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)

  PLEASE BE INFORMED—THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS Susan Borman, Valerie Anders, and Marilyn Lovell had been told that if all went well, their husbands would regain contact with Houston at about 12:19 A.M., the moment their spacecraft came around the lunar far side. That was still five minutes away. Seconds had never passed so slowly. It wasn’t much easier for those at Mission Control, and especially for Chris Kraft. All he could do now was wait. Now, just one minute remained until Apollo 8 was due to regain contact with Earth. Any longer than that, and it meant something had not gone according to plan. In Australia, technicians at the Honeysuckle Creek tracking station made certain their antenna was pointed accurately. (NASA needed a station in Australia, and elsewhere around the world, to ensure that the spacecraft could be “seen” at all times no matter where the Earth was in its rotation.) At just the moment Mission Control expected to acquire a signal, Australia reported receiving one. A wave of excitement washed over the room, but Houston still had to confirm it. CapCom Ken Mattingly called to the spacecraft. “Apollo 8, Houston.” There was no answer. Mattingly waited a full eighteen seconds, then called again. “Apollo 8, Houston.” Still no answer. Susan Borman and Valerie Anders were silent. There was no sound in the Borman home but for the squawk box, and their husbands’ voices were not coming out of it. Everyone there—Susan, her boys, the visitors— were just waiting to hear an astronaut’s voice, which was now overdue. Twenty-eight seconds later, Mattingly tried again. “Apollo 8, Houston.”

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

  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.

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

  lunar landing by the end of the decade. And then Low had an idea. It had come to him just a few weeks before he’d arrived at this beach, and it was wild, an epiphany, a dream. It was also dangerous, risky beyond anything NASA had ever attempted. But the more Low thought about it, the more he believed it could keep the Apollo program moving and save Kennedy’s deadline—and maybe even beat the Soviets to the Moon. Low inhaled the fresh, salty air and tried to push space travel out of his thoughts. At home, his mind burned nonstop with ideas, formulae, trajectories. Now he needed a break, and it should have been easy to find one in this tropical paradise. 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,

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

  box, nodding in conversation without actually hearing what people were saying. Her favorite dialogue between Apollo 8 and Mission Control came when Frank said things like “We noticed on our system test battery vent pressure that when we opened the battery vent valve, we get an immediate drop-off to pressure which nulls out at about two-tenths to three-tenths of a volt”—not because she understood the jargon, but because the sound of his voice proved Frank was still alive. Down the road, Chris Kraft, Flight Director Glynn Lunney, and several mechanical minds were studying 2.4 seconds’ worth of data, trying to explain the loss in pressure and thrust in the SPS engine. After nearly two hours of frenetic analysis, a contractor from North American Aviation, which built the spacecraft, had an epiphany: A bubble in a propellant line had fouled things up. Helium, the man reasoned, must have become trapped during launch and remained in the oxidizer line. That’s why the engine didn’t achieve full thrust right away. One could hear the same thing when starting a lawn mower after a period of inactivity. If that was true, it was good news for NASA, because it meant the bubble likely had been purged and the flow of propellant purified. But no one could know for sure. It was now up to Lunney and Kraft to decide what to do with that theory. As they mulled over how to proceed, Borman radioed Houston. He was supposed to be sleeping but, in the excitement of the flight, couldn’t make it happen. “We have one request. CDR would like to get clearance to take a Seconal.” Borman had asked whether he (CDR was shorthand for Commander) could take a sleeping pill. He detested the idea of relying on medication, but it was almost impossible to shut down one’s brain in the middle of mankind’s first trip to the Moon. Borman figured that a single Seconal, a barbiturate often prescribed for sleep, wouldn’t be harmful under the circumstances. CapCom Mattingly checked with NASA’s doctors, who okayed it, and Borman made his way back down to the sleeping area in the navigation bay. His crewmates were working and talking above him, but it was the best refuge possible in a craft just thirteen feet by eleven feet and filled with equipment.

