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 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.

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

  Chapter Eleven: My God, We Are Really Doing This Chapter Twelve: Leaving Home Chapter Thirteen: A Deeply Troubled Year Chapter Fourteen: A Critical Test Chapter Fifteen: An Astronaut in Trouble Chapter Sixteen: Equigravisphere Chapter Seventeen: Racing the Moon Chapter Eighteen: Our Most Ancient Companion Chapter Nineteen: Earthrise Chapter Twenty: The Heaven and the Earth Chapter Twenty-one: Aiming for Home Chapter Twenty-two: Please Be Informed—There Is a Santa Claus Chapter Twenty-three: Help from an Old Friend Chapter Twenty-four: The Men Who Saved 1968 Epilogue Photo Insert Dedication Acknowledgments Diagram of Apollo 8 Author’s Note A Note on Sources By Robert Kurson About the Author Prologue: Countdown [image file=Image00007.jpg] December 21, 1968—Four days before Christmas Three astronauts are strapped into a small spacecraft thirty-six stories in the air, awaiting the final moments of countdown. They sit atop the most powerful machine ever built. The Saturn V rocket is a jewel of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a vehicle that will generate the energy of a small atomic bomb. But it has never flown with men aboard, and it has had just two tests, the most recent of which failed catastrophically just eight months earlier. The three astronauts are going not merely into Earth orbit, or even beyond the world altitude record of 853 miles. They intend to go a quarter of a million miles away, to a place no man has ever gone. They intend to go to the Moon. Beneath them, the United States is fracturing. The year 1968 has seen killing, war, protest, and political unrest unlike any in the country’s history, from the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy to the unraveling of Vietnam to the riots in Chicago. Already, Time magazine has named THE DISSENTER its Man of the Year. As the countdown begins, there are engineers and scientists at NASA who question whether the crew will ever return. Even the astronauts are realistic about their chances of surviving the flight, an operation riskier than anything the American space agency has ever attempted. One of them has recorded a final goodbye to his wife, to be played in the event he doesn’t return. In August, this mission did not exist. Nearly everything that has gone into its planning—the training, analysis, calculations, even the politics—has been rushed to the launchpad in a fraction of the time ordinarily required. If anything goes wrong, public opinion—and the will of the United States government—might turn against NASA. The fate of the entire space program hangs on the crew’s safe return. As the moment of launch draws near, one of the astronauts spots a mud dauber wasp building a nest on the outside of one of the spacecraft’s tiny windows. Back and forth the insect moves, grabbing mud and adding to its new home. The astronaut thinks, “You are in for a surprise.” Vapors begin to spew from around the base of the giant rocket. Less than a minute remains before lift-off.

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

  On December 17, four days before scheduled lift-off, Marilyn Lovell and her four children landed in Florida and checked in to a beachside cottage. Valerie Anders, too, had managed to make the trip, catching a ride with a NASA contractor. Valerie had come only for the day, to squeeze in a final goodbye with her husband before returning home to be with their children. The next day, Jerry Lederer, director of NASA’s Office of Manned Space Flight Safety, spoke to a group of aviation enthusiasts in New York. Apollo 8, he said, had one safety advantage over the voyage undertaken by Christopher Columbus in 1492: “Columbus did not know where he was going, how far it was, nor where he had been after his return. With Apollo, there is no such lack of information.” There was, however, the matter of complexity. “Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and 1,500,000 systems, subsystems and assemblies,” Lederer noted. “Even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects.” For that reason, Lederer concluded, Apollo 8’s mission would involve “risks of great magnitude and probably risks that have not been foreseen.” As darkness fell in Florida that night, Lovell took Marilyn out on a date. They didn’t go to a restaurant or a movie, but rather to a place virtually no one on Earth could access, to see one of the newest wonders of the world. And no matter how high Marilyn looked when they reached the Cape, she still could not see where the great Saturn V ended, it just kept stretching upward, more than 250 feet taller than the rocket that had carried Lovell on his Gemini missions, a colossus lit white by floodlights against an inky black sky. “I don’t want you to worry,” Lovell said, holding Marilyn’s hand. “When we lift off, the rocket is going to tilt, it might even look like it’s going to fall over, but that’s normal, it’s exactly how they designed it. Also, the Earth is going to shake in a different kind of way. That’s normal, too.” By the morning of December 19, just forty-eight hours before lift-off, journalists were swarming at the Houston homes of the astronauts. Valerie and Susan were gracious, smiling for everyone, their hair and makeup done, all of them expressing support and admiration for their husbands. Valerie always wore the same dress for appearances on television—yellow, with a close-fitting waist and knee-length skirt. Her mother noticed and asked her about it. Valerie had to confess: It was the only good dress she owned. Her husband was about to become one of the most famous men in the world, yet he still earned military pay, about $16,000 per year (plus another $16,000 from Life magazine), which went only so far with five children to feed. That night, Valerie decided to slip out of the house with three-year-old Eric to go for some groceries.

