Fear

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)

  “If the Russians can deliver a 184-pound ‘Moon’ into a predetermined pattern 560 miles out in space,” wrote the Chicago Daily News that Monday, “the day is not far distant when they could deliver a death-dealing warhead onto a predetermined target almost anywhere on the Earth’s surface.” Stories like that whipped the nation into a frenzy. The pitch increased on Tuesday when it was learned that the Soviets had detonated a newly designed hydrogen bomb, one more powerful than any they’d ever tested. Already frightened, many Americans flew into a panic. Five days after Sputnik’s launch, President Dwight Eisenhower, the legendary general and hero of World War II, gave a press conference in which he seemed uncharacteristically out of his depth when asked about the Soviet satellite. He spoke haltingly, sounding little like the man who, five years earlier, had said, “Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.” Texas senator Lyndon Baines Johnson was more direct about the threat posed by Sputnik. Soon, he said, “the Russians will be dropping bombs on us from space, like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses.” The nuclear physicist Edward Teller, considered to be the father of the hydrogen bomb, said on television that the United States had “lost a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor.” His warning was echoed by other experts as Sputnik continued to orbit overhead, passing over American airspace, impervious to gravity and democracy and all the fears of the greatest nation on Earth. —The United States and the Soviet Union had been allies during World War II, but their cooperation began to collapse after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945. The bomb was America’s effort to end the war in the Pacific Theater, but the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin saw it as more than that: To him, it was a sign of America’s intention to dominate the world. Just fourteen days after Hiroshima, Stalin issued a secret decree ordering the urgent development of Russia’s own nuclear weapon. The idea seemed a pipe dream. Twenty-seven million Soviet citizens had died in the war, and the nation’s industries had been decimated. Cities and villages lay in ruin. People were left homeless, and food was scarce. An atomic bomb required cutting-edge technology and the marshaling of vast resources and great scientific minds. The Soviets could hardly build a good car. But the Soviet Union still had the biggest army in the world. And it had proved itself able to sustain massive casualties in war. So American diplomats paid attention in 1946, when Stalin blamed World War II on capitalism and promised that the Soviet Union would overtake the West in science and technology. By now it was clear that good science made good weapons.

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

  This was a new kind of conflict, one that would be fought not with bodies on a battlefield, but with propaganda and threats, military buildups, and the formation of alliances—a cold war. Perhaps most important, it would be a race to see which side could harness technology to achieve things that, until now, had seemed unimaginable. In August 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb—three years sooner than American experts had believed possible. Memories of bodies burned at Hiroshima and piled at Auschwitz remained fresh in the American psyche. No one had to imagine what a mass annihilation looked like, or to wonder whether human beings were capable of inflicting it on each other—they remembered it all too well. It was around this time that Americans learned to protect themselves—or at least try to survive—during a nuclear attack. In 1952, in schools across the country, a film featuring Bert the Turtle showed children how to “duck and cover” when they “saw the flash.” “We all know the atomic bomb is very dangerous,” the friendly narrator said over footage of children hiding under their desks. “Since it may be used against us, we must get ready for it.” By 1954, atomic bomb drills were being run throughout the country. Most people in the mid-1950s expected nuclear bombs to be delivered by airplanes like the B-29 Superfortress that had dropped atomic bombs on Japan, or the new B-52 Stratofortress. But these planes suffered the same vulnerability as World War I biplanes: They could be shot down by the enemy. A better delivery system was needed. And both the American and Soviet militaries knew what it was. The rocket. It had been used first in combat by the Nazis, when they fired their V-2 rockets at London and other targets in September 1944. The V-2 had a range of only two hundred miles and was too little too late to change the direction of Hitler’s war. The technology, however, was full of potential. Ten years later, both the United States and the Soviet Union were working on missiles that could traverse oceans. Now, one of those missiles had delivered Sputnik into orbit. America knew it had to answer, and fast, by getting its own rocket and satellite to the launchpad. A space race had begun. —Less than a month after Sputnik, the Soviets launched another satellite, only this time it carried a passenger—a dog known to the world as Laika (the Russian word for “barker”). An eleven-pound Samoyed mix, Laika won hearts the world over as she circled the globe. But Laika was no publicity stunt; she was the first step toward sending a man into space, there was no other reason to do it. But there was every reason to try. A country that could fly men into space was on its way to learning to migrate them off Earth, colonize the solar system, and station soldiers in space.

