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 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

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

  They would talk again in five days. If all looked good then, they would go to NASA’s boss for the go-ahead. — And that’s how things stood a day later, when Slayton got down to choosing a crew. He might have given the new mission to Jim McDivitt, who was currently assigned to command Apollo 8. But McDivitt’s crew had more experience with the lunar module than did Borman’s, so Slayton decided to keep McDivitt ready for when the troubled module was finally flightworthy. He pitched Borman on the new plan for Apollo 8 the next day. Now, Borman flew back to tell his crew of their new mission, one that hadn’t even been officially approved. He’d answered for them in Slayton’s office, never imagining they might say no. Yet this was the most dangerous mission NASA had ever contemplated. Borman assumed they’d be as eager as he was to take a sudden shot at the Moon, but there was every chance he was wrong. Sometimes Borman used the T-38 to do aerobatics, looping and rolling to help clear the cobwebs after a hard day’s work. This time, he flew level and fast, back to his crewmates in California in the straightest line a test pilot ever flew. Chapter Four

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

  developments that had started with the Enlightenment led to another, asking whether the Christian picture of God was believable. During the eighteenth century, the Newtonian system of mechanics and the deism associated with it seemed to safeguard the place of God as creator, and little in scientific discoveries seemed to suggest a denial of the biblical idea of a benevolent maker of the universe. Indeed, the mood of intelligent Christians was symbolized by the immense popularity in England of an apologetic book by the Cambridge mathematician and theologian William Paley, his View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794). This was the work which made much of ‘God the watchmaker’, an image whose antecedents could already be found in pre- Christian philosophy: its argument for God’s existence was based on the evidences for design in creation. The intricate structure of a watch could never have come about by chance, and neither could the intricacy or even adaptation and change in nature.90 Against this background, there developed an enthusiasm for a systematic physical exploration of the landscape, described by a new word-coinage, ‘geology’. This made it clear that traditional estimates of the date of biblical creation such as Ussher’s 4004 BCE bore no relation to the reality of the huge epochs of the earth’s existence. From the late eighteenth century, investigations in France laid down the way to proceed. The pioneer zoologist Georges Cuvier patiently mapped out the strata of the Paris river-basin even as the French Revolution raged about him; he showed that there could be a history of rocks and extinct creatures, just as there was a history of human empires.91 When English scholars added their contributions to this work, many of them were devout and orthodox Anglican clergy, led by the cheerfully learned and multifariously curious William Buckland, who kept a hyena at home as much for the enjoyment of its company as for research, and announced his intention of eating his way through the whole range of created animals. Geological work offered no problem to faith for such scholars; for them, creation stories in Genesis merely spoke figuratively of the time-spans involved in God’s plan. When Buckland recognized extinct fossil species, apparently changing in regular fashion over time, this was an additional proof of God’s providence: all earthly things have a tendency to decay, given the fallenness of creation, but God had provided for their replacement by creating new species. ‘Erratic’ rocks traceable to some rockbed large distances away after age-old glacial movements in ice ages seemed satisfying proof of the Flood’s universal reach. This picture was abruptly made less comforting by the work of Charles Darwin, once a prospective clergyman, who in 1835 turned from an early and not especially fruitful interest in geology to observing natural phenomena on the