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

  “Burning,” Anders confirmed. Eleven seconds later, it was done. Houston analyzed the telemetry— the correction had been nearly perfect, and it was just a matter of riding the ship for another eight hours until lunar rendezvous. Despite such close proximity, the crew still could not see its target. To all of them, it felt like sitting with their backs to the screen in a movie theater during a terrific thriller. In Houston, the wives began to prepare for when the spacecraft reached the Moon, scheduled for 4:00 A.M. Houston time, when Apollo 8 would attempt a complex maneuver known as Lunar Orbit Insertion, or LOI. Engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and other scientists had spent years developing the calculations and determining how to make the maneuver work. But on its face, LOI was easy to understand. At 69 hours into the flight, Apollo 8 would pass just in front of the Moon, missing its surface by only 69 miles. That altitude had been chosen for a reason. On future landing missions, it would be close enough so that the lunar module shuttling astronauts to the lunar surface and back wouldn’t require a massive amount of propellant, but far enough away to make it unlikely that the spacecraft waiting in orbit above would crash into the Moon. If Apollo 8 did not fire its SPS engine—or if the engine failed to ignite —after passing behind the Moon, lunar gravity would cause it to slingshot around the far side and head back to Earth, requiring only minor course adjustments in order to hit its reentry corridor and splash down in the Pacific Ocean. NASA had chosen this free return, figure eight trajectory in case of engine failure or other in-flight problems. But NASA planned for Apollo 8 to orbit the Moon. To enter lunar orbit, the spacecraft had to slow itself down enough to be captured by the Moon’s gravity. The only way to do that was to fire the SPS engine against the direction of its travel, for just the right amount of time—about four minutes—and with just the right amount of thrust. If the engine fired for too short a period, or without enough thrust, the spacecraft might still slingshot around the Moon but emerge on an improper trajectory, one that might cause it to burn up on reentry into the atmosphere or miss Earth entirely. Or it might be cast out into space without enough power or propellant to reverse course and come back. Or

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

  flooding into the agency. The New York Times proclaimed, “There was more than narrow religious significance in the emotional high point of their fantastic odyssey, their reading of the biblical story of creation while this world watched live pictures of the Moon televised by the astronauts from within a few dozen miles of the lunar surface.” Even acting NASA chief Thomas Paine couldn’t contain himself. As the spacecraft drew closer to Earth, he wrote to President Johnson, “It is apparent that an unprecedented wave of popular enthusiasm for the Apollo 8 astronauts is building up around the world. Laudatory editorials are in every paper.” Many were already calling the mission the greatest adventure in mankind’s history. But the ship wasn’t home yet. Apollo 8 still had to hit the narrowest of entry corridors, at just the right attitude, moving at speeds faster than humans had ever traveled. To Borman and his crewmates, reentry was one of the three maneuvers on the mission—along with launch and Trans Earth Injection—during which they were most likely to die. — Reentry into Earth’s atmosphere would officially start at an altitude of 400,000 feet, or 75.75 miles. Nothing magical happened at that point, but it’s where things would start to change in a hurry. By that time, the command module would have shed the service module, leaving Apollo 8 just a cone-shaped wedge about eleven feet tall and thirteen feet wide speeding through space. Several seconds later, Apollo 8 would have plunged 100,000 more feet, and Earth’s atmosphere would begin acting on the ship and on the crew, exerting just a tiny fraction of a single g-force. The spacecraft would be traveling in excess of 24,500 miles per hour, and the computer would take over flying duties from Borman. At that point, the astronauts could only trust that Apollo 8 was aimed and positioned right. Some had compared NASA’s challenge in finding the entry corridor to throwing a paper airplane into a public mailbox slot—from a distance of four miles. There was almost no margin for error. If the spacecraft came in too steep, it would grind too hard into the atmosphere, causing massive g-forces that would crush the ship and crew, and generating heat so intense it would incinerate the men and turn

