Awe

Passages

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

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

  the sky. In Houston, Susan Borman forgot for a moment that Frank was going to die on the flight. Instead she sat, still in her fancy cream-colored dress with a string of pearls around her neck, knees up against her chest, hands clasped, awestruck; to her, seeing Apollo 8 launch was like watching the Empire State Building leave Earth. The Saturn’s engines continued to burn 15 tons of propellant per second. Even as the ride smoothed, g-forces built inside the cabin, pinning the crew against their seats. Every movement and adjustment by the rocket was preprogrammed and executed by the Saturn’s onboard computer, so the crew could do little more than study the readouts on their instrument panels, watching the rocket’s velocity climb and the countdown grow closer to the end of the Saturn’s first stage. On nearby beaches, people watching the rocket ascend stood on cars and cheered and waved American flags. One of them was Lovell’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Barbara, who felt as if the Earth was cracking beneath her from the rocket’s shock waves. One minute into the flight, Apollo 8 reached the speed of sound—767 miles per hour—and an altitude of about 24,000 feet. At that point, the roar and crackle generated by the interaction between engine exhaust and air could not move fast enough to catch up to the spacecraft, and the cabin grew quiet, the hum of its instrument panel the only noise Borman could detect. To him, it now sounded as if he was flying an unpowered glider. Outside, the Saturn V’s first-stage engines still burned furiously as the rocket continued to gain speed as it rose an arced out to sea. In less than twenty seconds, the vehicle would reach a state known as max Q, the moment at which an airframe is subjected to maximum aerodynamic pressure. At Mission Control in Houston, Kraft felt his stomach twist. For months, he’d worried about the effects of max Q on Apollo 8. It happened about one minute and nineteen seconds into the flight, at an altitude of 44,062 feet and a speed of about 1,500 miles per hour. The Saturn’s five engines bellowed flames still visible to spectators up and down the Florida coast. In the press area, television cameras were now angled almost vertically on their tripods. If the ship was going to break apart, now was a likely time for it. But Apollo 8 passed this stress test and continued to soar into the sky.

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

  “Go ahead,” Collins responded. Anders gave the verdict. After passing through both belts, none of the astronauts had received more than about one-tenth the radiation of an average chest X ray. The command module was even better than a lead bib in protecting human beings from high-energy particles. The spacecraft was now about 22,000 miles from home. Out the window, Earth had grown even smaller. The entire planet now fit in Lovell’s center window. “Good grief,” Collins radioed, “that must be quite a view.” “Yes,” Anders said. “Tell the people in Tierra del Fuego to put on their raincoats, looks like a storm is out there.” Apollo 8 was now five hours into its journey. In the two hours since it had left its parking orbit around Earth, its speed had decreased from more than 24,000 miles per hour to just 9,450 miles per hour as Earth’s gravity continued to act on the unpropelled spacecraft. That decrease in speed would continue until Apollo 8 was about five-sixths of the way to the Moon, when lunar gravity would dominate and begin pulling the spacecraft toward its surface, causing the speed to rise again as the astronauts fell toward their target. But even at these decreasing speeds, Earth continued to appear smaller every time the crew looked back. To Anders, it felt like watching the clock in fifth grade: If you stared, it didn’t seem to move, but if you looked away and then looked back a short time later, it had changed. — If Apollo 8 were allowed to fly freely now, without any midcourse corrections to its trajectory, it would coast for about three days, then smash into the Moon. Midcourse adjustments would be necessary, as many as four, if needed. But those would come later. Around six and a half hours into the flight, the first shift change occurred at Mission Control, when the Maroon Team, led by Flight Director Milt Windler and CapCom Ken Mattingly, took over from the Green Team. They would run the flight for the next eight hours until their replacements, the Black Team, took over. After that, it would be back to the Green Team, and so on.