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

  failure and tragedy to the modern world.96 Kierkegaard had reached this vision by another route: it was a faith infinitely remote both from the old Christianity of dogmatic systems and from the rationalizing Christianity of the nineteenth- century liberals. Alongside this textual investigation was a virtually new science, archaeology, which explored the lands in the Middle East where the Bible stories were actually set. Christians enthusiastically promoted this, believing that it would confirm biblical truths; they set up funds for such exploration. The results were in fact equivocal: ancient Israel seemed much less important or even visible than in its own accounts in the Old Testament, and many works of literature from other cultures were revealed, which indicated that biblical writers had borrowed plenty of their ideas and even texts from elsewhere.97 Yet the first golden age of these sciences of history and archaeology in the new universities failed to daunt liberal Protestants any more than they were unnerved by Darwin. One of the greatest of them, Adolf von Harnack – like von Ranke, ennobled by the Reich for his contribution to scholarship – was gleeful in his conviction that the work of the Reformation was thus completed: ‘Cardinal Manning once made the frivolous remark “One must overcome history with dogma.” We say just the opposite. Dogma must be purified by history. As Protestants we are confident that by doing this we do not break down but build up.’98 Nevertheless, for many sensitive people, science and history between them had irretrievably shaken the basis of revealed religion. Hegel had pictured the world of being and ideas as a continuous struggle; now the struggle, mindless, amoral and utterly selfish, extended to the natural world. In an age deeply concerned to live by moral principles, it was unnerving to suppose that the Creator did not share that concern. Evolution turns some of the human characteristics which seem most divine – moral fastidiousness, love – into products of self-interested evolution. It robs the world of moral or benevolent purpose, and even if God is taken as a first cause as the Origin still proclaimed, it is difficult to summon up enthusiasm for worshipping an axiom in physics.99 If evolution suggested that humanity partakes of the world’s general selfishness and amorality, then a subsequent Western thinker, Sigmund Freud, who published his first work on psychoanalysis thirteen years after Darwin’s death, and who remained fascinated by the myths of his ancestral Judaism and their development in Christianity, completed this picture of the amoral basis of human motivation beyond consciousness or public profession. The sexual drive was the most important force lying behind human behaviour.100 Darwin himself, whose first publication was actually a defence of Christian missions co-written during his Galapagos adventure, lost any sense of a purpose

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

  wiring diagrammed and tested, and the tracking stations around the world—which would relay voice and data between the flying spacecraft and Mission Control in Houston—brought up to speed. All of this, and so much else, had to be finished in just over one hundred days, all while NASA prepared for the launch of Apollo 7 in just one month. If that flight wasn’t near-perfect, Apollo 8 wouldn’t go. — On Friday evening, August 23, the astronauts went home for a rare weekend off. Many of their neighbors were like them—astronauts or NASA employees, conservative politically, with front lawns and haircuts that were military short. Boys still said “Yes, sir” when speaking to adults, girls still wore dresses. When the network newscasts came on the black- and-white televisions that night (color was still a luxury for many), few in these neighborhoods recognized the country looking back at them. Thousands of antiwar protesters had descended on Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, which was scheduled to start in three days. Gathering in parks and on the streets downtown, these protesters, most of them under thirty years old, intended to make their demands for peace known to the Democrats, and to the world. Rumors as to the protesters’ intentions had circulated for weeks. Word had it that these long-haired young people planned to dump LSD into the water supply, stage nude-ins at Lake Michigan, turn over cars and toss Molotov cocktails, run off with delegates’ daughters. A siege mentality took root in Chicago’s elders. Except for one rally in Grant Park, Mayor Richard J. Daley refused to issue permits for the protesters to march, gather, or camp out in parks. To enforce Daley’s peace, twelve thousand Chicago police officers, armed with military gear, stood at the ready, backed by six thousand members of the Illinois National Guard and six thousand regular Army troops. To the astronauts, Chicago seemed a universe away. They lived military lives, rarely intersecting with the counterculture. Like most astronauts, Borman, Lovell, and Anders found the lifestyle and tactics of hippies and the antiwar movement unbecoming, even unpatriotic. But they didn’t dismiss these young people. Each of them knew that the powder keg that looked ready to ignite in Chicago hadn’t formed