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

  To him, each additional orbit was another chance for something to go wrong. As far as Borman was concerned, flying once around the Moon would be a historic accomplishment—and more than enough to beat out the Russians. Borman’s position didn’t please Kraft’s men, who thought it wasteful to take all the risk of flying to the Moon only to leave early once they got there. Kraft jumped in to calm the planners down. “What’s the absolute minimum you can take?” he asked them. The men thought about it and came back with an answer: twelve. Since each orbit would last about two hours, that gave the crew twenty-four hours around the Moon. “Ten is better,” Borman shot back. But the men shook their heads. If Apollo 8 flew only ten orbits, it would splash down in the Pacific Ocean before dawn. That meant if the parachutes malfunctioned, no one could see what was happening. “What the hell does that matter?” Borman said. “If the chute works, great. If it doesn’t, we’re all dead and it won’t make any difference if anyone can see us.” No one could argue with that. Kraft asked if his men could accept ten orbits. They nodded. Kraft liked it. Ten was a rational, empirical number. And like that, it was ten orbits. The question then became at what altitude to orbit. Kraft and his men wanted Apollo 8 to fly just 69 miles above the lunar surface, the same altitude at which the command and service modules would operate during a future landing mission. That required almost unimaginable precision, equivalent in scale to throwing a dart at a peach from a distance of 28 feet—and grazing the very top of the fuzz without touching the fruit’s skin. If that weren’t daunting enough, the Moon would be barreling through space at nearly 2,300 miles per hour. Toss a peach in the air at 28 feet and now hit the top of the fuzz with a dart. That’s what these trajectory experts were proposing to do. And soon everyone agreed to do it. As the men continued to talk, the details of the flight took shape. Launch would occur in early morning from the Kennedy Space Center on December 21, when the new Moon would be just a sliver in the sky. Borman and crew would orbit Earth for a short time to check out the health of the rocket and spacecraft. If all looked good, they would attempt to relight the Saturn V’s third-stage engine—no sure thing, as it had failed on the test flight in April. If it did work, the engine would push Apollo 8 to a speed of 24,200 miles per hour, enough to break free of Earth’s gravitational pull. To date, no human had ventured more than 853 miles away from Mother Earth. Borman, Lovell, and Anders would blast past that in a few minutes.

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

  About the only reminder of America was the local newspaper, which told of the Newport Pop Festival in Costa Mesa, California, where more than a hundred thousand music fans were expected, and brought word of potential protests at the coming Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It had been an explosive year already, with assassinations, riots, and violence. A quiet beach was just where a man like Low needed to be. But Low could not relax. He walked the beach, looking out over the ocean toward Moscow and the Moon, thinking, imagining, America and the world on fire behind him. —Five days after Low returned from vacation, a serious man with an oversized head went to work inside a giant assembly plant in Downey, California. His mission: to build a machine from the future that would help make the world safe for democracy. Over and over, astronaut Frank Borman opened and closed the hatch on the Apollo command module, a cone-shaped capsule made to fly a three-man crew to the Moon. He’d already certified that the hatch worked, then certified it again, but he would not stop pushing on it, making sure it opened, no matter what. Nearby, Borman’s two crewmates, Jim Lovell and rookie Bill Anders, got ready to test the hundreds of dials, switches, levers, lights, and gauges that made the command module work. The spacecraft was small, measuring just eleven feet tall and thirteen feet wide at its base, but every inch of it had been designed by Borman and others to be impervious to a galaxy of deadly forces. A nearby transistor radio played Top 40 music, which caught Borman’s ear. “That’s a pretty slick song,” Borman said. “Who’s the fella singing it?” “That’s the Beatles, Frank,” Lovell said, laughing. Borman preferred the standards. As a kid, he’d memorized the lyrics to all the great Western songs played on the radio in Arizona. He could still sing “Cowboy Jack”—a ditty that dated to the nineteenth century—but didn’t dare start, because he knew Lovell and Anders would insist that he sing it to the end. Borman stuck to classic films, too. Alone among astronauts, it seemed, he hadn’t bothered to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, the new Stanley Kubrick film released in April that showed men flying to the Moon. That stuff was science fiction, Borman told his colleagues; America had real people to get to the Moon. Borman and his crewmates knew that the lunar module was troubled and behind schedule. But until designers and engineers could make the fixes, these astronauts could do little more than make certain that the command module was perfect. So they climbed inside their spacecraft and began testing it, pushing the command module mercilessly, because that’s what outer space would do to it, too. And then the phone rang. Smart people knew better than to bother Borman at work. But the man on the line went back a long way with Borman. And he said it was urgent.

