obliged them, smashing and clubbing and kicking and dragging anyone they could reach—demonstrators, onlookers, journalists—and it didn’t matter that the network television cameras were filming or that people were yelling “The whole world is watching!” or that those in the streets weren’t Vietcong or Soviets but the sons and daughters of fellow citizens; all that mattered for the next eighteen minutes of brutality and mayhem was that something had fractured in America and no one had any idea how to stop it, and after order was restored there still seemed to be cries coming from the streets, even though there was no one left to make them. Among the millions who watched the unedited footage on television, there hardly seemed a soul among them—rich or poor, young or old, left or right—who didn’t wonder if America could be put back together again. —On Sunday, September 8, the crew of Apollo 8 flew their T-38 jets from Houston to Cape Kennedy in Florida, checked in to the Holiday Inn at Cocoa Beach, and prepared to die. Often. In the morning, they would start training in the command module simulator, an Earth-based model of the Apollo spacecraft they would pilot in December. Housed in nondescript buildings at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston and at Cape Kennedy in Florida, the machines were highly accurate mock-ups of the real thing, their cabins outfitted with every switch, lever, dial, gauge, light, alarm, circuit breaker, and readout the astronauts would use on the lunar journey. Everything worked—the simulator itself didn’t move, but optics could be projected onto screens, navigational information displayed, sounds played over speakers, and lights flashed.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Even then, they would still have to cover nearly 240,000 miles to reach the Moon, about fifty-eight times the distance Columbus had sailed to find his own new world. The Earth–Moon crossing would last about sixty-six hours. The astronauts would spend much of that time doing navigation sightings, making live television broadcasts, and checking systems. The spacecraft would fly on a precise round-trip pathway, aimed close enough to the Moon’s surface to ensure that if anything went wrong along the way, the Moon itself would make the rescue, catching the ship with its gravity and slingshotting it back to Earth, all courtesy of the laws of physics, with no man-made propulsion required. As Apollo 8 neared its target, the Moon would be moving at more than 2,000 miles per hour, with the spacecraft rapidly accelerating, both approaching nearly the same spot in space. If NASA’s figures were accurate, the ship would slide just ahead of the Moon’s leading hemisphere, then use lunar gravity to curl behind the lunar far side. Once the spacecraft went behind the Moon, all communication with Mission Control would be blocked. At that point, if all looked good, Borman would fire the Service Propulsion System, or SPS, engine, which would slow the ship enough to be captured by the Moon’s gravity and enter lunar orbit. There was no backup to the SPS. If it didn’t fire, Apollo 8 would whip around the Moon and return to Earth. The real problem would come if the engine fired incorrectly: too short or too weak, and the spacecraft would fly off into eternal space; too long or too strong, and it would crash into the Moon in less than an hour. If it all worked, however, Apollo 8 would enter an irregular orbit, about 69 miles above the lunar surface on the far side and about 200 miles over the near side. For two revolutions (about four hours), the crew would prepare their cameras and observe landmarks. Then they would get ready to fire the SPS engine again, this time to circularize their orbit at a constant 69 miles above the lunar surface. It would then be Christmas Eve morning back in America. Once in a circular orbit, the crew would do the bulk of its work. For eight revolutions over the next sixteen hours, they would scout candidate landing sites for future missions, take photographs, analyze lighting conditions, and study the effects of gravitational anomalies on the spacecraft’s orbit. All the while, Mission Control would be tracking the spacecraft by radio and communicating with the astronauts, except when Apollo 8 was over the far side of the Moon. And there would be two more television broadcasts. As Borman did the math, he could see that these would come on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Borman could have fired his thrusters again, but in space, that had to be done in the correct direction, a difficult task to perform manually and by sight. If Borman added velocity in the wrong part of the spectrum of angles, he might only increase the spacecraft’s vertical separation from the third stage rather than get ahead of it. Or he might even move Apollo 8 back into the third stage’s path. That was one of the