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

  the world. At home, the astronauts’ wives gathered their children in front of their television sets. None of the women had been able to sleep. At around 7:30 A.M. on December 24, test patterns flickered on TV screens and a grayish blob wobbled into the picture. When the camera steadied, the blob settled into a perfect sphere, with faint, almost invisible circles etched onto its surface, or maybe they were just lines, or the viewer’s imagination. But when Anders pointed the camera out a window with better visibility, even the youngest viewers knew what had come into their homes. This was the Moon. “Say, Bill,” Lovell said, playing emcee for the broadcast, “how would you describe the color of the Moon from here?” Much of the world might have expected a poetic description. But as Anders looked down, the lunar surface reminded him of the seawall at La Jolla Shores in San Diego, where he and Valerie used to roast marshmallows and play volleyball when they were younger. So that’s how he described it. “The color of the Moon looks a very whitish-gray, like dirty beach sand with lots of footprints in it.” Flying past various landmarks, Anders worked the camera for a clearer view. After a time, the picture became sharp. One after another, Anders not only described the craters he was seeing, but referred to them by names that he himself had bestowed. He reported that Apollo 8 had passed over Mueller, Bassett, See (Bassett and See were two astronauts who’d died in an airplane crash in 1966), Borman, Lovell, Anders, Collins, and others. In Moscow, when the news emerged that Apollo 8 had made its lunar orbit, the reality of the moment struck cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, who was training to command a Soviet circumlunar mission. Watching the astronauts, he felt his life’s work crumble, his dreams evaporate. He worried that with news of Apollo 8, the Soviet Union might scrap its entire manned circumlunar program. Yet he could not but help respect the Americans, not just for what they’d done, but how they’d done it. To him, the aggressive, last-minute upgrade of Apollo 8 was nothing short of inspired. Twelve minutes into the broadcast, Apollo 8 signed off and television

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

  firmament. And it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.” Borman continued. “And God said, ‘Let the waters under the Heaven be gathered together unto one place. And let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. And God called the dry land Earth. And the gathering together of the waters He called seas. And God saw that it was good.” Borman paused. “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.” A moment later, television screens around the world went dark. — Inside Mission Control, no one moved. Then, one after another, these scientists and engineers in Houston began to cry. The agency had allowed Borman to choose what to say to the world on Christmas Eve—no oversight, no committees, not even a quick glance on the day before the flight departed. It had come as a complete surprise to them. In his studio at CBS, Walter Cronkite fought back tears as he came back on the air. At a house party in Connecticut, novelist William Styron told himself to remember the scene. He had had to persuade his host, the composer Leonard Bernstein, to watch the broadcast. Bernstein considered the space program an overhyped waste of vast American treasure, but he’d bent to the wishes of his guest. As the astronauts read from Genesis, the raucous party went still. Styron would never forget the emotion on Bernstein’s face during Borman’s parting words, a look he would describe years later as “depthless and inexpressible.” Watching in Houston, Susan Borman wept. Marilyn Lovell gathered up her kids and they walked, not drove, past the holiday lights in Timber Cove, slow enough to remember them all.Valerie Anders told her children, “That was for the whole world.” Across much of the globe, people streamed outside and looked up, trying to pick out the three men who’d just spoken to them, knowing it was impossible, but trying all the same. Chapter Twenty-One

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

  Imprisoned as a subversive, Harris was granted visions of the Archangel Gabriel, who relayed God’s command to begin the work of prophecy. One aspect of the command was that Harris must abandon European clothing: that resolved the tangle into which his complicated relationship with Western culture had led him. Soon he was striding barefoot through the villages of the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast (now Ghana), dressed in a simple white robe, bearing a gourd calabash of water and a tall cross-staff (after Harris, staffs became well-nigh- indispensable kit for any African prophet). He preached the coming of Christ and the absolute necessity to destroy traditional cult objects. With him was his team of two or three women, singing and playing calabash gourd rattles to summon the Holy Spirit.61 Little in Harris’s message beyond his angelic vision and personal style could be considered alien to the mainstream Christianity he had learned in his years as an Episcopalian catechist, although colonial administrators of antiquarian tastes deplored the destruction of local art which followed his visits. He himself recommended his converts to join the Methodists, but given his own tolerance of polygamy, that caused problems. A feature of Harris’s often brief visits in his tireless preaching (no more than a few weeks in the Gold Coast in 1914, for instance) was his extraordinary ability to leave permanent Churches in his wake – in terms of missionary impact, he was more John Wesley than George Whitefield. In the Ivory Coast, previously a Roman Catholic French enclave, Protestant practice mushroomed. The rich variety of Churches he left behind was characterized by local leadership and a propensity for building their own emphases into a distinctive system, beyond anything that Harris recommended. The Twelve Apostles Church in modern Ghana, for instance, has developed predominantly female leadership. Prophetesses preside over ‘gardens’, complexes of open-air church, oratory and hostel rather like a monastery; the prophetess’s most prized ministry is healing, centring on Friday services (for which market women have decreed themselves a day off), the whole congregation dressed in red robes to honour the blood of Christ (see Plate 66). All these are developments independent of Harris. His gourd rattles nevertheless remain crucial to the liturgy, banishing spirits of illness with their clamour, while alongside them the skills of teenage drummers are given full rein. The Bible becomes a sacramental instrument, its touch calming the noisily possessed, and the prophetess bears a replica of Harris’s cross-staff. The Twelve Apostles pride themselves on being the Church of last resort in affliction, even for proud folk who affect to despise such unsophisticated approaches to illness.62 Harris’s early effort to play off the British against the Liberian authorities followed by his sudden rejection of European styles of worship echoed wider