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

  bring those concerns to Paine, and he would personally see to it that the issue was addressed and fixed, no matter what, and without consequence to them. Second, if the crew had any doubts or worries during the mission— with how the flight was progressing, with the function of the spacecraft or systems, with anything—he should feel free to abort the mission and bring the ship back early, and Paine would guarantee a seat on a subsequent flight as soon as possible. No one, he told the astronauts, would lose his chance to go to the Moon for ending a flight in the name of safety. Borman, Lovell, and Anders thanked Paine for the offer, but none of them expressed any concerns about Apollo 8. All of them expected it would require a hell of a lot more than a feeling or an intuition to U-turn a spacecraft bound for the Moon. On December 17, four days before scheduled lift-off, Marilyn Lovell and her four children landed in Florida and checked in to a beachside cottage. Valerie Anders, too, had managed to make the trip, catching a ride with a NASA contractor. Valerie had come only for the day, to squeeze in a final goodbye with her husband before returning home to be with their children. The next day, Jerry Lederer, director of NASA’s Office of Manned Space Flight Safety, spoke to a group of aviation enthusiasts in New York. Apollo 8, he said, had one safety advantage over the voyage undertaken by Christopher Columbus in 1492: “Columbus did not know where he was going, how far it was, nor where he had been after his return. With Apollo, there is no such lack of information.” There was, however, the matter of complexity. “Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and 1,500,000 systems, subsystems and assemblies,” Lederer noted. “Even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects.” For that reason, Lederer concluded, Apollo 8’s mission would involve “risks of great magnitude and probably risks that have not been foreseen.” As darkness fell in Florida that night, Lovell took Marilyn out on a date. They didn’t go to a restaurant or a movie, but rather to a place virtually no one on Earth could access, to see one of the newest wonders of the world. And no matter how high Marilyn looked when they reached

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

  the rocket. In the Borman and Anders homes, hands were squeezed tight. On the sand dune, Marilyn Lovell huddled with her children. Photographers from various media outlets were stationed with all three families, pressing shutter buttons and swapping film rolls as fast as they could, desperate not to miss a moment. In Mission Control, Flight Director Cliff Charlesworth and CapCom Mike Collins watched the monitors. George Low, the man who’d conceived a mission the Soviets still didn’t believe would fly, breathed deeply as the clock showed just one minute remaining. At T minus 60 seconds, all three stages of the Saturn V were fully pressurized. “Twenty seconds,” Jack King announced to the world. “We are still Go at this time.” Storms of white vapor began to billow near the base of the rocket, liquid oxygen boiling off during the Saturn V’s final moments on Earth. Inside the spacecraft, Borman felt the rocket sway a bit in the wind. “T minus fifteen,” King called, “fourteen...thirteen...twelve...eleven... ten...” Heart pounding, Borman’s left hand remained gripping one of the spacecraft’s controls, ready to twist it to the left and abort the mission in case of a catastrophic problem. The three men listened to propellant pumping through the engine manifolds. On the beach, Marilyn reminded herself that the rocket would lean when it took off, just as Jim had warned. “Nine...We have ignition sequence start, the engines are armed!” King said, as a fury of orange-yellow flames lit beneath the rocket and exploded against the launchpad. “Four...” “Three...” Flames spread from beneath the rocket and erupted out to the sides, a typhoon of fire awakened and screaming as the ground began to shake. “Two...” A man-made thunder crashed into people and windows and buildings for miles around. “One...” Borman loosened his grip on the abort handle. He would have rather died than twist it by accident in the violence unfolding beneath him. “Zero. We have commit...We have...” King paused for a moment, as if he didn’t quite believe what he was seeing. Susan Borman, Marilyn Lovell, and Valerie Anders didn’t breathe. At 7:51 A.M., King called it. “We have lift-off.” And Apollo 8 began to move. Chapter Twelve