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

  broadcast left, when they would address a nation growing ever more nervous about their safe reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Marilyn Lovell was nervous, too. She grabbed her two eldest children, Barbara and Jay, and whisked them to Mission Control, where they could all watch. As they arrived, they heard Jim poke a little fun at himself. “I tried to hurry up the voyage home by calling up Program 01 to get us back on the pad, but it didn’t work,” he radioed to Houston. “Well, that’s the best excuse I’ve heard so far, Jim,” Carr replied. “The best of many,” Lovell said. A few minutes later, while millions of Americans watched, the crew of Apollo 8 began its sixth and final scheduled television broadcast. For nearly a minute, almost nothing appeared onscreen as Anders tried to frame the shot. But then a planet emerged, half lit, half in darkness, and there was no mistaking the swirls of clouds, the grooves of continents, the scoops of oceans. This was Earth, from 110,000 miles away. This, every person could see, was where they lived. Lovell pointed to a storm over South America, the waters around the West Indies, and Florida. Looking through his telescope, he said he could see the central and southern United States. He asked Anders to describe his view. “As I look down on the Earth here from so far out in space,” Anders said, “I think I must have the feeling that the travelers in the old sailing ships used to have—going on a very long voyage away from home, and now we’re headed back, and I have that feeling of being proud of the trip, but still...still happy to be going back home and back to our home port.” — Nineteen hours remained until Apollo 8’s scheduled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. With no major milestones due between now and then, the media was hungry for stories, and they turned to the astronauts’ families to find them. Valerie Anders reported that she was locked to her squawk box. Her son, Alan, was playing with his dog, Luna, and cat, Dudley, while the other Anders kids concentrated on their Christmas presents. Valerie also noted that ten-year-old Glen had mowed the lawn that morning, a job Bill

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  knew our reality was not sane, but that knowledge didn’t stop me from tying “blessed” handkerchiefs around the doorknobs in my room when I got home. When friends asked me what they were for, I shrugged. “I dunno. Something my brother did.” My mother called me and my date into the living room at the end of her Friday night Bible study. The date was a twenty-two-year-old law student I had gone out with for a year, and despite his professed agnosticism, my mother liked him. The neighbor family who attended the study had already gone, and the room was quiet and mostly dark. A small lamp squatted on a tabletop at either end of the couch and cast the only circles of light in the room. My mother waved us over to the couch. We anchored one end and she took the other. “I don’t know what y’all are going to do about this, but I thought I should tell you that we are going to be moving in a few months.” For several months, my mother and siblings had met Brother Terrell for prolonged visits at some “ranch” out in the middle of nowhere. He was worried that our house in Groesbeck was not remote enough, that “the enemy” would find him. I refused to go with them for these visits, and when my mother tried to tell me about the ranch, I left the room with my hands over my ears. And now here it was, the big announcement. I told my mother I couldn’t bear to move, that I would not move. The boyfriend spoke up. “Look, we’ll go to Oklahoma and get married. I think the age of consent is fifteen there. I know for sure it’s a lot younger than it is here.” Mama didn’t say anything for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was smooth and fat with satisfaction. “Well, now, y’all don’t have to do that. We can have a wedding, a real wedding, before the move.” I had planned to break up with the law-school boyfriend. He was kind and smart and talked to me about Nietzsche and existentialism, but I also felt overwhelmed and voiceless around him. And there was a boy in high school. A boy with whom I felt, for the first time in a long time, like a kid. I didn’t want to get married. I wanted to continue waking up in the yellow house every day, and going to school and coming home until it was time, really time, to do something else. All of this had seemed possible, but it wasn’t and probably never had been. My choices were to marry or to move to the middle of nowhere and wait for the end of the world.

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

  Chapter Sixteen EQUIGRAVISPHERE During Sunday morning services across America, congregations prayed for the astronauts. In Rome, Pope Paul VI did the same: “We open the window and instinctively the eye, the thought, the heart, go to the heavens. We pray to the Lord for them, and for the world, which is dazed at the conquest of science and of human endeavor.” Leaving St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in League City, Texas, on the arms of her two big, rugged teenage sons, Susan Borman remained grateful for everyone’s good wishes, even as she calculated that Frank had moved another ten thousand miles away from her since services had begun. At home, Susan climbed out of the family’s old F-150 pickup truck. Reporters were waiting on her front lawn, and she smiled and answered questions, then excused herself and went inside. Ignoring all the food left by well-wishers, she made her way to the bedroom, where she turned off the lights, lay on the bed, and listened on the squawk box for the voice of her husband. A few miles away, Marilyn Lovell and her four children had returned to Houston from Florida. When she opened the door to her house, she was greeted by a small village of friends, babysitters, neighbors, and astronauts with their wives, all of whom had brought something to eat or to drink (including the customary deviled eggs and champagne). The first thing Marilyn did was go to each of the four squawk boxes set up in her home—in the study, master bedroom, family room, and living room. Only after she’d flipped each of them to ON did she circle back to join her company. (Both Marilyn and Susan were squawk box veterans, having listened in during their husbands’ flight together on Gemini 7.) Neither Marilyn nor the other astronaut wives understood much of the technical jargon, but all of them found comfort in hearing their husband’s voice and those of the men they knew in Mission Control. Now, however, when Mission Control called the spacecraft with their