challenges of flying in formation in space; you had to know not just your own trajectory but that of the object you were trying to move toward or away from. And there was little about orbital mechanics that one could eyeball against a black background that stretched forever. The spent stage moved even closer to the spacecraft. From Houston, Collins recommended a separation maneuver. “I don’t want to do that,” Borman answered. “I’ll lose sight of the S-IVB.” “Frank, if you use zero, then make the [separation] if possible in the plus-X thrusters. That’s the direction of the burn we’d like,” Collins said. “Well, can’t do that. I’ll thrust right square into that S-IVB,” Borman argued. For the next several minutes, Collins and controllers in Houston wrestled to determine a separation maneuver that would move Apollo 8 safely away from the third stage without causing Borman to lose sight of the threat. Making matters more difficult, the third stage continued to vent propellant, creating a virtual snowstorm in the jet-black sky. Earth was nowhere to be seen through the spacecraft’s windows. Apollo 8 needed a landmark, some reference point against which to maneuver, but there was none in any direction. Finally Houston devised a burn maneuver it believed could move Apollo 8 to safety. Borman didn’t seem entirely comfortable with it, but he performed it using the spacecraft’s thrusters, then waited to see where it took his ship. “How is that booster looking now?” Collins called. “Is it drifting away rapidly, or how does it look?” “We’re well clear of the S-IVB now, Houston,” Borman said. While the astronauts had been focused on navigating away from the discarded third stage, Apollo 8 had passed through the Van Allen belts, two massive, doughnut-shaped bands of intense radiation that encircle Earth. Named for James Van Allen, the American space scientist who discovered them in the late 1950s, the belts had long been thought to pose a danger—even a deadly one—to space travelers. For years, scientists and government agencies had tried to figure out a safe way through the belts; Van Allen himself suggested that detonating a nuclear bomb might clear the ionizing particles enough to allow spaceship passage. In the end, NASA determined that the Apollo spacecraft would be traveling so fast, and the astronauts would be so well shielded by the command module, that the risk of harmful radiation exposure would be minimal. But no one knew for sure.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Earth meteorites preserved on the Moon could provide a window back to that time, giving us a glimpse of the ages from which we came, the stuff from which we are made. But there would be no way to examine Earth meteorites embedded in the Moon without space travelers who could bring them back to us—without humans brave enough to climb into a spacecraft, light an engine with the power of a nuclear bomb below them, and land on our most ancient companion. And one must wonder if, in the future, a similar push by bold adventurers, this time beyond the Moon and into the universe, might bring back another kind of knowledge about ourselves, one that we might not yet have the capacity to imagine but that might transform us fundamentally. Chapter Nineteen [image file=Image00007.jpg] EARTHRISEFor months, Borman had been fixated on a particular moment in the flight plan: the instant when Apollo 8 would lose radio contact with Earth as it slipped behind the Moon. This would not be the first time a space mission lost contact with Earth. In fact, every Earth orbital flight (Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo 7, as well as the Soviet flights) had long periods when the spacecraft was out of touch with all the ground stations due to Earth’s curvature. Since the planet was not covered with ground stations, the crews on those missions spent most of their time in radio silence. But that was far different from losing contact with the home planet because another world got in the way, which was just about to happen with Apollo 8. NASA had calculated, to the second, when it expected its communications with Apollo 8 to go dead. If the planners were correct, it meant the ship was on its proper trajectory and was where it should be. If radio contact lasted too long, however, it likely meant Apollo 8 had been traveling too fast and had arrived at its rendezvous point with the Moon before the Moon had a chance to get there and block the transmissions. If the arrival was just a little early, the spacecraft might still be whipped around the Moon by lunar gravity, but at a much higher orbit than desired. If the arrival was earlier than that, Apollo 8 might head off in a trajectory away from the Moon that it couldn’t reverse for lack of sufficient onboard propellant. If, on the other hand, radio contact ended prematurely, it likely meant Apollo 8 had taken too long to reach its rendezvous point with the Moon. If the lateness of arrival was slight, the spacecraft would zoom past the lunar surface at an altitude lower than NASA had planned or deemed safe for the mission. If it arrived much later, Apollo 8 would smash into the Moon.