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

  influence enjoyed by his Greek entourage in their Phanar enclave in Constantinople that the institutions of the patriarchate were often known, without any sense of compliment, as ‘the Phanar’. The Phanar’s decline proceeded in step with the decay of the Ottoman Empire which had so promoted the patriarch after the seizure of the city (see pp. 497–8). Given this ongoing home-grown crisis, the memories of 1789 which so agitated the Western Church were only one competitor for Orthodox attention. It was difficult for the embattled Greek Orthodox to look past their ancient grievances against Catholic aggression from 1204 onwards. So when Napoleon invaded Ottoman Egypt in 1798, intent on pursuing the British to India, but also proclaiming the rhetoric of liberty, equality and fraternity, the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem published a book in Constantinople which argued that God had created the Ottoman Empire to defend his Church from Latin heresy, let alone French Revolutionaries, so God required loyalty to the sultan from all good Christians.70 Equally, the Russian tsar continued to expect God to deliver him the loyalty of his subjects. In Russia, the shackling of Church institutions to the tsar’s centralizing bureaucracy (see pp. 542–3) caused many thoughtful Orthodox discomfort, but few had any objection to the steady expansion of Orthodox culture which accompanied the tsar’s conquests south, east and west from the eighteenth century. Given Russia’s absorption of much of the old Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth and its moves eastwards, Russian Orthodoxy was always also going to be conscious of both its European and its Asian neighbours. During the early nineteenth century, its armies had marched to Paris, as well as in striking distance of Constantinople and Teheran. In central Asia, the Tsaritsa Catherine and her successors controlled Islam by a policy straightforwardly borrowed from their existing control of official Orthodox Christianity: a central ‘Muhammadan Assembly’ of mullahs, and even a system of parishes. In the 1820s and 1830s they issued regulations for Muslim burials in the interests of bureaucratic record-keeping which bore all the cavalier disregard for ritual propriety that Peter the Great had shown to the Christian institution of sacramental confession.71 The tsars who succeeded Catherine the Great parted with her fascination for Enlightenment values, but they did not find it a problem to combine Tsar Peter’s bureaucratic shackling of the Church with their intense commitment to a role as Christian absolute ruler. Tsar Alexander I (reigned 1801–25) was in thrall to a mysticism which once made him entertain the great Austrian politician Prince Metternich at a table laid for four: the other guest present was a noblewoman from the Baltic who had taken up a career as a prophetess, and the absentee was Jesus Christ. Tsar Alexander was fascinated by pronouncements from the

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

  Even if Apollo 8 somehow flew to the Moon and back, NASA would not, as matters presently stood, be able to retrieve the crew, as the agency had yet to schedule an operation for recovering the astronauts when their capsule splashed down in middle of the ocean. Engineers hadn’t even run a trajectory analysis to account for the phases of the Moon in December, or lunar lighting at that time of year, or the position of the Moon relative to Earth during such a flight. Even if NASA could manage all that, the risks of undertaking a lunar mission in December were enormous. Kraft could hardly scribble a list of them fast enough on his steno pad, but two stood out above the rest. First, the Saturn V rocket—the only one powerful enough to reach the Moon—had never flown with men aboard. It had been tested only twice, the second time in April, when it had suffered near-catastrophic problems. If Apollo 8 was to go to the Moon in December, there wouldn’t be time to test the rocket again. The next time the Saturn V rocket flew, it would be with the crew of Apollo 8 aboard. Second, the lunar module also served as a backup engine—a lifeboat of sorts. Going without it meant that if Apollo 8’s single engine failed or malfunctioned at the Moon, the crew could smash into the lunar surface or be stranded in lunar orbit or fly off toward the Sun. And yet Kraft couldn’t bring himself to say no. He asked for a day to study the problem, then met with several experts. He returned to Low’s office the next morning with startling news. Kraft thought Apollo 8 should do more than just go to the Moon in December. He thought Apollo 8 should orbit the Moon. That nearly knocked Low from his chair. A lunar fly-by, as Low had proposed (and the Soviets planned), required only that a spacecraft be pointed at the Moon. If aimed precisely, it would be pulled in by the Moon’s gravity, whipped around its far side, and slingshotted back toward Earth, all without relying on the complex engine burns and calculations that were required to enter and exit a lunar orbit. That made things simpler by an order of magnitude, because it put gravity in charge, not engineers and rockets. In essence, Low had wanted Apollo 8 to fly a classic figure eight from Earth around the Moon and back again. Engineers had worked on this so-called free return trajectory for years, and NASA was certain it was sound. Now Kraft was suggesting Apollo 8 do something much more difficult. Entering and exiting lunar orbit—whereby the spacecraft would slow itself enough to become captured by the Moon’s gravity, then speed up again to leave—required intervention. Engines had to be fired, altitudes changed, speeds modified, navigation altered, and countless other adjustments made.