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

  such was the urgency of wartime training. The work of a fighter pilot was exceedingly dangerous; six men died over one weekend, all at Borman’s base. At home, Susan never allowed her husband to see how these accidents made her shake. New orders sent Borman to the Philippines, closer to the war in Korea, which was just what a fighting man wanted. Still just twenty-one years old, Susan sold the Oldsmobile for the price of a one-way plane ticket and, with baby on lap, made her way to Manila. Another son, Edwin, was born in a Quonset hut at Clark Field in July 1953. A few months later, Borman’s tour in the Philippines ended, and so had the Korean War. The battle he’d signed up to fight had faded away. Borman spent the next several years logging hours in fighter jets, learning to drop atomic bombs, waiting for his chance to defend America. Always he posted the highest marks, blending rare piloting skills with a fighting instinct and a mission-first tunnel vision. Wherever he went, he considered Susan his secret weapon, a partner, mother, and best friend who arranged their lives so that his only worries were in cockpits. Not all of it came naturally to Susan. Every boom in the sky, every siren on the base, had to be answered by reminding herself, It’s not going to happen to Frank. He’s different. Frank’s a better pilot than they are. Frank will always be okay. After leaving the commissary one day at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, Susan witnessed a midair collision between two jets. She knew Frank was flying at that time. Both airplanes were two-seaters, but only three parachutes opened in the sky. Frantic, she ran toward the billowing black smoke and tried to climb a fence to reach the field, but she was intercepted by a GI, who ordered her to go home. Susan raced back to her neighborhood and banged on the door of Frank’s boss. The man’s wife let her in. “What do I do?” Susan asked. “What you do is wait,” the woman said. And Susan did, for two and a half hours, until Frank landed and called her. He reacted to news of the fatality as he always did, by thinking That dumb sonofabitch killed himself; it’ll never happen to me because I’m better. It was a defense mechanism shared by many fighter pilots, and Susan bought into it, too. At least for now. In 1956, Borman was ordered to earn a graduate degree in

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

  Both command centers vibrated as hundreds of controllers moved into position. At the helm would be Flight Director Cliff Charlesworth, in charge of the flight from the ground. Charlesworth could take any action he deemed necessary to ensure the safety of the crew and the success of the mission. The CapCom—always a fellow astronaut—would do most of the communicating with the crew of the spacecraft as it flew, and he would be the crew’s advocate in Mission Control. The facility would operate around the clock in eight-hour shifts, as long as the mission lasted. Each team of flight controllers was designated by a color. The primary CapCom, Mike Collins, was on Charlesworth’s Green team and would cover launch through to the historic TLI maneuver. Overseeing them all in Houston would be Chris Kraft, the director of flight operations. Even now, Kraft might have been the most nervous of them all. He’d been with NASA since its inception in 1958. More than anyone else, he knew how much could go right—and wrong—when men left Earth. The astronauts occupied themselves by checking switches, confirming checklists, and eavesdropping through their headsets on launch personnel. They could not hear NASA public affairs officer Jack King, whose baritone voice and slight Boston accent had kept the world updated live on launch countdowns since the Mercury flights. Borman, Lovell, and Anders shivered in their space suits, their cabin freezing in the still-chilly morning air. The astronauts could do little more than wait. Through a tiny porthole in front of him, Borman watched two seagulls flying around the spacecraft and checking out the strange, tall bird—the Saturn V—that now shared their sky. From his middle seat, Lovell scanned the instrument panel and admired the detail of the Apollo simulators; nothing inside the command module looked or felt different from what the crew had practiced with on the ground. And in a testament to the cool that runs through the bloodstream of fighter pilots, Anders fell asleep, ready to awaken when things got good. By 7 A .M ., network coverage of the launch had gone live on televisions and radios across America and the world. As the countdown clock ticked under an hour, a crowd gathered around the color television in the living room of the Borman home. Susan, her two sons, Frank’s parents (who had arrived at three A .M . and now fidgeted nervously on the couch), and family friends had come to watch the launch. Joining them were a Life magazine photographer, along with the wives of seven other astronauts, some of whom had brought deviled eggs and champagne. Though she smiled for newspaper photographers while scratching the tummy of the family’s shaggy dog, Teddy, Susan’s insides were in knots. At every chance, she hurried back to the squawk boxes NASA had installed in her home so that she could listen directly to the communications between Apollo 8 and Mission Control.