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

  His automatic direction finder (ADF) indicated he was heading straight for the carrier, but the ship wasn’t there. The other pilots reported that they were already circling the Shangri-La . Something in Lovell’s navigation had gone wrong. He checked his ADF and confirmed he was locked on to the ship’s frequency. But he was not, in fact, locked on to the ship. His instrument had instead picked up a Japanese tracking station broadcasting on the same frequency. Without knowing it, he was following that signal, in total darkness, to the coast. Sensing that something was wrong, Lovell banked 180 degrees to look for his wingmen. All he found were empty skies. He reached for the flight plan to make sure his radio numbers were correct, but it was too dark to read the small print by the jet’s ambient light. Lovell had a solution for that. He’d designed and built a small light, which he’d carried along and now plugged in. Circuits blew. Every light in the cockpit died. The airplane turned as dark as the night. Lovell had to make a choice. He could ask the carrier to turn on its lights, an embarrassment from which he might never recover. Or he could continue following the signal, hoping to find the ship—or Japan—before he ran out of fuel. In the end, he chose neither. And it was all because of green. Lovell saw the color barely glowing in the water below him. He knew that algae could be made luminous when churned by the spinning propellers of a powerful ship, so he decided to follow the faint flare in the water. Several minutes later, he located his wingmen, who set down, first one and then the other, on the deck of the Shangri-La. Next it was Lovell’s turn to land, and even though he’d found home, his cockpit was still without lights. He couldn’t tell his airspeed and altitude without being able to read his instruments. But he still had a penlight, and he flipped it on, then put it in his mouth to cast its tiny beam on the instrument panel before him. Believing himself to be about 250 feet above the water, he descended toward the carrier, only to see his wingtip’s red light reflect on the water no more than twenty feet below, a split second from impact. Lovell cranked back on the stick and jammed forward the throttle, sending the Banshee howling skyward and just clear of the side of the Shangri-La ’s deck. Heart pounding and mouth dry, Lovell now had to turn back and try again. This time, he came in high but, despite frantic don’t-do-it signals from the landing officer, figured he’d never get a better chance to make the flight deck, given his limited ability to read his instruments. Plummeting downward, he thudded onto the deck and skidded forward, one of his tires blowing before the carrier’s last arresting wire grabbed the jet’s tailhook and jerked the plane to a halt.

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

  George Low, the man who’d conceived a mission the Soviets still didn’t believe would fly, breathed deeply as the clock showed just one minute remaining. At T minus 60 seconds, all three stages of the Saturn V were fully pressurized. “Twenty seconds,” Jack King announced to the world. “We are still Go at this time.” Storms of white vapor began to billow near the base of the rocket, liquid oxygen boiling off during the Saturn V’s final moments on Earth. Inside the spacecraft, Borman felt the rocket sway a bit in the wind. “T minus fifteen,” King called, “fourteen…thirteen…twelve…eleven…ten…” Heart pounding, Borman’s left hand remained gripping one of the spacecraft’s controls, ready to twist it to the left and abort the mission in case of a catastrophic problem. The three men listened to propellant pumping through the engine manifolds. On the beach, Marilyn reminded herself that the rocket would lean when it took off, just as Jim had warned. “Nine…We have ignition sequence start, the engines are armed!” King said, as a fury of orange-yellow flames lit beneath the rocket and exploded against the launchpad. “Four…” “Three…” Flames spread from beneath the rocket and erupted out to the sides, a typhoon of fire awakened and screaming as the ground began to shake. “Two…” A man-made thunder crashed into people and windows and buildings for miles around. “One…” Borman loosened his grip on the abort handle. He would have rather died than twist it by accident in the violence unfolding beneath him. “Zero. We have commit…We have…” King paused for a moment, as if he didn’t quite believe what he was seeing. Susan Borman, Marilyn Lovell, and Valerie Anders didn’t breathe. At 7:51 A .M ., King called it. “We have lift-off.” And Apollo 8 began to move. Chapter Twelve [image file=Image00007.jpg] LEAVING HOMEApollo 8 strained to separate from Earth, explosions of smoke and fire channeled to the sides of the launchpad by a massive, wedge-shaped flame deflector designed to prevent the fire from rebounding back up into the rocket. Four hold-down arms held the rocket in place, waiting for the Saturn V’s engines to attain perfect, proper thrust. A fraction of a second later, these arms released to allow the machine to ascend. Five swing arms, each weighing more than twenty tons, remained for a split second longer with their connections to the rocket intact. As the Saturn V began to rise, they, too, withdrew, and the six-and-a-half-million-pound beast broke free from its bonds. A half inch off the pad, it was already too late for the rocket to settle back safely if something went wrong. System design would not allow shutdown of the engines for thirty seconds even in the event of catastrophic failure, since this would cause the Saturn V to fall back onto the launchpad and explode.