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

  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. To test it, NASA had fitted each member of the Apollo 8 crew with a Personal Radiation Dosimeter, an ivory-colored device about the size and shape of a bar of soap that Anders had helped to design. It would measure the levels of radiation to which the astronauts had been exposed. (The device had a tiny five-digit analog meter to provide readings.) Now that Apollo 8 had passed through both belts (the first of which extended from about 600 to 3,500 miles above Earth, the second from about 9,300 to 14,000 miles above Earth), Collins wanted a radiation reading from the crew. Borman was eager to learn the results; he’d heard the dire warnings some scientists had made about passage through the belts. Anders, a nuclear engineer who had developed expertise in shielding against charged space particles, felt certain no damage had been done. It was he who radioed back to Mission Control with the results. “Houston. Apollo 8 with a PRD reading.”

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

  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 aeronautical engineering in order to become an instructor at West Point. He enrolled at Caltech in Pasadena, where he kept up with some of the best students in the world. By 1957, he had his master’s degree and was teaching thermodynamics and fluid mechanics at West Point. He loved being back at the place that had shaped him. If anything, Susan loved it more. Her boys were playing little league baseball and learning to swim, she’d decorated the family’s apartment, and Frank was home most nights. For the first time since they’d married, it seemed a stable existence, and one that might last. A few months later, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. Borman couldn’t imagine a bigger blow to national pride, or a clearer indication that America was losing the Cold War. Already a staunch anticommunist, Borman now believed the United States to be facing an existential threat. From that point forward, his thinking changed. If he could do anything to be part of the fight America needed to bring against the Soviet Union, he would do it. Even if the United States needed him to drop an atomic bomb, he wouldn’t have hesitated for a second. He didn’t want to kill anyone, let alone innocent civilians, but his faith that his country would always act as a force for good in the world trumped all. In 1960, Borman applied to and was accepted by the Air Force’s exclusive Experimental Flight Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

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

  It read: Dear Sir: I wonder what sort of thinking went into your decision to send three men around the Moon at Christmas-time. This is by no means a sure venture, and the risk of ruining the Christmas Season for millions of Americans is enormous. Christmas is a time for carefree family reunions, for as much happiness as all of us can snatch in this miserable year of 1968. We do not need a space triumph to celebrate our greatest holiday, but a failure will be the crowning blow to a people already punch drunk with the events of the year. Along with millions of Americans I have been thrilled by the successes of the Space Program…but I am of the opinion that the American people would much prefer a delay of a month if such is essential. Sincerely, Stewart Atkinson It was around this time, about six weeks before scheduled lift-off, that Borman got a call from the agency’s public affairs mastermind, Julian Scheer. NASA, Scheer said, had decided to have the crew of Apollo 8 make a live television broadcast on Christmas Eve. “We figure more people will be listening to your voice than that of any man in history,” Scheer said. “So we want you to say something appropriate. You’ll have maybe five or six minutes.” “Great, Julian,” Borman replied. “What are we doing?” “Do whatever’s appropriate,” Scheer said. Borman was surprised by the response. Scheer, and NASA, were leaving it up to him to decide what to say. No committees. No consensus. No vetting. Just him. By this time, the unmanned Zond 6 had already flown around the Moon, passing within 1,500 miles of its surface, and was headed back to home. So confident in the mission were Soviet planners that they took the uncharacteristic step of announcing, during the flight, that the explicit purpose of the mission was to prepare for a manned journey to the Moon. All that remained was for the spacecraft to execute its complex reentry and touch down under parachute in Kazakhstan. Execution was near flawless. Zond 6 completed its reentry having endured no more than four to seven g’s. The flight of Zond 6 made it clear to NASA that the Soviets were ready to send men to the Moon ahead of Apollo 8. And the Soviets didn’t intend to stop there. One of their experts said that the flight of Zond 6 paved the way for manned flights not just to the Moon but to Mars, Venus, and other planets. What NASA, and even the CIA, did not know was that Zond 6 had experienced two serious problems during its flight. The first, a partial depressurization of the cabin, occurred just before reentry. The second, a failure of the parachute system, caused the spacecraft to plummet into the ground. Both incidents would have been fatal had a crew been on board. That meant the Soviets had a decision to make.