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

  sooner than anyone at NASA had planned. As if that weren’t enough, Low was proposing to skip not one but two preparatory Apollo flights, violating one of NASA’s foundational philosophies: that missions be incremental to assure mastery and success. And yet Kraft saw elegance, even genius, in the plan. Low wasn’t proposing to land Apollo 8 on the Moon, just to fly around it, so no lunar module was necessary. By going in December, NASA could prove many of the systems and procedures, and much of the equipment and technology, required for a lunar landing. It could gain valuable deep space experience, and avoid the months of downtime that would come from delaying Apollo 8 until the lunar module was ready. That would put the agency back on track to make Kennedy’s deadline. And there was another benefit: A December launch gave America a chance to beat the Soviets to the Moon. Still, the logistical challenges seemed insurmountable to Kraft. Mission Control would need to be readied, trajectories and navigation calculated, an entire deep space communication network finished, an astronaut crew quickly trained, the flight control team brought up to speed and made confident, new software written, instrumentation calibrated. 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

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

  EARTHRISE For months, Borman had been fixated on a particular moment in the flight plan: the instant when Apollo 8 would lose radio contact with Earth as it slipped behind the Moon. This would not be the first time a space mission lost contact with Earth. In fact, every Earth orbital flight (Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo 7, as well as the Soviet flights) had long periods when the spacecraft was out of touch with all the ground stations due to Earth’s curvature. Since the planet was not covered with ground stations, the crews on those missions spent most of their time in radio silence. But that was far different from losing contact with the home planet because another world got in the way, which was just about to happen with Apollo 8. NASA had calculated, to the second, when it expected its communications with Apollo 8 to go dead. If the planners were correct, it meant the ship was on its proper trajectory and was where it should be. If radio contact lasted too long, however, it likely meant Apollo 8 had been traveling too fast and had arrived at its rendezvous point with the Moon before the Moon had a chance to get there and block the transmissions. If the arrival was just a little early, the spacecraft might still be whipped around the Moon by lunar gravity, but at a much higher orbit than desired. If the arrival was earlier than that, Apollo 8 might head off in a trajectory away from the Moon that it couldn’t reverse for lack of sufficient onboard propellant. If, on the other hand, radio contact ended prematurely, it likely meant Apollo 8 had taken too long to reach its rendezvous point with the Moon. If the lateness of arrival was slight, the spacecraft would zoom past the lunar surface at an altitude lower than NASA had planned or deemed safe for the mission. If it arrived much later, Apollo 8 would smash into the Moon. So it was with great anticipation—and some dread—that the