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

  Given the problems with Zond 6, should they risk sending a crew to the Moon aboard Zond 7 in early December? Or should they make one more unmanned lunar flight to make certain those problems had been worked out? Those who wanted to go, including the cosmonauts, felt certain the problems on Zond 6 could be fixed, and were willing to take their chances. Those who preferred to play it safe couldn’t stand the thought of losing another cosmonaut in flight, as they had in a 1967 accident that still haunted the country. And many of them didn’t believe the Americans crazy enough, in any case, to launch Apollo 8 in December. The Soviets had already sent two flights capable of carrying men to the Moon; the Americans had sent none. NASA, they figured, would soon come to its senses and order Apollo 8 to stand down. In Houston, many worried that NASA might decide the same. Nervous personnel counted down the number of days until the next Soviet lunar launch window opened. In Kazakhstan, the Soviets moved a new Zond spacecraft to the launchpad, a ship scheduled to lift off for the Moon two weeks before Apollo 8. Few in America knew that this spacecraft even existed. All that anyone knew in the West was that the race to the Moon was being pushed to superhuman speeds that could get men killed. A recent newspaper editorial had proposed cooperation between the United States and Soviet Union, a fixing of the race so that the two nations arrived simultaneously, a way to avoid a tragedy. But neither side had come this far to compromise. And neither had Apollo 8’s youngest astronaut, a thirty-five-year-old father of five who’d been born in Hong Kong and came from fighting stock, the kind that would never settle for a tie. Chapter Nine [image file=Image00007.jpg] BILL ANDERSWilliam Alison Anders first witnessed an attack from the sky by foreign invaders in 1937, when he was four years old. He was living with his parents along the Yangtze River in Nanking, China, when his father, a United States Navy lieutenant, sensed that Japanese forces would attack nearby Chinese boats. Arthur Anders told his wife, Muriel, to take their son and evacuate. After a two-day trip by train to Canton, mother and son found a hotel room, and it was there that Bill watched Japanese airplanes streak overhead and bomb ships in the Pearl River just two hundred yards away. The next day, Bill and his mother boarded a boat and made their escape. Bill’s father stayed, manning the American gunboat USS Panay, on which he was second in command. A few days later, on December 12, 1937, Japanese aircraft attacked the Panay as it moved up the Yangtze. The United States was a neutral party in the conflict between Japan and China, and the boat, marked by American flags, was attempting to move people to safety. A bomb struck the boat’s bridge, wounding and disabling the captain.