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

  eternal shadow. If humans someday set up a colony on the Moon, they’d probably start at these craters, where water is most likely to be. On Earth, there is little sign of the bombardment the planet has received from meteorites and other space debris. Rain, wind, plate tectonics, glaciers—all of these factors have worked over eons to erode or bury the evidence of these impacts on Earth. On the Moon, nothing is churned or worn away. The scars from objects that strike the Moon are preserved; this is true even for objects that arrived during the earliest days of the solar system. Examining particles blown onto the Moon by the solar wind might reveal much about the young Sun, when that star was just born. And examining particles thrown off by Earth onto the Moon would tell us about our own history—and ourselves. Little is known about Earth’s first billion years, the time when primitive life originated on the planet. Earth meteorites preserved on the Moon could provide a window back to that time, giving us a glimpse of the ages from which we came, the stuff from which we are made. But there would be no way to examine Earth meteorites embedded in the Moon without space travelers who could bring them back to us—without humans brave enough to climb into a spacecraft, light an engine with the power of a nuclear bomb below them, and land on our most ancient companion. And one must wonder if, in the future, a similar push by bold adventurers, this time beyond the Moon and into the universe, might bring back another kind of knowledge about ourselves, one that we might not yet have the capacity to imagine but that might transform us fundamentally. Chapter Nineteen

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

  be sharp, angular, and scratchy. In real life, they looked sandblasted. The size and number of craters was staggering. There were countless numbers of them, some as small as the eye could discern, others as wide as European countries. For years, scientists had argued about the cause of these impressions—volcanic activity or meteorite impacts? Most experts had come to the conclusion that craters were caused by meteorites. Anders scanned the surface of the far side but found no lava flows or other evidence of volcanic activity. He felt pleased to add his firsthand opinion to the debate: The craters had been made by meteorites, four billion years’ worth, an endless bombardment from the solar system. To Lovell, the surface looked like a concrete sidewalk that had been attacked by a man wielding a pickax, each wound rippling sand and particles around the impact point, so many craters they could never be counted. There was a harshness to the terrain, and no color, just grays and whites that went on forever. It wasn’t beautiful, exactly, but to Lovell, the scene was awe-inspiring in its vastness and the story it told—a tale as old and as new as Earth and the Sun—and for that alone, it was beautiful to his eyes. To Borman, spacecraft, rockets, and computers were the products of science, the logical advance of mankind. The lunar far side, however, seemed a dreamscape, straight out of science fiction. Nothing was lit like that on Earth, or even in one’s imagination. Nothing was ever that alone. And yet he saw splendor in all of it, in the epochs of violence gone perfectly still. The men could have watched the Moon for hours, but there was work to do. Borman would fly the ship, making certain the windows stayed in position for Lovell and Anders to perform their tasks. Lovell would take navigation sightings, confirm lunar landmarks, and assess potential landing sites on the near side for future missions. Anders would pull heavy photography duty while monitoring the spacecraft and its systems. Apollo 8 had ten revolutions to get all its work done, twenty hours total. In Houston, the controllers were back at their desks, but they still didn’t know that Apollo 8’s SPS engine had performed well, or even whether it had fired at all. All they knew was that if it had failed to light, the spacecraft would appear just two minutes from now. For once, controllers rooted for their consoles to remain frozen; if any jumped to