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

  spacecraft downward until Apollo 8 pointed nose down and vertical to the Moon. With the new view, Anders could begin shooting a series of vertical stereo photographs—two photos of the same object from slightly different positions—that would aid NASA in constructing detailed topographic maps of the lunar surface, including the approach path for future landing missions. He continued to concentrate on photography whenever there was light to shoot, as well as on monitoring the spacecraft and its systems. Lovell continued to study the lunar terrain and take sightings and photos of lunar landmarks. After centering an important place or feature (many of which NASA had preselected) in the optics of his sextant, he would push a button on a control panel in front of him that recorded the spacecraft’s location and the exact angle to the landmark. Collecting the precise coordinates of these places would help NASA build more detailed maps of the Moon, refine their knowledge of its shape, and chart variations in its gravity field that might draw future missions off course. By now, the flight was just over three days old, and none of the crew had found much rest, another problem in Borman’s file cabinet of concerns. Apollo 8 was scheduled for just ten orbits, and the third one had already started. And that was the rub. How could a man come to the Moon for just twenty hours and spend any of it snoring in his hammock? And yet Borman believed that if the crew didn’t rest, mistakes would be made, some of them potentially catastrophic. But when he looked around the cabin, all he could see was Lovell and Anders busily at work. Anders was immersed in his cameras when Apollo 8 came around for its third pass across the lunar near side. It was difficult for the astronauts to estimate the dimensions of the craters and mountains they were seeing, or even gauge that the spacecraft was at an altitude of 69 miles. When flying in an airplane, an observer sees familiar reference points—a city block, a river, an automobile—that help determine altitude, distance, even speed. Flying over the Moon, the astronauts saw only craters and more craters, and mountains in between. Without their knowing the size of those craters and mountains, any sense of distance or altitude was short-circuited. By reasoning, the men knew they weren’t, say, one mile above the Moon, because the surface wasn’t whizzing by beneath them. But much beyond that, it was hard for them to be certain of anything by means of the naked eye.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  some way from the initial demonstrations that reminding people of old age makes them walk more slowly. We now know that the effects of priming can reach into every corner of our lives. Reminders of money produce some troubling effects. Participants in one experiment were shown a list of five words from which they were required to construct a four-word phrase that had a money theme (“high a salary desk paying” became “a high-paying salary”). Other primes were much more subtle, including the presence of an irrelevant money-related object in the background, such as a stack of Monopoly money on a table, or a computer with a screen saver of dollar bills floating in water. Money-primed people become more independent than they would be without the associative trigger. They persevered almost twice as long in trying to solve a very difficult problem before they asked the experimenter for help, a crisp demonstration of increased self-reliance. Money-primed people are also more selfish: they were much less willing to spend time helping another student who pretended to be confused about an experimental task. When an experimenter clumsily dropped a bunch of pencils on the floor, the participants with money (unconsciously) on their mind picked up fewer pencils. In another experiment in the series, participants were told that they would shortly have a get-acquainted conversation with another person and were asked to set up two chairs while the experimenter left to retrieve that person. Participants primed by money chose to stay much farther apart than their nonprimed peers (118 vs. 80 centimeters). Money-primed undergraduates also showed a greater preference for being alone. The general theme of these findings is that the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others. The psychologist who has done this remarkable research, Kathleen Vohs, has been laudably restrained in discussing the implications of her findings, leaving the task to her readers. Her experiments are profound—her findings suggest that living in a culture that surrounds us with reminders of money may shape our behavior and our attitudes in ways that we do not know about and of which we may not be proud. Some cultures provide frequent reminders of respect, others constantly remind their members of God, and some societies prime obedience by large images of the Dear Leader. Can there be any doubt that the ubiquitous portraits of the national leader in dictatorial societies not only convey the feeling that “Big Brother Is Watching” but also lead to an actual reduction in spontaneous thought and independent action? The evidence of priming studies suggests that reminding people of their

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

  A SECRET PLAN Borman 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. — To fly to the Moon and land a man on its surface, the Apollo spacecraft required three components: Command Module—the cone-shaped spacecraft where the three astronauts lived, worked, and conducted most of their mission Service Module—the storehouse for the craft’s life support systems, its electrical power, and a large rocket engine with sufficient propellant Lunar Module—the small landing craft that shuttled two astronauts between the orbiting spacecraft and the lunar surface NASA needed to test all three modules—both in Earth orbit and around the Moon—before it could attempt a lunar landing. For months, this is how the test schedule stood: FLIGHT OBJECTIVE LOCATION

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

  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. She stole out the back gate and headed for the garage but was greeted in her driveway by an ocean of reporters and bursting flashbulbs. The next day, photographs ran across the country showing Eric in his mother’s arms, sucking his thumb, along with the caption THUMBS UP FOR DAD! Valerie loved the photo, but she knew it meant she would be a captive in her own home from that moment forward. On December 20, the day before the flight, the Soviets let the world know what they thought about Apollo 8. “It is not important to mankind who will reach the Moon first and when he will reach it,” said cosmonaut Gherman Titov, the second man ever to orbit Earth. Not many in the Soviet Union were worried. Even with the American countdown clock at T minus 24 hours, few Soviets believed NASA would be crazy enough to launch. That afternoon, Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow, joined the astronauts in Florida for lunch. Anders suspected the visit to be a