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

  The SPS engine had no backup—if it misfired or didn’t fire at all, the spacecraft and crew could crash into the Moon, fly off into endless space, or be trapped in a slowly decaying lunar orbit that would ultimately impact the lunar surface. The simulations began early in the morning. More than once the astronauts perished because someone didn’t fix problems correctly or in time. In those cases, the crew and controllers held a short briefing afterward, discussed how they’d failed and what could be improved, then tried again. Over and over, scenarios were run, often for full days at a time, the more catastrophic the better, until repetition began to groove instinct into all the participants, and dying helped the men learn to survive. —Even at NASA, Thanksgiving was a day for family, and Borman, Lovell, and Anders found their way home just in time to celebrate the holiday. Apollo 8 was scheduled to launch in just twenty-three days, so Thursday was the only day off the men were allowed. By now, all three wives had decided where they’d be when Apollo 8 lifted off. Marilyn Lovell wanted to see it live, to be as close to it and as much a part of it as possible. (She had been too far along in her pregnancy to watch Jim launch on Gemini 7, but she did witness his flight on Gemini 12 in person.) And she wanted her four children to be there, too; it was something she thought they should experience as a family. That was fine with Lovell; while he knew there was a chance of disaster, he never thought about launches, or life, in those terms, and he didn’t want his children to think that way, either. A person had to take things as they came. Lovell spread out his maps of the Moon for his children and showed them which parts of the lunar surface he’d be flying over and what the crew intended to do there. He’d even brought his children to explore the simulator at the Cape. He didn’t tell them that his mission was dangerous, or that their father might not be coming home. There was no reason to put a fear like that into children. Valerie Anders made a different decision. Her children were younger than Marilyn’s, the flu was going around, and she didn’t want to risk having five sick kids while holed up at a hotel near Cape Kennedy. The decision to stay home in Houston made a lot of sense to Anders. Even if his kids remained healthy, he wanted them and Valerie to be home, in a comfortable and safe environment, in case a disaster unfolded. In any event, Anders got the sense that his kids were more interested in water-skiing and playing with their friends, which was fine with him.

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

  And who were the Soviets, anyway? To most Americans, they comprised a technologically backward people living in an all-gray country with a peasant economy and prewar tractors. Yet overnight, they’d made one of history’s great scientific breakthroughs. That changed the balance of power; anyone could see it. “If the Russians can deliver a 184-pound ‘Moon’ into a predetermined pattern 560 miles out in space,” wrote the Chicago Daily News that Monday, “the day is not far distant when they could deliver a death- dealing warhead onto a predetermined target almost anywhere on the Earth’s surface.” Stories like that whipped the nation into a frenzy. The pitch increased on Tuesday when it was learned that the Soviets had detonated a newly designed hydrogen bomb, one more powerful than any they’d ever tested. Already frightened, many Americans flew into a panic. Five days after Sputnik’s launch, President Dwight Eisenhower, the legendary general and hero of World War II, gave a press conference in which he seemed uncharacteristically out of his depth when asked about the Soviet satellite. He spoke haltingly, sounding little like the man who, five years earlier, had said, “Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.” Texas senator Lyndon Baines Johnson was more direct about the threat posed by Sputnik. Soon, he said, “the Russians will be dropping bombs on us from space, like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses.” The nuclear physicist Edward Teller, considered to be the father of the hydrogen bomb, said on television that the United States had “lost a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor.” His warning was echoed by other experts as Sputnik continued to orbit overhead, passing over American airspace, impervious to gravity and democracy and all the fears of the greatest nation on Earth. — The United States and the Soviet Union had been allies during World War II, but their cooperation began to collapse after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945. The bomb was America’s effort to end the war in the Pacific Theater, but the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin saw it as more than that: To him, it was a