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  The idea that it could move, never mind fly, seemed impossible from up close. The astronauts walked to the middle of the launchpad, then took two elevator rides, the first to the zero level of the service tower, the second up the crisscrossed steel beams of that tower thirty-two stories into the air. Then they walked across an access arm to a small loading area, where technicians would make a final check of the space suits. From there it was a short walk for the astronauts across a small metal bridge and into the spacecraft. It was 4:58 A .M ., still dark outside. From his vantage point, Lovell couldn’t help but think of the old astronaut joke—How does it feel to sit atop a vehicle built by the lowest bidder? A NASA staffer gave the signal for the astronauts to start loading. Borman went first and, after some maneuvering, settled into the left-hand seat of the command module, lying flat on his back as an airline pilot would if his airplane were tipped back onto its tail. A technician gave Anders a hug, then sent him, too, into the spacecraft, where he took the right-hand seat in the small cabin. As Anders worked to get himself settled, Lovell looked down to the ground several hundred feet below. He could see the lights of the press corps as they arrived at their designated sites, and all of a sudden it hit him: These NASA people are serious. They’re going to send us to the Moon. My God, we really are doing this . He took a deep breath, then walked across the bridge, put his feet through the hatch of the spacecraft, and lowered himself into the seat between Borman and Anders. Technicians closed and secured the hatch on the Apollo 8 spacecraft at 5:34 A .M . Inside the cabin, the countdown clock read T minus 2 hours, 17 minutes and counting. Lying flat on their backs, there wasn’t much the crew could do to help things along. Borman wished NASA could just get the damned thing into the air, but knowing that wasn’t possible, he wished for something more realistic—that the launch would actually occur. He didn’t want another episode such as John Glenn endured in the Mercury days, when his flight was scrapped with twenty-nine minutes to go. If a guy was going to suit up and climb aboard with his nerves on edge, the least a rocket could do was go up. In the command centers at the Cape and in Houston, controllers readied for launch, settling in to legacy aromas of stale pizza and burnt coffee, checking their consoles and lists and running through their responsibilities as they had done for the past four months in their offices, at dinner with their families, in bed after their wives had fallen asleep. The Cape would be in charge of the launch (since they would be on scene), then turn over command to Houston shortly after lift-off.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Donald Kent “Deke” Slayton was in charge of managing astronaut training and choosing crews for manned space missions. If an astronaut flew on board a NASA spacecraft, it was because Slayton had chosen him to go. When Borman heard who was calling, he wriggled out of the capsule and grabbed an extension. “Deke, I’m in the middle of a big test here,” he said. “Frank, I need you back in Houston.” “Talk to me now.” “No, I can’t talk over the phone. It’s gotta be in person. Grab an airplane and get to Houston. On the double.” Borman grimaced—America did not have time for nonsense and delays—but Slayton was in charge, and NASA, no matter its official designation as a civilian organization, was a military operation to Borman, so he took his orders. Poking his head back inside the spacecraft, he told his partners, “You guys are stuck with the module. I’ve gotta go back to Houston.” Borman grabbed his rental car, drove to Los Angeles International Airport, and hopped into a T-38 Talon, a two-seat twin-engine supersonic jet used by astronauts for training, commuting, and even some fun, and pointed it toward Texas. At forty, he still looked every bit the West Point cadet: sandy blond near-crewcut, square jaw and chin set for combat, arched eyebrows that seemed a radar for anything askew. Even his head was military issue, all right angles and slightly larger than life, a feature that had earned him the childhood nickname Squarehead. Borman couldn’t imagine why he was needed in Houston, and so suddenly. He was commander of Apollo 9, the third of four manned test flights NASA planned before it would attempt to land on the Moon. Apollo 9 was to be a basic mission—orbit Earth, test the spacecraft, come home. It wasn’t scheduled to launch for another six months. Still, Borman