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

  saw, using shadows near the Moon’s terminator—the line that divides dark from light on the lunar surface—to pick out features undetectable to the naked eye, including craters. The dark parts of the Moon, Galileo theorized, were low-lying plains or dry seas, the bright parts mountains and highlands. Now, more than three centuries years later, three men had become the first to see with their own eyes the detail that Galileo had observed through his telescope, and they knew the sketches he made had been perfect. — Kraft finally allowed himself to exhale. He could see Deke Slayton, the man at NASA in charge of astronaut training and crew selection, step forward to speak to the men aboard Apollo 8. Ordinarily, it was just the CapCom who did the talking, but this moment was extraordinary. “Good morning, Apollo 8, Deke here. I just would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas on behalf of everyone in the Control Center, and I’m sure everyone around the world. None of us ever expect to have a better Christmas present than this one. Hope you get a good night’s sleep from here on and enjoy your Christmas dinner tomorrow; and look forward to seeing you in Hawaii on the twenty-eighth.” “Okay, leader,” Borman replied. “We’ll see you there. That was a very, very nice ride, that last one. This engine is the smoothest one.” Several minutes later, the large display in Mission Control shifted from a map of the Moon to one showing Earth—lit up in red and green. A six-foot Christmas tree, twinkling with lights and tinsel, was moved to the front of the room, where everyone could take in its splendor and see its bright blue Earth-shaped ornament at the top. But neither Borman, nor Slayton, nor anyone else took it for granted that Apollo 8 was home free, or anywhere close to it. The crew still had to travel 240,000 miles, make sure the guidance system worked, separate from the service module that had kept them alive, then survive reentry at record speeds. Even if all that worked, parachutes had to open, a landing site had to be hit, and the command module had to survive intact. One hour after lighting the SPS engine for TEI, Apollo 8 was 3,225

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

  Two hours, and a full revolution, later, Borman still had the spacecraft pointed nose down. The position gave the astronauts their clearest view yet of the lunar surface. To each of them, the Moon appeared a place of sameness and loneliness, an expanse of blacks and whites and grays. With four minutes remaining until Apollo 8 emerged from the eastern limb and reestablished contact with Earth, Borman fired his thrusters and put the ship into a 180-degree roll to the right, just as the flight plan dictated, so that Lovell could take sightings of lunar landmarks. The spacecraft was still pointed nose down, but for the first time since arriving at the Moon, the windows faced forward, in the direction of travel. In the distance, the astronauts could see the arc of the lunar horizon, and beyond it, the pitch-black infinity of space. As Apollo 8 continued to roll, Anders saw something appear in his window, just over the Moon’s western horizon. “Oh, my God!” he called out. “Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” A shining sphere of royal blues, swirling whites, and dabs of sunbaked browns rose over the rough, all-gray Moon. And now Borman and Lovell saw it, too. Anders reached for his camera. “Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled,” Borman joked. But no one could take his eyes off the scene. “Hand me that roll of color, quick, will you?” Anders said. “Oh, man, that’s great!” Lovell said. “Hurry, quick!” Anders said, as Earth continued to rise above the horizon. In a few moments, he knew, it would be gone. And then Earth disappeared. “Well, I think we missed it,” Anders said, his voice soft, his disappointment palpable. “Hey!” Lovell cried several seconds later, looking through the hatch window. “I got it right here!” The spacecraft was still rolling. The scene had shifted windows. Earth was still rising, and it looked brighter than ever.

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

  other text, particularly in its description of miracles; sacred texts are human artefacts, venerable religious institutions ‘relics of man’s ancient bondage’. The whole argument of the work was designed to promote human freedom: the supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation, and count it no shame, but the highest honour, to spend their blood and their lives for the glorification of one man.25 Spinoza’s Ethics (1677) saw God as undifferentiated from the force of nature or the state of the universe. Naturally such a God is neither good nor evil, but simply and universally God, unconstrained by any moral system which human beings might recognize or create. Calvin might have assented to the latter proposition, but emphatically not the former. There could be nothing further from the spirit of vast separation between Creator and created expressed in Calvin’s ‘double knowledge’ of God and the human self (see p. 634) than Spinoza’s proposition that ‘the human mind, insofar as it perceives things truly, is part of the infinite intellect of God, and thus it is as inevitable that the clear and distinct ideas of the mind are true as that God’s ideas are true’.26 Soon Spinoza was regarded as the standard-bearer for unbelief, even though pervading his carefully worded writings there is a clear notion of a divine spirit inhabiting the world, and a profound sense of wonder and reverence for mystery. It was too much for the authorities in the Dutch Republic: they banned the Tractatus in 1674, and more predictably the Roman Inquisition followed suit in 1679, after the work had widely circulated in French translation. ‘Atheist’ was an easily hurled term of abuse in Spinoza’s day, generally pointed with gloomy relish at someone whose sordidly self-indulgent lifestyle satisfyingly demonstrated the results of denying conventional divinity. Spinoza inconsiderately upset such rhetorical symmetry by living in serene simplicity, his only vice a very Dutch addiction to tobacco, which along with the lens-grinding by which he made his frugal living probably brought his early death at forty- four. He lived with all the contemplative austerity of a St Jerome, but was cheerfully ready to discuss sermons of the day, or to receive a stream of philosopher-tourists.27 Within a few years of his death, Pierre Bayle, son of a French Huguenot pastor but in permanent exile in the Dutch Republic after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, was openly saying the previously unsayable, the conclusion to which Spinoza’s writings inexorably led: it was probable that ‘a society of Atheists wou’d observe all Civil and Moral Dutys, as other Societys do, provided Crimes were severely punish’d, and Honor and Infamy annex’d to certain Points’. Bayle tartly observed that morality in Christian societies seemed