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

  After much discussion, Lunney and Kraft came to a decision on the matter of the SPS engine. Each of them thought through the theory offered by the man from North American and ultimately judged it to be correct, and they were willing to bet the rest of the flight on it. After consulting with other controllers, who concurred, the men decided to continue with Apollo 8’s flight plan just as it had been written. The next time the SPS engine fired would be when the spacecraft slipped behind the Moon. At that moment, the crew’s lives would depend on its functioning properly. As midnight approached in Houston, all three of the astronauts’ wives, too, struggled to sleep. It had been a long and exhausting first day, but Susan and Valerie remained attached to their squawk boxes as they lay in bed, each trying to pick out a hint of how her husband was feeling by the tone of his voice. Staying overnight in Florida, Marilyn Lovell had no squawk box; instead, she listened to the sound of the waves by her beachside cottage, wondering whether Jim could see that same stretch of ocean from space. A few hours after test-firing the SPS engine, Houston got good news. The test burn hadn’t fouled Apollo 8’s trajectory, as some had feared. In fact, tracking analysis showed that if the spacecraft made no further changes and was simply allowed to coast, it would slingshot around the Moon at an altitude of just 80 miles above the lunar surface, then return to Earth, just as the trajectory specialists had designed. For the first time in a long while, Mission Control grew quiet. It was past midnight and the spacecraft was coasting. And Borman was supposed to be sleeping. Instead, he tossed and turned in his hammock. Borman had never been sick for a minute on the two-week flight of Gemini 7, or even on the “Vomit Comet,” the zero gravity airplane used to acclimate astronauts to weightlessness. Even when flying in violent thunderstorms as an inexperienced fifteen-year-old student of Miss Bobbie Kroll, he’d not experienced so much as a stomachache. Now he swallowed hard in his sleeping bag and tried to push away the nausea, but the waves were building and moving fast toward shore. “I’m sorry, guys,” he called to his crewmates above. And then the vomit came.

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

  range machines that flew missions near Iceland and the North Atlantic designed to test American air defenses. To help avoid starting a world war, his aircraft and others would be armed only with conventional air- to-air rockets, no nukes. Early in his assignment, a Soviet bomber penetrated the eastern edge of Iceland’s Air Defense Identification Zone. Anders and his wingman scrambled into the air, afterburners blazing, and caught up with the Russian plane. Anders positioned his wingman to shoot down the bomber if its pilot gave the Americans any trouble, then flew his F-89 so close he could call out the eye colors of the Soviet crew. The Russians smiled and waved. Anders offered his own American greeting—a middle finger. The Soviet crew kept smiling and waving, then broke back to where they belonged. Low on fuel, Anders returned to base, knowing the incident would be important to American intelligence officers, as it was among the first—if not the very first—intercept of a Soviet bomber in the zone. On the ground, he described the event. “Anything else?” asked a representative of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Anders feared he would be facing some discipline. Still, he had to be honest. “There is something else,” Anders said nervously. “I probably should tell you that, you know...I gave them the finger.” The man smiled. There was no trouble. Anders flew more missions in Iceland, many of them risky, both for the dangerous flying conditions and for the potential conflict with Soviet bombers. Three or four months after Anders flipped off the Russian crew, another pilot in his squadron intercepted a Soviet bomber. This time, the Russians had a response to their American pursuers, and they held it up to their window—a sign printed in English—for the Air Force pilots to see. American intel had a good laugh when they heard the story. To them, it represented the layers of bureaucracy that constituted the Soviet socialist system. It had taken more than one hundred days for the first bomber crew to report Anders’s middle finger, for word to travel through channels to the Kremlin, for analysts to decipher it, for committees to formulate a response, for other committees to approve it, for translators

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

  on her pearls while Valerie took several deep breaths. At 11:42 P.M. Houston time, Apollo 8 slipped behind the Moon, and radio contact with Earth went dead. — Each of the astronauts was ready to come home. For Borman, America’s mission to beat the Soviets to the Moon wouldn’t be complete until the crew had returned safely. For Lovell, making it back meant a chance to return to the Moon, not just to see it but to walk on it. Anders, who’d been so interested in lunar geology, had seen all there was to see of Earth’s satellite and didn’t think he’d overlooked anything during his ten times around. All three of them missed their families. “It’s been a pretty fantastic week, hasn’t it?” Borman asked his crewmates. “It’s going to get better,” Lovell said. “I hope this baby holds out for another two and a half days,” Anders said. “It sure has performed admirably, hasn’t it?” None of the men had dwelled on what awaited them if the SPS engine didn’t perform. If test pilots and fighter pilots thought like that, they would never climb into a cockpit. But none of the men could say he hadn’t thought about being marooned in lunar orbit, or how he’d spend his remaining time—perhaps four days—before dying. In fact, Borman had been asked about it before launch. “I don’t know how I’d want to spend my last days,” he’d told reporters. “I think that’s something you decide when it happens. If the engine doesn’t work, we’ve had a bad day.” NASA had considered a plan for a lunar rescue mission should something catastrophic happen. It involved sending a single astronaut to the Moon in his own command and service module, atop his own Saturn V, which would stand ready to launch at Cape Kennedy. Once in lunar orbit, rendezvous and rescue would involve complex maneuvers that would also place the rescuing astronaut at risk. Such a contingency would add significantly to the agency’s already massive budget. In the end, the idea was scrapped. NASA hadn’t bothered training the astronauts on how to handle being