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

  then could be sent to Houston via an auxiliary channel meant for television, data, and backup voice transmissions. Only a select handful at Mission Control would hear it. Borman thought it over. He still believed the doctors would leap at the chance to insinuate themselves into the flight. But Anders was right, maybe there was a fix, or at least something to learn, if NASA was informed in a discreet fashion. “Okay,” Borman said. “Let’s do it.” Anders engaged the spacecraft’s voice recorder with its built-in voice track, and ensured that there were no downlink communications to Houston. Then Borman started talking, and he spared no details. A few minutes later, Anders pressed some buttons and shot the recording back to Earth. The crew expected to hear back from Houston in a few minutes. Instead, two hours passed without mention of Borman’s condition by Mission Control. Anders snapped a few photos of Earth, wondering what could be taking Houston so long. Finally, Collins radioed to the spacecraft and said that Houston had received the voice tape and would advise shortly. When Mission Control listened to the tape and realized what Borman was describing, top management rushed together, including the flight directors, Chris Kraft, and Dr. Berry. Kraft was furious that Borman hadn’t reported his illness right away. While he understood that astronauts didn’t trust doctors or want them mucking around in their domain, he couldn’t abide the test pilot ethos of silence; Mission Control was there to assist the crew. But if no one talked, it rendered Houston helpless. But Kraft didn’t have the luxury of frustration now. He and the others had to figure out what had happened to Borman in order to determine what to do about it—and what to do with the flight. Dr. Berry considered that Borman might be suffering from a virus, perhaps even the Hong Kong flu that had struck so many in recent weeks. That was the fate that had worried Valerie Anders when she saw guests coughing and sneezing at the White House during the astronauts’ last- minute send-off. 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.

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

  — A week later, on September 14, the Soviet Union launched an unmanned spacecraft toward the Moon. Both the Americans and Soviets had sent probes to the Moon in the past, but this one, called Zond 5, was different, because the Soviets intended to get it back. No spacecraft had ever come near the Moon and returned safely to Earth. If the Soviets could pull it off, it would represent a major leap forward, and a clear signal they intended to send men to the Moon in early December, their best launch window, and two weeks before Apollo 8’s scheduled lift-off. Streaking out of Earth’s atmosphere, Zond 5 carried tortoises, wine flies, mealworms, and other living organisms. Strapped into the pilot’s seat was a five-foot-seven, 154-pound mannequin, its sensors absorbing radiation data. With modifications, the same ship could carry two cosmonauts. The day after Zond launched, NASA chief James Webb announced his resignation, effective October 7. (Earlier in the year, upon learning that President Johnson wouldn’t seek reelection, Webb had decided to step down.) Until then, Thomas Paine would continue as deputy administrator, then assume the reins in Webb’s place. Word of Webb’s resignation surprised the NASA brass. Most considered him a giant, as responsible as any person, Kennedy included, for making the American space program world class. But there was a silver lining. Webb had never been fully on board with the plan to send Apollo 8 to the Moon in December. Paine always had been. A day later, good news arrived for Apollo 8. The Saturn V rocket had passed its design certification review, meaning the fixes and modifications made by von Braun and his engineers after the booster’s troubled test flight on Apollo 6 in April had been judged to be effective. Even the violent pogo problem seemed to have been tamed. Pending a few final checkouts, the rocket looked ready to launch three astronauts to the Moon. The crew of Apollo 8 spent much of the next day, September 18, in the command module simulator in Florida. They were joined, as they often would be during training, by their backup crew, Neil Armstrong, Edwin