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

  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 “Buzz” Aldrin, and Fred Haise. By Slayton’s assignment scheme, backup crews became primary crews three flights later. That meant Armstrong, Aldrin, and Haise would be prime crew for Apollo 11. Late that night, while the astronauts slept, the famed British astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell (no relation to Jim Lovell) reported that a massive radio telescope in England had tracked a Soviet spacecraft (Zond 5) as it passed within a thousand miles of the Moon. Further, it appeared that the ship was now making a return journey to Earth. Lovell concluded the Soviets intended to recover the craft. “Once they have achieved this,” he said, “we can anticipate that they will put a man in one.” The next night, observers picked up a different kind of signal being broadcast from Zond 5. This time, they heard a Russian voice. No one believed a cosmonaut to be aboard Zond 5, but the man calling out the ship’s instrument readings was as real as the spacecraft itself. His voice, and others heard later, belonged to cosmonauts and were being transmitted live from the Soviet Union to Zond 5, then beamed back to Earth by the spacecraft, all by way of practice for the real thing. Soviet intentions were clear. A manned lunar mission was coming very soon. But Zond 5 wasn’t home yet. On September 21, the spacecraft collided with Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of 24,600 miles per hour. In seconds, deceleration forces reached between 12 and 18 g’s, a punishing (but survivable) load for properly trained humans (1 g is equal to the force of gravity at Earth’s surface, 2 g’s is equal to twice the force of gravity at Earth’s surface, and so on). For three minutes, Zond 5 raked through increasing resistance until it plummeted through a darkened sky toward the Indian Ocean. At an altitude of about 20,000 feet, its single parachute deployed, leaving the craft, still glowing from the heat generated by reentry, in a final ride to the water. Still alive inside the capsule were the tortoises, just 10 percent lighter for their near-week in space. Several fly eggs had hatched.

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

  In a November 4 letter to one of NASA’s top managers, he wrote, “you and I know that if failure comes, the reaction will be that anyone should have known better than to undertake such a trip at this point in time.” Mueller also asked the man to fill out a Mission Risk Assessment Form. To Kraft, that was a portent of things to come—Mueller intended to make him and other top managers at NASA sign in blood that Apollo 8 was the right thing to do, and that they would be responsible if things went wrong. On November 5, 1968, the American people elected Richard Nixon as the country’s next president. During his campaign, Nixon had promised to support the space program, as Johnson had done. “I don’t want the Soviet Union or any other nation to be ahead of the United States,” he’d told voters a few weeks before the election. “Let’s emphasize the Moon shot and others where we can make a direct breakthrough.” NASA managers continued to debate the Apollo 8 mission into November. As they went from meeting to meeting, an unmanned Soviet spacecraft lifted off from the launchpad in Kazakhstan. Zond 6 represented the final piece of the Soviet plan to send a crew on a circumlunar mission. Two months earlier, Zond 5 had made a successful loop around the Moon, only to experience a violent reentry that might have injured or even killed a crew. This time, Zond 6 had been designed to loop around the Moon, then execute a complex, guided reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, reducing g-force loads to manageable levels. If the Soviets could pull that off, the next Zond flight would go to the Moon with two cosmonauts in early December—and beat out Apollo 8. On November 11, NASA chief Thomas Paine made a final decision on Apollo 8. He phoned President Johnson, who was meeting with President-elect Nixon, and informed the men of the agency’s decision. It was determined then that Paine would announce NASA’s verdict on Apollo 8 to the American public at a press conference from NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. Early the next day, as Zond 6 headed on a perfect course for the Moon, Paine spoke to members of the media. “After a careful and thorough investigation of all the systems and risks involved,” he said, “we have concluded that we are now ready to fly the most advanced mission for our Apollo 8 launch in December, the orbit around the Moon.” The press conference lasted more than three hours. When it ended, reporters rushed their stories to their respective outlets. America was shooting for the Moon at Christmas. —Three days after Paine’s announcement, a letter arrived at the office of Bob Gilruth, director of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. It was written by a man named Stewart Atkinson, of Darien, Connecticut.

