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)

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

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

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

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

  then could be sent to Houston via an auxiliary channel meant for television, data, and backup voice transmissions. Only a select handful at Mission Control would hear it. Borman thought it over. He still believed the doctors would leap at the chance to insinuate themselves into the flight. But Anders was right, maybe there was a fix, or at least something to learn, if NASA was informed in a discreet fashion. “Okay,” Borman said. “Let’s do it.” Anders engaged the spacecraft’s voice recorder with its built-in voice track, and ensured that there were no downlink communications to Houston. Then Borman started talking, and he spared no details. A few minutes later, Anders pressed some buttons and shot the recording back to Earth. The crew expected to hear back from Houston in a few minutes. Instead, two hours passed without mention of Borman’s condition by Mission Control. Anders snapped a few photos of Earth, wondering what could be taking Houston so long. Finally, Collins radioed to the spacecraft and said that Houston had received the voice tape and would advise shortly. When Mission Control listened to the tape and realized what Borman was describing, top management rushed together, including the flight directors, Chris Kraft, and Dr. Berry. Kraft was furious that Borman hadn’t reported his illness right away. While he understood that astronauts didn’t trust doctors or want them mucking around in their domain, he couldn’t abide the test pilot ethos of silence; Mission Control was there to assist the crew. But if no one talked, it rendered Houston helpless. But Kraft didn’t have the luxury of frustration now. He and the others had to figure out what had happened to Borman in order to determine what to do about it—and what to do with the flight. Dr. Berry considered that Borman might be suffering from a virus, perhaps even the Hong Kong flu that had struck so many in recent weeks. That was the fate that had worried Valerie Anders when she saw guests coughing and sneezing at the White House during the astronauts’ last- minute send-off. But the most ominous possibility was also the simplest: that there might be something NASA and doctors did not know or understand about humans going to the Moon. In that case, it would be hard even to guess at a remedy, if there was a remedy at all. Despite their uncertainty, the managers and Dr. Berry had to make a decision. If Borman had been made sick by radiation, a virus, or some unknown cause related to lunar travel, it was likely his crewmates would become sick, too. It would be difficult enough to justify continuing the mission with one astronaut in trouble. To continue with two or three out of commission was unthinkable. The decision makers began to discuss aborting the mission and returning the crew. On board Apollo 8, Borman, Lovell, and Anders awaited the verdict. An hour later, the call came in. The bosses had made up their minds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  controllers, media, and others, until the place was again packed shoulder to shoulder, just as it had been when Apollo 8 first disappeared behind the Moon. Everyone there knew what to expect next. At 11:42 P.M., Apollo 8 would begin its final scheduled pass behind the Moon, losing contact with Houston. Twenty-nine minutes later, while still out of communications, the SPS engine would fire, increasing the spacecraft’s speed enough to leave its orbit and set course for Earth and its splashdown point in the Pacific Ocean. It would have been easier for the flight controllers had TEI occurred on the near side, where they could monitor the ship and talk to the crew, but orbital mechanics dictated that the break for home occur while Apollo 8 was on the far side. By design, the rocket would burn for about three minutes and eighteen seconds. If all went well, Houston could expect the spacecraft to emerge around the near side at about 12:19 A.M. If the rocket had malfunctioned, or had failed to fire, it would come out later than that, perhaps by as much as eight minutes. NASA possessed some of the world’s most powerful computers, but it would be a simple clock that first told them whether their men were coming home. Ten minutes now remained until Apollo 8 would disappear behind the lunar far side. Kraft and Low stood together in silence. If something happened to the astronauts—if the ship blew up or crashed into the Moon or flung itself off on an unrecoverable trajectory—NASA couldn’t do anything about it, and they wouldn’t even know about it until after it happened. In 1961, Kraft had been the flight controller on Mercury-Redstone 2, the first planned launch of a hominid into space. The passenger was a chimpanzee named Ham, and Kraft had become attached to him. By the time the rocket launched, Kraft regarded Ham as crew, and he celebrated Ham’s safe return. In the seven years since, Kraft had felt a personal responsibility to every man who risked his life aboard a NASA spacecraft. But all of them had been just a few hours from home in case of emergency. Now Kraft was about to say goodbye to three extraordinary men he both liked and admired, powerless to help them when they were days away from Earth, when they might need help most. The countdown to loss of signal went under a minute. Susan chewed

• 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.