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  about least by men, whether in praise or criticism.14 Given that life expectancy was low, a threshold of thirty years of age for participation also excluded a majority of males. Democratic participation excluded all Greeks who were not born citizens of the polis in which they now lived, and participation also relied on the body of enfranchised citizens having enough leisure time to listen to debates on policy and then take a part in decision-making. This required a large body of slaves to do a great deal of work for citizens, and naturally slaves had no useful opinions. Take all these factors together and perhaps only around a fifth of the adult inhabitants of proudly democratic Classical Athens could actually be described as active citizens: those who were considered best to represent the community of the polis. Nevertheless, with all these caveats, large numbers of ordinary people who were not privileged by birth or divine favour were indeed charged with responsibility for their own future and the future of their community. This was a frightening responsibility. Could frail human beings bear the emotional load? This is surely one of the chief reasons why the Greeks searched for meaning in cosmos and society with an intensity unparalleled elsewhere in Mediterranean civilization, and why they were more inclined than others to detach that search from structures of traditional religion. Philosophers involved themselves intimately in debate about what society should be like and how it should govern itself. Some did this through deliberately aggressive and paradoxical distancing from everyday life, brutally to present reality to their fellow citizens, particularly the complacently wealthy. So Diogenes of Sinope, whom the philosopher Plato nicknamed ‘Socrates gone mad’, became a wandering beggar and, when infesting Athens with his presence, he slept in a large wine jar (he was sufficiently appreciated by the citizenry that when a teenage vandal broke his jar the ekklēsia is said to have bought him a replacement and to have had the boy flogged). His lifestyle was an enacted reminder that although human beings were rational animals, they were still animals – he was nicknamed ‘the dog’, from which his admirers and imitators took the name Cynics (‘those like dogs’). Christianity has at various stages produced saints in his mould, holy fools and others openly contemptuous of worldly wealth, although they have rarely shared Diogenes’s propensity for masturbation in public as a symbol of detachment from conventional values.15 At the other extreme, there were philosophers who plunged into practical politics. Followers of the mystical mathematician Pythagoras seized power in a number of Greek cities in south Italy during the late sixth and the fifth centuries BCE, but they generally do not seem to have made a great success of their activism, which included an alarming tendency to live by intricate binding rules

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  cause of instability for Christendom: the gradual disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, or, more precisely, the competition to dominate its former Balkan conquests. The heir to the Austro-Hungarian thrones, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, a devout Catholic keenly interested in the restoration of historic church buildings, was gunned down with his wife in Sarajevo, capital of the Habsburgs’ most recently acquired province, Bosnia-Herzegovina. His murderers were part of an Orthodox-inspired movement to create a Greater Serbia which would include this religiously pluralistic territory. Beyond religion were power politics, ranging the Orthodox Tsar Nicholas II alongside the Protestant (and ethnically German) King-Emperor George V, in uncomfortable entente with an anticlerical Third French Republic. They acted in defensive nervousness, hoping to quell the expansionist ambitions of the new imperial Germany, which had encouraged its Habsburg ally to pressure Serbia, in order to confront Serbia’s protector Russia. Religion lurked in unpredictable ways. When the German Kaiser’s armies invaded Belgium to strike at the Franco-Russian alliance, they were violating the neutrality of a state formed in the 1830s specifically to accommodate the Roman Catholic faith of its inhabitants. Britain fought ostensibly to enforce that neutrality under guarantees that it had made to Belgium in 1839. In summer 1914 the Second Socialist International tried in vain to summon up a cross-border solidarity of workers against the growing crisis; it found that far more were swayed by the rhetoric of nationalism backed up by the institutions of Christianity, which caused a continent-wide outpouring of popular enthusiasm for war. All sides excitedly coupled the theme of Christian faith with national unity as they launched their armies, none more so than the government of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was also supreme Bishop of the Prussian Evangelical Church (see Plate 47). ‘No lust for conquest prompts us – unshakeable determination inspires us to guard the place in which God has set us and all generations to come,’ he proclaimed. ‘You have read, Gentlemen, what I have said to my People from the Castle balcony. Here I say again: I know parties no more, I know nothing but a German!’ The Kaiser’s speech from the throne of August 1914 to the leaders of the Reichstag parties echoed the public proclamation drafted for the Emperor by the Imperial Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, aided by the great liberal Protestant historian Adolf von Harnack, Rector of Berlin University, now Royal Librarian, and ennobled only six months before. German Protestant theologians and academics, Harnack’s colleagues, had internalized the new imperial ideal with remarkable and unedifying speed after the Hohenzollern triumph of 1870–71. At no time did they trumpet that more than in 1914 – very specifically, in a Proclamation of Ninety-three German Professors to the Cultural