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

  “I bet the TV doesn’t work,” he told Collins. Just before 3:00 P.M. EST, with Apollo 8 at an altitude of 200,000 miles, the crew got ready to transmit. A few seconds later, a rounded edge appeared on television screens across America, then disappeared. Collins radioed instructions to the spacecraft, but the screen stayed gray. Suddenly, an orb drifted dead center into the middle of the picture, and the shape of clouds and continents sharpened into view. For the first time in history, mankind was looking back at itself—at all of itself. Every human culture and language and idea and conflict and difference fit into a single picture. In Mission Control, in living rooms, in hotels and bars and bus shelters across America, in the astronauts’ homes, people fell silent. Then Lovell spoke. “Houston, what you are seeing is the Western Hemisphere. Looking at the top is the North Pole. In the center—just lower to the center is South America—all the way down to Cape Horn. I can see Baja California, and the southwestern part of the United States. There’s a big, long cloud bank going northeast, covers a lot of the Gulf of Mexico, going up to the eastern part of the United States, and it appears now that the East Coast is cloudy. I can see clouds over parts of Mexico; the parts of Central America are clear. And we can also see the white, bright spot of the subsolar point on the light side of the Earth.” The broadcast was in black-and-white, so Collins asked about the colors. “For colors, the waters are all a sort of a royal blue,” Lovell said. “Clouds, of course, are bright white. The reflection off the Earth is much greater than the Moon. The land areas are generally a brownish, a sort of a dark brownish to light brown texture.” Watching out the window, Anders almost forgot the camera in his hand. To him, Earth seemed almost to transcend reality, its color and brightness and clarity beyond what one could see when one was actually on the planet. He could hardly imagine a more beautiful image. After a few more minutes, Lovell added to his description. “Mike, what I keep imagining is, if I’m some lonely traveler from another planet, what I think about the Earth at this altitude, whether I

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

  out of its sunken center, and 80-foot boulders strewn about. So that’s what Lovell guessed. “No,” Borman said. “It’s the Earth coming up.” Through his window, Borman had caught another Earthrise, this one as stunning as the first, not just for its beauty, but for how it came to him —unexpected, ascendant, a call from home. — In Houston, Marilyn Lovell felt the need to go to church. Late night Christmas Eve services weren’t scheduled to start for several hours, but Father Raish told her to drop by anyway. When she arrived late that afternoon, the church was decorated with flowers and Christmas trimmings and burning candles. Marilyn was the only parishioner there. While the church organist played, Marilyn took a private communion, then joined Father Raish in prayer—for Jim, for his crewmates, for the mission. In just a few hours, they knew, Apollo 8 would face perhaps its most dangerous and critical test. And it would all happen just a few minutes after midnight on Christmas morning. — Only seven hours remained until Trans Earth Injection. But before the crew could get ready for that, they had to prepare for their second television broadcast from the Moon. It would occur in less than four hours, at around 8:30 P.M. Houston time, on Christmas Eve, before children’s bedtimes in America. By NASA’s estimates, more people around the world would be watching and listening than had ever tuned in to a human voice at once. These last few hours demanded the best of the crew. The Apollo spacecraft was incredibly complex to operate, and the SPS engine was no exception. For Trans Earth Injection, there were five pages of switch settings, equipment checks, and adjustments, each of which had to be verified by a second crewman in the knowledge that one mistake could prove fatal. But as Borman looked around the cabin, he doubted that he’d be getting the best from the crew. None of them had slept for the past