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

  American intel had a good laugh when they heard the story. To them, it represented the layers of bureaucracy that constituted the Soviet socialist system. It had taken more than one hundred days for the first bomber crew to report Anders’s middle finger, for word to travel through channels to the Kremlin, for analysts to decipher it, for committees to formulate a response, for other committees to approve it, for translators to put the Soviet answer into English, for orders to be given to a new bomber crew, and for the Soviet pilots to deliver it. Their message to the Americans flying alongside: WE FUCKED YOUR SISTER . After more than a year in Iceland, Anders was sent back to Hamilton Field in California, a welcome return for Valerie. Anders continued flying interceptor missions, this time with the nuclear-armed supersonic F-101 Voodoo, a fearsome jet capable of reaching speeds in excess of a thousand miles per hour. At Hamilton, Valerie became even more accustomed to the stresses of being married to a fighter pilot. Men died in this line of work, she knew that, but it was always terrible to see a black Air Force car drive into base housing to deliver the bad news. Every time she saw the black car she wondered, Is my life about to change? Could this happen to us? And even as the car passed her home and stopped at a neighbor’s, she didn’t kid herself. Yes, she thought, it could certainly happen to us . Around this time, Anders began to get itchy. Interceptor work was interesting, but he didn’t feel pushed to his limits, not in body or mind, in a way that would make for a satisfying long-term career. He went to see Chuck Yeager at the Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California. Pushing unproven airplanes to their limits demanded a new level of intellectual engagement, raw bravery, and adventure; to Anders, that sounded like the life he wanted. Yeager was impressed by Anders’s flying credentials but urged him to go back to college and obtain an advanced degree in science or engineering, since that’s what the Air Force was looking for in test pilot candidates. Anders followed the recommendation and applied to the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. He requested a program in either aeronautical or astronautical engineering, but administrators put him in nuclear engineering. To cover his bases, Anders enrolled in a night school program in aeronautics at nearby Ohio State University. Over the next two years, Anders studied, fathered another child, Gayle (born 1960), and learned more about nuclear energy and radiation. In 1962, he graduated second in his class with a master’s degree in nuclear engineering. He submitted his application for test pilot school, but now the school wasn’t accepting new students.

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

  About ninety minutes into the flight, Apollo 8 passed over the Pacific Ocean toward Southern California. Out his window, Anders stole a glimpse of Los Angeles, picking out Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades, and then his hometown of San Diego, and the beaches where he first met Valerie. He felt a moment’s envy—Borman and Lovell had enjoyed these spectacular rolling views for two weeks aboard Gemini 7. For Anders, the view would last for just another eighty minutes. Officially, he wasn’t even supposed to be looking. Anders checked to make sure Borman wasn’t watching, then stole a long glance out the window and let it settle into his memory. It took Apollo 8 less than eleven minutes more to cross the United States. In Houston, Flight Director Cliff Charlesworth told Mission Control that the S-IVB, the Saturn’s third-stage booster, looked good for translunar injection, the maneuver that would propel the spacecraft out of its orbit around Earth and on to the Moon. To pull it off, Apollo 8 needed to accelerate from its current speed of about 17,400 miles per hour to nearly 24,250 miles per hour. That boost would be accomplished by the single J-2 engine on the Saturn’s third stage, which would be reignited and burned for nearly six minutes. Doing this would not, as many believed, cause the spacecraft to leave Earth orbit; rather, it would simply change the shape of Apollo 8’s orbit around Earth from a near circle into a highly elongated ellipse, one that would stretch all the way from Earth to the Moon and back. The exact moment of the engine’s firing, as well as its thrust, direction, and duration, depended on complex mathematics designed to put the spacecraft at just the right point where it could slingshot around the far side of the Moon and make a free return to Earth if necessary, all while accounting for the movements of Earth, the Moon, and the spacecraft itself. Row after row of controllers in Houston, in shirtsleeves and ties, seated at consoles crowded with monitors, buttons, levers, and dials, needed to analyze data pouring in from the spacecraft, trying to determine whether Apollo 8 looked ready to go to the Moon. “How does it feel up there?” Collins radioed to the crew. “Very good, very good,” Borman replied. “Everything is going rather well. The Earth looks just about the same way it did three years ago.” Mission Control got a kick out of that one. Meanwhile, in Hawaii, NASA had made it known that the translunar injection burn would occur almost directly over the islands. If the night stayed clear, locals might see Apollo 8’s third-stage engine ignite as it hurled the spacecraft toward the Moon. Just twenty-five minutes remained before the scheduled burn. Borman could picture Chris Kraft as he prepared for the historic maneuver, chewing on a stale cigar, watching a console over a controller’s shoulder, processing the flood of information pouring in.