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

  AIMING FOR HOME On board Apollo 8, Borman wasn’t certain that the crew’s message had even been heard. “Did you read everything that we had to say there?” he radioed to Houston. “Loud and clear,” Mattingly confirmed. “Thank you for a real good show.” That settled, Borman got down to the matter that had concerned him for months: Trans Earth Injection. Perhaps more than any other part of the mission, Trans Earth Injection, or TEI, had haunted NASA managers, planners, and controllers. Without it, Apollo 8 could not return home. Since entering lunar orbit, the spacecraft had been traveling steadily at about 3,600 miles per hour. And unless it could gain enough speed to overcome the lunar gravity holding it in orbit, it would never leave the Moon. To do that, Apollo 8 would need to increase its speed to about 6,000 miles per hour. Onboard thrusters weren’t nearly powerful enough to provide that kind of boost. Only the SPS engine—the same one the crew had used to enter lunar orbit—had the muscle it would take. As before, the engine needed to burn for just the right amount of time, with just the right amount of thrust, and in the right direction, to send the spacecraft and its crew home safely. If it burned too long or too strong (or both), Apollo 8 could be hurled off into space without enough propellant to correct the bad trajectory and set course back to Earth, and would be doomed to pursue its own orbit around the Sun. If it burned too short or too weak (or both), the spacecraft could coast off into space without sufficient momentum either to return to the Moon or to fall back to Earth, or it might crash into the lunar surface, adding another crater to the Moon. But perhaps the worst result would come if the engine failed to light at all. In that case, Apollo 8 would remain a possession of the Moon for

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  listen is to say what they want to hear, to fill their ears with whatever is pleasant to them. This is the essence of seductive language. Inflame people's emotions with loaded phrases, flatter them, comfort their insecurities, envelop them in fantasies, sweet words, and promises, and not only will they listen to you, they will lose their will to resist you. Keep your language vague, letting them read into it what they want. Use writing to stir up fantasies and to create an idealized portrait of your- self. Seductive Oratory On May 13, 1958, right-wing Frenchmen and their sympathizers in the army seized control of Algeria, which was then a French colony. They had been afraid that France's socialist government would grant Algeria its independence. Now, with Algeria under their control, they threatened to take over all of France. Civil war seemed imminent. At this dire moment all eyes turned to General Charles de Gaulle, the World War II hero who had played a crucial role in liberating France from After Operation Sedition, we are being treated to the Nazis. For the last ten years de Gaulle had stayed away from politics, dis- Operation Seduction. gusted with the infighting among the various parties. He remained very —MAURICE KRIEGEL-popular, and was generally seen as the one man who could unite the country, VALRIMONT ON CHARLES DE but he was also a conservative, and the right-wingers felt certain that if he GAULLE, SHORTLY AFTER THE GENERAL ASSUMED POWER came to power he would support their cause. Days after the May 13 coup, the French government—the Fourth Republic—collapsed, and the parliament called on de Gaulle to help form a new government, the Fifth Repub-My mistress staged a lock- lic. He asked for and was granted full powers for four months. On June 4, out. . . . \ I went back to days after becoming the head of government, de Gaulle flew to Algeria. verses and compliments, \ The French colonials were ecstatic. It was their coup that had indirectly My natural weapons. Soft brought de Gaulle to power; surely, they imagined, he was coming to thank words \ Remove harsh door-chains. There's magic them, and to reassure them that Algeria would remain French. When he in poetry, its power \ Can arrived in Algiers, thousands of people filled the city's main plaza. The pull down the bloody mood was extremely festive—there were banners, music, and endless chants moon, \ Turn bach the sun, make serpents burst of "Algérie française," the French-colonial slogan. Suddenly de Gaulle ap- asunder \ Or rivers flow peared on a balcony overlooking the plaza. The crowd went wild. The upstream. \ Doors are no general, an extremely tall man, raised his arms above his head, and the match for such spellbinding, the toughest \