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

  Author’s Note In late 2014, I took some friends to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, my hometown. It had been a few years since I’d seen U-505, the German U-boat that is one of the centerpiece attractions in the museum, and a perfect match for the submarine I wrote about in my first book, Shadow Divers. On the way out, we came across a space capsule, about ten feet tall by thirteen feet wide. It appeared to be scarred from its journey, wherever it had gone, and its open hatch revealed three cramped seats and a universe of controls inside. Kids circled around the spacecraft, which looked at once to have come from the past and the future. A nearby placard announced that this was the command module of Apollo 8, which had carried the first men ever—Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders—to the Moon. I knew almost nothing about that mission. Like many, I was much more familiar with the story of Apollo 11, man’s first lunar landing, and of Apollo 13, when an explosion on board the spacecraft nearly resulted in tragedy. A few weeks later, I got around to reading about Apollo 8. What I found was one of the most incredible stories in American history. It had everything—daring, adventure, risk-taking, a race against time that came down to the final hours, an existential battle against a magnificent adversary. It blended cutting-edge science and technology with the eternal human yearning to explore. It told of the power of three unbreakable women and the love of children and family, of America’s ability to do the impossible when pushed to its limits, of the moment when mankind first reached the place that had called to it for eternity— the Moon. It told of how three men lived extraordinary lives after becoming the first ever to leave the world. It was even a Christmas story.

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

  available lenses—one to show the inside of the cabin, the other to show the views out the window. If all went well, the broadcast would begin at about three in the afternoon Eastern Standard Time in the United States, when many families would be home watching Sunday’s professional football games. Borman hadn’t wanted to bring television cameras in the first place, and when the flight plan was being made, he had bristled at the idea of interrupting NFL playoff action, which he would now be watching himself if only the high gain antenna could pull in the signal from Earth. Before the scheduled broadcast, Valerie had gathered her children in front of the family’s television and flipped on the special programming, then gone out to answer a few questions from reporters. When she returned, the TV was tuned to cartoons, a situation she quickly remedied. The broadcast began a minute later. “Are you receiving television now?” Borman asked Houston. On millions of sets across America, a gray screen flickered and flashed. Suddenly there was Borman, slightly blurry, diagonal, and seated at the controls of Apollo 8, his right hand on a joystick-shaped thruster control, his left hand waving to the world. “Okay,” Borman said, moving the thruster, “we’re rolling around to a good view of the Earth, and as soon as we get to the good view of the Earth we’ll stop and let you look out the window at the scene that we see. Jim Lovell’s down in the Lower Equipment Bay preparing lunch, and Bill is holding a camera here for us both.” Anders swung around for a view of Lovell, who was working upside down. A bag floated in the cabin nearby. Borman continued to swivel the spacecraft with the rotation thrusters. “Okay, now we are coming up on the view we really want you to see, that’s the view of the Earth, and if you’ll break for just a minute, Bill’s going to put on the large lens. So we’ll be right back with you.” A few moments passed as Anders changed lenses and repositioned the camera. His job was made tougher by the fact that he had no monitor to show him what he was capturing—this was strictly a point-and-hope affair. “Houston, we are now showing you a view of the Earth through the telephoto lens,” Borman announced.

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

  would be nothing to mark the place in space, no bump or jolt to the spacecraft. But in its silence, the crossing would make a thundering announcement—for the first time, man had become captured by the pull of another celestial body. The men in Mission Control had bet on the event; the winner would be the one who most accurately predicted the moment of crossing. It wasn’t an easy guess, as the line changed depending on the distance between Earth and Moon at the moment, the phases of the Moon, and other factors. But controllers would know it when the moment arrived, because for the first time in more than two days, the spacecraft would stop slowing down and begin to gain speed. At around this time, Mission Control received a visit from Marilyn Lovell, who’d hitched a ride with a NASA representative. In the viewing area, Robert Gilruth, the director of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center, greeted her and sat down to talk. Perhaps he sensed her apprehension, or maybe he was just being friendly, but he did not rush off to attend to his pressing duties, even at this historic moment. At 55 hours, 38 minutes into the flight, all eyes in Mission Control, including Marilyn’s, turned to the big screens. Controllers checked the numbers—Apollo 8 was 202,700 miles from Earth, but its speed, about 2,200 miles per hour, was no longer dropping. Moments later, a light flashed on the screen. “My God,” one of the young computer specialists said. “Do you know what we just saw?” And the room, transfixed, did know. The light meant that Apollo 8 was no longer a part of this world. Chapter Seventeen