• From Scandalous Liaisons (2007)

  “Release her,” he ordered, stepping closer. “I’m the one you want.” Robidoux laughed mirthlessly. “Imagine my surprise to discover the lady Pierre wanted was your wife.” Sebastian’s hands clenched into fists, his heart racing in near-mindless panic. Olivia stood stoically, but her dark eyes betrayed her fear. “I’ll pay whatever you desire if you allow her to go unharmed.” “I want my brother back. Can you give me that?” Sebastian gritted his teeth and took another step closer. “You know I cannot.” “Very well then.” Robidoux shoved Olivia toward him and raised the gun. “Your wife will die in your arms, as Pierre died in mine.” “No!” Sebastian’s agonized cry echoed through the narrow space as he reached for Olivia’s stumbling form. He caught her close, spinning desperately to shield her with his back. The report of the shot was deafening, and he jerked as searing pain tore into his shoulder, barely missing his wife. Suddenly Remington was there with pistol in hand, thrusting them out of the way. The second shot left a horrendous buzzing in Sebastian’s ears, drowning out Olivia’s sobbing. A quick glance backward assured him Robidoux was dead. Dropping his gaze to the rapidly spreading bloodstain on his coat, he prodded the wound with his working hand. “It’s nothing,” he assured her. She grabbed his lapels and attempted to shake him, her mouth forming words he couldn’t hear but understood nevertheless. “Are you bloody mad?” “Don’t swear,” he admonished with a roll of his eyes. Then he kissed her senseless. Epilogue Olivia rose from the chair next to the bed and felt momentarily dizzy, something that happened often as her pregnancy progressed. Sebastian was at her side instantly. “What is it? You look pale.” He pressed her back into the seat with his free hand. “You’re supposed to be in bed resting,” she scolded. “It’s a blasted nuisance to be in bed all day. I’m wearing a sling, for Christ’s sake. I’m not dying. You, on the other hand, look positively ill.” “It’s nothing, darling. Truly.” She’d been attempting to find the right time to tell him about the baby, but in the three days since he’d come home, so much had occurred that she could barely catch her breath. His gaze narrowed. “I’ll believe you when a doctor tells me the same.” “A doctor isn’t necessary.” “You’re not well,” he insisted. “I’ve never seen you look less than the picture of health.” “I am completely healthy, Sebastian. If you settle a moment—” “Like hell you are!” His wicked mouth tightened obstinately. “I’m with child,” she confessed with a sigh. “What? Oh, God!” He dropped to his knees before her, his mouth pressing reverently to her forehead. “Bloody hell, why didn’t you tell me before?” “I never had the time. What with your persistent ravishment and the events of yesterday, when did I have the opportunity?” She leaned forward, burying her face in his shoulder, breathing in the scent of his skin.