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

  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. Given the problems with Zond 6, should they risk sending a crew to the Moon aboard Zond 7 in early December? Or should they make one more unmanned lunar flight to make certain those problems had been worked out? Those who wanted to go, including the cosmonauts, felt certain the problems on Zond 6 could be fixed, and were willing to take their chances. Those who preferred to play it safe couldn’t stand the thought of losing another cosmonaut in flight, as they had in a 1967 accident that still haunted the country. And many of them didn’t believe the Americans crazy enough, in any case, to launch Apollo 8 in December. The Soviets had already sent two flights capable of carrying men to the Moon; the Americans had sent none. NASA, they figured, would soon come to its senses and order Apollo 8 to stand down. In Houston, many worried that NASA might decide the same. Nervous personnel counted down the number of days until the next Soviet lunar launch window opened. In Kazakhstan, the Soviets moved a new Zond

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

  HOW’S FIFTY-FIFTY? Thanksgiving was just three days away, and less than four weeks remained until the scheduled launch of Apollo 8. While most Americans got ready to celebrate the holiday, Borman, Lovell, and Anders were hard at work with the SimSup. The focus during these pre-Thanksgiving sessions would be on two key aspects of the flight. The first, Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI), would come when the spacecraft arrived at the Moon and fired its Service Propulsion System (SPS) engine in order to slow down enough to be captured by lunar gravity and go into orbit around the Moon. The second, Trans Earth Injection (TEI), would come when the spacecraft fired that same engine to pick up enough speed to leave lunar orbit and head back to Earth. Both of these critical maneuvers would occur around the far side of the Moon, completely out of touch with the engineers on Earth who might catch any equipment malfunctions or slip-ups by the crew. More than almost anything else, it was TEI that worried the astronauts, controllers, engineers, and NASA officials. The SPS engine had no backup —if it misfired or didn’t fire at all, the spacecraft and crew could crash into the Moon, fly off into endless space, or be trapped in a slowly decaying lunar orbit that would ultimately impact the lunar surface. The simulations began early in the morning. More than once the astronauts perished because someone didn’t fix problems correctly or in time. In those cases, the crew and controllers held a short briefing afterward, discussed how they’d failed and what could be improved, then tried again. Over and over, scenarios were run, often for full days at a time, the more catastrophic the better, until repetition began to groove instinct into all the participants, and dying helped the men learn to survive. —

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

  newsstands. The cover image, set against a brilliant blue sky, showed two space travelers, one American, the other Soviet, sprinting toward the cratered lunar surface. Four words appeared on the cover: RACE FOR THE MOON. The story inside summarized NASA’s plans to send Apollo 8 to the Moon and the Soviets’ push to send Zond 7 before the Americans could launch. Even at this late date, with just days remaining until the Soviet launch window opened on December 8, the race was too close to call. In Moscow, the Soviets appeared to be celebrating early. Already, they had named a seventy-mile-wide crater on the far side of the Moon, photographed by Zond 6, in honor of two Soviet scientist brothers. In Florida, Anders was doing some naming of his own. Working from photos taken by unmanned spacecraft, he began assigning names to several of the most interesting and prominent craters never before seen by human eyes, ones he expected to see during his flight. Whether the International Astronomical Union would accept those designations once the crew had actually seen the craters remained to be determined. It was around this time that Mueller asked the Apollo 8 astronauts to sign a statement confirming that they’d been properly trained by NASA. To Anders, that came as a bitter disappointment. Mueller was the boss— he should have been the one to tell the crew they’d been properly trained. Instead, he seemed to want a waiver in case anything went wrong. By early December, the eyes of the world were trained on Kazakhstan. Cosmonauts were already at the launchpad there, awaiting the mission’s final go-ahead. On December 8, many at NASA held their breath. If the Soviets were going to send a manned spacecraft to the Moon, this was the forty-eight- hour window during which they would do it. More than a decade in the making, the Space Race was coming down to a matter of hours. The first day passed. The Soviets now had twenty-four hours to make their move to the Moon. The second day passed. The Soviets now had just a few hours remaining. If they were going to beat the United States they had to do it now.