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

  He explained to viewers how the crew had spent Christmas Eve— doing experiments, taking photographs, firing their thrusters—and promised to show everyone a lunar sunset. But first, he wanted to talk about the place he and his crewmates had been circling for the past sixteen hours. “The Moon is a different thing to each one of us. I think that each one of—each one carries his own impression of what he’s seen today. I know my own impression is that it’s a vast, lonely, forbidding type existence, or expanse, of nothing. It looks rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone, and it certainly would not appear to be a very inviting place to live or work. Jim, what have you thought most about?” “Well, Frank, my thoughts were very similar,” Lovell said. “The vast loneliness up here of the Moon is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth. The Earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space.” Anders chimed in. “I think the thing that impressed me the most was the lunar sunrises and sunsets. These, in particular, bring out the stark nature of the terrain, and the long shadows really bring out the relief that is here and hard to see in this very bright surface that we’re going over right now.” Suddenly NASA lost the picture from Apollo 8, and so did the rest of the world. But the audio remained clear, and Anders continued to describe some of the landmarks he was seeing as Mission Control struggled to regain the visual. Soon the picture returned, this time a view out a different window, one that showed the clear arc of the grayish-white Moon against the pitch-black lunar horizon. Anders described the various craters he could see as the spacecraft glided overhead. “Actually, I think the best way to describe this area is a vastness of black and white, absolutely no color,” Lovell said. “The sky up here is also a rather forbidding, foreboding expanse of blackness, with no stars visible when we’re flying over the Moon in daylight,” Anders added. For the next several minutes, the astronauts continued to describe what they were seeing—mountains, craters, landmarks, the brilliance of the Sun’s reflection. At one point, Anders became so enthused about describing the evolution of craters that Borman had to remind him, off

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

  stage. Hundreds of shimmering stars appeared to fill the sky, but the crew knew these to be fuel particles coming from the tanks or flakes of ice from the tank walls. In Hawaii, observers could see a speckled white fog in the sky as liquid hydrogen vented into the predawn dark. At the speed Apollo 8 was traveling, more than 20,000 miles per hour, Earth appeared to shrink before Lovell’s eyes, growing smaller with each passing second in the way a tunnel entrance appears to shrink to a passenger looking out a car’s rear window. “We see the Earth now, almost as a disk,” Borman radioed to Houston. “We have a beautiful view of Florida now,” Lovell added. “We can see the Cape, just the point...and at the same time, we can see Africa. West Africa is beautiful. I can also see Gibraltar at the same time I’m looking at Florida.” Even Borman, who’d warned Anders not to spend time sightseeing, couldn’t avert his gaze. This must be what God sees, he thought. Now it was time to move away from the third stage, which had the same 20,000-mile-per-hour velocity as Apollo 8 and was following the ship into space—a wayward cylinder as tall as a six-story building, and twenty-two feet longer than the remaining spacecraft the astronauts were riding. Unlike the Saturn V’s first two stages, which had fallen back to Earth by force of the planet’s gravity, the third stage, like the spacecraft, had too much momentum for such a fate and continued to move along with Apollo 8 toward the Moon. If all went according to plan, Apollo 8 would pass just ahead of the Moon, while the third stage would pass its trailing hemisphere, then slingshot into orbit around the Sun. But not all was going according to plan. The crew of Apollo 8 had lost sight of the third stage. Yet Borman knew it to be just one or two hundred yards away, a mere whisker in infinite space. And that meant trouble. If the crew couldn’t see the third stage, they couldn’t be certain they wouldn’t collide with it. For all the engineering miracles of the Apollo spacecraft, it hadn’t been designed to absorb a ramming by an entire stage of a Saturn V rocket. The loss of visual contact came as a surprise to Borman; the crew hadn’t trained for that. Anders could see that his commander believed an emergency to be unfolding.