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  the Carmelite spirituality of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross which managed to hang on inside the official Church, but also the amorphous movement labelled alumbrado (see pp. 590–91.) From Spain, via the mystical theologian Juan de Valdès, the alumbrado style of Christianity influenced the Spirituale movement in Italy, which produced such unexpected outcrops as Ignatius Loyola’s Society of Jesus. When the Spirituali were dispersed in the 1540s, Italians spread all over Protestant Europe in their own diaspora (see pp. 662–4). Many proved remarkably independent-minded once released to think for themselves, especially on the Trinity – again, Spanish crypto-Judaism was an influence here – and the result was the ‘Socinianism’ of eastern Europe (see pp. 642–3). Catholic Spain, through the unlikely agency of John Calvin, produced the classic martyr for radical religion, Michael Servetus, whose project for reconstructing Christianity was inspired by his consciousness of what had happened to religion in his Iberian homeland. All these stirrings were challenges to Christian orthodoxy, and now they met new forces of doubt among the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam.18 At the time, doubt was generally given the blanket label atheism, just as a whole variety of sexual practices of which society pretended to disapprove were given the blanket label sodomy.19 Specific examples of doubt are generally hidden from us throughout the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, since it was suicidal for anyone to proclaim doubt or unbelief, and the kindly instinct of priests and pastors was no doubt normally to still doubts in their flocks rather than risk their parishioners’ lives by exposing them. Educated and powerful people in the sixteenth century of course did speak seriously of doubt, but rather like medieval discussion of toleration, such talk had to be understood as theory only, if it was to be considered respectable. The best way (as with sodomy) was to shelter behind interest in Classical literature. The scrupulously dispassionate Latin poet Lucretius and the Greek satirist of philosophy and religion Lucian were widely read, while the sceptic Sextus Empiricus was rediscovered in the sixteenth century, giving his name to ‘empiricism’. Though Christian leaders regularly expressed their deep disapproval of such ‘atheistic’ writings, it was difficult to burn someone simply for reading a Classical author. Then gradually in the seventeenth century doubts melded into that systematic and self-confident confrontation with religious tradition which has become part of Western culture and has deeply affected the practice of Christianity itself. At least one impulse provoking this seismic shift had come – with poetic justice – from the Iberian Inquisitions, which demanded a profound and complete conversion from people, many of whom held a deep faith already. Among many possible outcomes of this shattering experience, one effect for

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

  It had been a rough return, but the bottom line was unmistakable: living creatures had survived a round-trip to the Moon. In England, Sir Bernard Lovell told reporters that Russia had regained the lead in the race to send men to the Moon and that Zond 5 “makes it highly probable that a Russian will get a close-up look at the Moon quite a long time before an American does.” —At NASA, the preparations for Apollo 8 grew even more intense. While the astronauts trained for twelve or more hours a day, the spacecraft was moved to the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Kennedy, where it was mated to the Saturn V rocket. Voices of opposition to the Apollo 8 mission began to ring out. In a September 24 editorial, The Washington Post warned, “Our program…ought to move at its own pace. If that pace is sufficiently rapid to bring American astronauts to the Moon first, fine. If it is not, so be it. The Russians will deserve the honor and praise they will win if their men make the first landing. In space exploration, it is more important to do things right than to do them first.” In a letter to Webb, astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s father, himself a former Air Force colonel and an aviation pioneer, wrote, “I do not favor a manned flight of Saturn V until the changes being made have been proven. What is the value of risking lives at this stage? You really need less yes-men in the space program.” —On October 9, a sky-high bay opened at the Vehicle Assembly Building, revealing the gargantuan Saturn V, white with black patches and streamlined to a narrow point at the top, an elegant monster fifteen stories taller and five times heavier than the Saturn IB the crew of Apollo 7 were scheduled to ride into Earth orbit. Only a rocket with that kind of size and power could lift a payload as heavy as an Apollo spacecraft bound for the Moon (although most of the rocket would fall away in the first few minutes of flight, and the rest of it a few hours later). For several minutes, the Saturn V stood and gleamed in the Florida sun. And then it started to move. The rocket stood atop NASA’s Crawler-Transporter, the world’s most powerful tractor. Powered by two sixteen-cylinder engines with a combined 5,500 horsepower and sixteen locomotive traction motors, the Crawler-Transporter was the largest self-powered land vehicle in the world. By itself, it weighed 6 million pounds, and it could move payloads in excess of 12 million pounds. The 131-foot-long vehicle rode on eight tank-like tracks—two on each corner, each pair the size of a Greyhound bus—and could deliver its payload to within inches of its target destination. Its top deck was the size of a major league baseball infield. Carrying the Saturn V to the launchpad, it would cruise at one mile per hour.

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

  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