knew he hadn’t been summoned for nothing. The last time he’d received a “drop everything” call had been the darkest day in NASA’s history. It had happened about a year and half earlier, on January 27, 1967, when a fire broke out in the spacecraft during a simulated countdown on the launchpad in Florida. The Apollo 1 rehearsal should have been safe and routine for the three astronauts inside, who were preparing for the actual flight about four weeks later. But a spark occurred in the electrical system and the men were trapped as the sudden fire spread in pure oxygen. Even Ed White, the strongest of all NASA’s astronauts, couldn’t muscle open the command module’s hatch as flames spread through the spacecraft. Borman had been enjoying a rare break with his family at a lakeside cottage near Houston, where they lived, when Slayton’s call came in that day. “Frank, we’ve had a bad fire on Pad Thirty-four and we’ve got three astronauts dead—Gus Grissom, Ed White, and one of the new boys, Roger Chaffee.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  Now at an altitude of 300,000 feet, the astronauts could see the curvature of Earth against a blue sky that melded into the deep purple-black of onrushing outer space. Two minutes later, Apollo 8 reached 100 miles altitude as it arced almost horizontally over Earth. The ship was now 350 miles downrange of Cape Kennedy and just about high enough for its planned Earth orbit. Speed, however, was another matter. To achieve orbit, the spacecraft needed to reach approximately 17,425 miles per hour; anything less and Earth’s gravity would pull it back down. At the moment, six minutes into the flight, it was traveling only 10,000 miles per hour. Apollo 8 needed a big push, and that was the job of the five second-stage engines. Borman could see indicators of the ship’s speed galloping forward on a five-digit readout on the instrument panel. If the Saturn’s second stage failed now, the crew could use the rocket’s single third-stage engine to get them to orbital speed—but if that happened, they wouldn’t have enough propellant left to send the spacecraft on to the Moon, and Apollo 8 would become a days-long Earth-orbital checkout mission. That was the scenario Borman dreaded. So far, however, the second-stage booster was flying true and smooth as it pushed the spacecraft’s speed from 10,000 to 14,000 miles per hour in just two minutes’ time. The five engines needed to burn for only another forty-five seconds before falling off and giving way to the third stage. Even for a conservative pilot like Borman, those forty-five seconds seemed a near certainty now. And then he felt something go wrong. The rocket beneath him started to shake furiously—a pogo—a problem similar to the one that had afflicted the unmanned Apollo 6 on the Saturn V’s second and most recent test flight. Stresses created by pogo could damage or even tear apart the rocket. Von Braun and his engineers believed they’d worked out the issue, but this was exactly the kind of thing no one could know for certain without making another test flight, and there hadn’t been another test flight after Apollo 6. As a longtime fighter pilot and test pilot, Borman didn’t spook easily. Now he was concerned. But there was nothing for the crew to do now except hope that the Saturn V could endure the pogo for another forty seconds until the second stage burned itself out and separated from the vehicle. The ship continued to shake even as it gained speed by hundreds of miles per hour every few seconds. With just nine seconds to go before the engines of the second stage were to cut off, Borman radioed to Collins in Houston. “The pogo’s damping out.” Collins barely had time to respond before the engines shut down as scheduled and the Saturn’s second stage separated from Apollo 8 and began its long fall back to Earth, where its remains would sink into the Atlantic, just as the first stage had.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  But as spring turned to summer, there was more bad news for the agency. Plagued by design and production problems, the lunar module had fallen behind schedule. Engineers reported that a fix could take six months or more. That threatened to delay several planned Apollo flights—including those to the Moon. By early August 1968, things looked dire for the American space program. The Saturn V rocket was in no shape to fly with a crew aboard. The Soviets looked ready to send men around the Moon by year’s end. And now, because of issues with the lunar module, Kennedy’s end-of-decade deadline for a lunar landing was slipping away. NASA always proceeded deliberately and carefully. They didn’t skip ahead; the risks of manned spaceflight were simply too great. But their hand had been forced. So Deke Slayton had to ask Frank Borman an unthinkable question: Will you and your crew go suddenly—in just four months’ time—to