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

  bacteria that could, over time, generate gases that could cause the package to explode. This bathroom breaks could take as long as an hour. Cleaning was done with a small moist towelette like those handed out at barbecue restaurants. Much as the crew might have liked to fire the sealed bag into space, they could not. Ejecting such a bulky item would require the cabin to be depressurized, possible but risky to the men and the flight. Also, NASA planned to examine the feces (as well as blood and urine) on the crew’s return to Earth, eager to study the effects of deep space flight on the human body. Even as an engineer, Anders knew this fecal collection system would be difficult. Months before Apollo 8, he took home a kit to practice (one didn’t experiment on such a device in the simulators at work). He explained to Valerie that it had to be tested, at least on Earth, while lying down. To that end, he intended to try it in bed. “Not in our bed!” Valerie said. So Anders lay on the carpet and gave it his best. The device did not work well for him. A few days later, he asked the flight surgeon to recommend a low- residue diet he could eat in the days leading up to and during the flight. The less often he had to use the device on the mission, he figured, the better. So far, his plan was working. While Borman and Lovell struggled with the contraption, Anders sat in his seat, doing his work and looking out his window, uncalled by that part of nature, watching the universe go by. — More than nine hours had elapsed in the flight before the astronauts got their first glimpse of the Moon. It happened during one of Lovell’s looks through the spacecraft’s telescope and sextant, when he spotted a barely visible crescent surrounded by a light blue haze, “just about as light blue as we have it back on Earth,” Lovell radioed to Houston. Lovell knew that the appearance of color came from the way the Sun scattered light through his navigation instruments. Tiny as the Moon appeared through his telescope, it was more than his colleagues were getting, or were likely

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

  measuring just eleven feet tall and thirteen feet wide at its base, but every inch of it had been designed by Borman and others to be impervious to a galaxy of deadly forces. A nearby transistor radio played Top 40 music, which caught Borman’s ear. “That’s a pretty slick song,” Borman said. “Who’s the fella singing it?” “That’s the Beatles, Frank,” Lovell said, laughing. Borman preferred the standards. As a kid, he’d memorized the lyrics to all the great Western songs played on the radio in Arizona. He could still sing “Cowboy Jack”—a ditty that dated to the nineteenth century— but didn’t dare start, because he knew Lovell and Anders would insist that he sing it to the end. Borman stuck to classic films, too. Alone among astronauts, it seemed, he hadn’t bothered to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, the new Stanley Kubrick film released in April that showed men flying to the Moon. That stuff was science fiction, Borman told his colleagues; America had real people to get to the Moon. Borman and his crewmates knew that the lunar module was troubled and behind schedule. But until designers and engineers could make the fixes, these astronauts could do little more than make certain that the command module was perfect. So they climbed inside their spacecraft and began testing it, pushing the command module mercilessly, because that’s what outer space would do to it, too. And then the phone rang. Smart people knew better than to bother Borman at work. But the man on the line went back a long way with Borman. And he said it was urgent. Donald Kent “Deke” Slayton was in charge of managing astronaut training and choosing crews for manned space missions. If an astronaut flew on board a NASA spacecraft, it was because Slayton had chosen him to go. When Borman heard who was calling, he wriggled out of the capsule and grabbed an extension. “Deke, I’m in the middle of a big test here,” he said. “Frank, I need you back in Houston.”

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

  A CRITICAL TEST Just eight minutes after the third-stage engine cutoff, Apollo 8 burst through the altitude record of 853 miles set by Gemini 11 in 1966. But there was little time to celebrate, or even notice, the achievement. The spacecraft needed to separate from the spent third-stage booster, the S- IVB. To make it happen, Borman turned a T-shaped handle that triggered a set of explosives, cutting loose the expired third stage in a spectacle of pyrotechnics. For five seconds after the separation, Borman slowly moved his ship away from the expired third stage. Then he did something strange. Using the thrusters, Borman pivoted the spacecraft 180 degrees and began to move back, nose first, toward the cast-off third stage. This maneuver wouldn’t benefit Apollo 8, but it would be critical to future missions designed to land on the Moon. On those flights, the lunar module—the landing craft that would deliver astronauts to the Moon’s surface—would be stowed on top of the third stage. (Apollo 8 carried a large cylindrical water tank to simulate the mass.) To retrieve the lunar module, the crew would need to return to it, pull it free from the third stage, and carry it to the Moon. Borman needed to prove that the maneuver would work. He couldn’t dock, of course, but just needed to get close enough to confirm the procedure. Now pointed back toward the third stage, the astronauts were awed by the view of Earth. Out the spacecraft’s windows, the planet was a round swirl of vibrant blues and whites, with much of its curvature visible. Lovell grabbed a 70 mm Hasselblad camera mated to an 80 mm lens and began firing away, flying through a magazine of color film, capturing Cuba and Jamaica at the planet’s bottom, never worrying about framing or filters lest he lose perspective. Moments later, Lovell turned his camera to the still-glowing third