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

  His eleven-year-old son, Alan, told how a classmate brought his fireman father to school one day, and everyone thought that kid had the coolest father of them all; in this neighborhood, it seemed every old dad was an astronaut. When Valerie talked to the kids about Apollo 8, she explained what their father would be doing, but she never promised that he would be okay; she didn’t want to mislead them. And they didn’t seem worried, anyway. They had other excitements to deal with, like the new color television Anders bought so his family could watch the launch, and the Life magazine photographers who were now showing up almost daily to take photos of the family doing things they didn’t do in real life, like eating ice cream together at the kitchen table. When Borman arrived home for Thanksgiving, Susan had the house perfect and ready for him, as she always did. In the 1950s, when they were moving from base to base, she’d read and absorbed The Army Wife by Nancy Shea, a book about making a good life and a good home while married to a military man. “Every Army wife has three basic responsibilities,” the author wrote: 1. To make a congenial home 2. To rear a family of which he will be proud 3. To strengthen her husband’s morale “Your whole scheme of life revolves around your husband, your children, and a happy home,” Shea added. Susan had been the perfect Army wife for eighteen years, since Frank had graduated from West Point in 1950, but now she wondered whether she’d be able to keep it up, whether the pressure might finally break her. Susan believed, with one hundred percent certainty, that Frank was going to die aboard Apollo 8. Frank knew she had been drinking, but he didn’t think she had a problem because she kept such a beautiful home, raised her sons with honor and dignity, and never expressed a moment’s concern for herself. He’d never seen her drunk, not once. When he discussed Apollo 8 with Susan, she told him, “I know you’ll be fine.” Inside, she was dying, watching her life and the lives of her sons being torn apart before her eyes, her best friend being taken away forever, to a place she could never reach. If Borman had had even an inkling that his wife was suffering, he would have explained the mission to her, laid out maps, described how thoroughly NASA had engineered the flight, listed all the precautions that were in place. If her sons, now seventeen and fifteen, had known that their mother was so worried, they would have hugged and reassured her. But no one knew, which was just how Susan wanted it—she didn’t want anyone to suffer on her account. As launch neared, Susan hosted a cocktail party, with many NASA folks in attendance. During a quiet moment, she pulled Chris Kraft aside. “Chris, I’d really appreciate it if you’d level with me,” Susan said.

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

  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. When the five first-stage engines ignite, they will deliver a combined 160 million horsepower. In the final few seconds, a typhoon of flames unfurls to either side. Beneath the astronauts, it is not just the launchpad that begins to shake, but the entire world. Chapter One DO YOU WANT TO GO TO THE MOON? August 3, 1968—Four months earlier As he sat on a beach in the Caribbean, a quiet engineer named George Low ran his fingers through the sand and wondered whether he should risk everything to win the Space Race and help save the world. At forty-one, Low was already a top manager and one of the most important people at NASA, in charge of making sure the Apollo spacecraft was flightworthy. Apollo had a single goal, perhaps the greatest and most audacious ever conceived: to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy had committed the United States to achieving this goal by the end of the decade. Never had a more inspiring promise been made to the American people—or one that could be so easily verified. Now, Kennedy’s end-of-decade deadline was in jeopardy. Design and engineering problems with the lunar module—the spidery landing craft that would move astronauts from their orbiting ship to the lunar surface and back again—threatened to stall the Apollo program and put Kennedy’s deadline, just sixteen months away, out of reach. And that led to another problem. Every day that Apollo languished, the Soviet Union moved closer to landing its own crew on the Moon. And that mattered. The nation that landed the first men on the Moon would score the ultimate victory in the years-long Space Race between the two superpowers, one from which the second-place finisher might never recover. For months, NASA’s best minds had worked around the clock to fix the issues with the lunar module, but the temperamental and complex landing craft only fell further and further behind schedule. By summer, many at the space agency had abandoned hope of making a manned