the Moon? Now Slayton needed an answer. Chapter Three [image file=Image00007.jpg] A SECRET PLANBorman had no idea what Slayton’s proposed mission entailed. He did know, however, that NASA couldn’t be ready to go to the Moon in just four months. He knew the agency had yet to build essential systems, calculate proper trajectories, solve problems with its Moon rocket, determine fundamental navigation, develop software, even make a basic flight plan. And he knew how badly the lunar module had fallen behind schedule. Borman hadn’t joined NASA for the usual reasons. He had little interest in exploration, adventure, or pioneering. He didn’t thrive on speed or adrenaline. Even the glamorous perks of the job—the availability of beautiful women, discounts on Corvettes, the public’s adoration—meant nothing to him. He’d joined NASA for a single purpose: to fight the Soviet Union on the world’s new battlefield, outer space. Before Slayton’s question could settle, Borman gave his answer. “Yes, Deke. Let’s go to the Moon.” Slayton didn’t need any more than that. He thanked Borman and warned him to keep the information on a need-to-know basis. A few minutes later, Borman was in his airplane and headed back to his crewmates in California. Flying always focused Borman’s mind, and now, cruising at 600 miles per hour, he began to see what a dangerous business he’d signed up for. He believed his crew to be the best at NASA, but four months might not be enough for even this crew to prepare for a journey to the Moon. He had no idea how the space agency would do its part to be ready by December. He could only trust that NASA had carefully crafted the mission, whatever it was, and had taken their time to work out the science. In fact, much of the plan to send Apollo 8 to the Moon had been contemplated by George Low on the beach just five days earlier. As for the science—that would require some faith.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  A year after Tsar Bomba, Khrushchev placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. Kennedy demanded they be removed. Khrushchev refused, but in October 1962, he was facing a different kind of president. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of the island. For thirteen days, the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war. But Kennedy refused to call off the blockade. Just as it seemed both sides had no choice but to use their nuclear weapons, Khrushchev backed down and removed the missiles. The Cuban Missile Crisis had been among the most tense and dangerous events in American history, but when it ended, the world had a different opinion about the will of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. —In mid-November 1963, Kennedy visited Cape Canaveral, where he was briefed on America’s developing colossus, the Saturn V, the 36-story-tall three-stage booster being built to take Americans to the Moon. Standing outside with rocket designer Wernher von Braun, Kennedy shook his head in wonder at it all. These men in shirtsleeves and ties were building machines to take human beings to new worlds. Six days later, the president was dead from an assassin’s bullet. In the wake of Kennedy’s killing, some wondered whether the nation’s will to land a man on the Moon might have died with him. The new president, Lyndon Johnson, supported the space program and pushed to keep Kennedy’s deadline, but problems with logistics, spacecraft, rockets, and engineering bogged down the American effort. Some NASA analysts put the chances of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade at just one in ten. In 1964, the Soviet Union only widened its lead in the race to the Moon. But NASA wouldn’t give up. Over the next three years, the Americans and Soviets volleyed for supremacy in space. Project Gemini, designed to perfect techniques the Apollo flights would use to land men on the Moon, opened a floodgate of progress. In the Soviet Union, the skies darkened. Its space program had managed a few interesting missions, but nothing close to the game changers that had put them so far ahead for so long. By the end of 1966, the Soviets were panicked. For the first time since the Space Race began, they were losing. The American advantage never looked stronger than on January 27, 1967, when three astronauts rode an elevator to the top of a Saturn IB booster at Cape Kennedy in Florida and strapped themselves into their capsule for a simulated countdown. In three weeks they would do it for real, taking Apollo 1—the kickoff of NASA’s new Apollo program—into orbit around Earth. At 6:31 P .M ., one of the astronauts screamed into his microphone a word that sounded like “Fire!” Two seconds later, another cried out. His first word was unclear—either “I” or “We” —but the rest was unmistakable: “got a fire in the cockpit!” That was followed by garbled, desperate words and an agonized scream.