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

  Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Prologue: Countdown Chapter One: Do You Want to Go to the Moon? Chapter Two: The Space Race Chapter Three: A Secret Plan Chapter Four: Are You Out of Your Mind? Chapter Five: Frank Borman Chapter Six: Just Four Months Chapter Seven: Jim Lovell Chapter Eight: Pushed to Superhuman Speeds Chapter Nine: Bill Anders Chapter Ten: How’s Fifty-Fifty? Chapter Eleven: My God, We Are Really Doing This Chapter Twelve: Leaving Home Chapter Thirteen: A Deeply Troubled Year Chapter Fourteen: A Critical Test Chapter Fifteen: An Astronaut in Trouble Chapter Sixteen: Equigravisphere Chapter Seventeen: Racing the Moon Chapter Eighteen: Our Most Ancient Companion Chapter Nineteen: Earthrise Chapter Twenty: The Heaven and the Earth Chapter Twenty-one: Aiming for Home Chapter Twenty-two: Please Be Informed—There Is a Santa Claus Chapter Twenty-three: Help from an Old Friend Chapter Twenty-four: The Men Who Saved 1968 Epilogue Photo Insert Dedication Acknowledgments Diagram of Apollo 8 Author’s Note A Note on Sources By Robert Kurson About the Author Prologue: Countdown December 21, 1968—Four days before Christmas Three astronauts are strapped into a small spacecraft thirty-six stories in the air, awaiting the final moments of countdown. They sit atop the most powerful machine ever built. The Saturn V rocket is a jewel of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, a vehicle that will generate the energy of a small atomic bomb. But it has never flown with men aboard, and it has had just two tests, the most recent of which failed catastrophically just eight months earlier. The three astronauts are going not merely into Earth orbit, or even beyond the world altitude record of 853 miles. They intend to go a quarter of a million miles away, to a place no man has ever gone. They intend to go to the Moon. Beneath them, the United States is fracturing. The year 1968 has seen killing, war, protest, and political unrest unlike any in the country’s history, from the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy to the unraveling of Vietnam to the riots in Chicago. Already, Time magazine has named THE DISSENTER its Man of the Year. As the countdown begins, there are engineers and scientists at NASA who question whether the crew will ever return. Even the astronauts are realistic about their chances of surviving the flight, an operation riskier than anything the American space agency has ever attempted. One of them has recorded a final goodbye to his wife, to be played in the event he doesn’t return. In August, this mission did not exist. Nearly everything that has gone into its planning—the training, analysis, calculations, even the politics— has been rushed to the launchpad in a fraction of the time ordinarily required. If anything goes wrong, public opinion—and the will of the

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

  continue following the signal, hoping to find the ship—or Japan—before he ran out of fuel. In the end, he chose neither. And it was all because of green. Lovell saw the color barely glowing in the water below him. He knew that algae could be made luminous when churned by the spinning propellers of a powerful ship, so he decided to follow the faint flare in the water. Several minutes later, he located his wingmen, who set down, first one and then the other, on the deck of the Shangri-La. Next it was Lovell’s turn to land, and even though he’d found home, his cockpit was still without lights. He couldn’t tell his airspeed and altitude without being able to read his instruments. But he still had a penlight, and he flipped it on, then put it in his mouth to cast its tiny beam on the instrument panel before him. Believing himself to be about 250 feet above the water, he descended toward the carrier, only to see his wingtip’s red light reflect on the water no more than twenty feet below, a split second from impact. Lovell cranked back on the stick and jammed forward the throttle, sending the Banshee howling skyward and just clear of the side of the Shangri-La’s deck. Heart pounding and mouth dry, Lovell now had to turn back and try again. This time, he came in high but, despite frantic don’t-do-it signals from the landing officer, figured he’d never get a better chance to make the flight deck, given his limited ability to read his instruments. Plummeting downward, he thudded onto the deck and skidded forward, one of his tires blowing before the carrier’s last arresting wire grabbed the jet’s tailhook and jerked the plane to a halt. Lovell’s legs shook so badly he could barely climb from the cockpit. But that experience only confirmed how he felt about death. To him, the only thing guaranteed to a person was the moment. It was the only time one knew he would be there to take in the trees and the sun and the stars, to meet people, make friends, fall in love. But a person couldn’t be in the moment if he worried too much about the future. That meant in order to live, he couldn’t worry about dying. The day after Lovell’s wild flight, he climbed back into the cockpit and took off again. This time, he put the airplane back down just where it belonged. While Lovell was training, Marilyn gave birth to their second child, James Jr. A few weeks later, Lovell watched transfixed as America’s lead

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

  other, as the computer steered them toward the recovery ships. It had been nearly five minutes since the crew lost contact with Houston, but now Lovell began calling home. “Houston, Apollo 8. Over.” Mattingly made out the voice through the static. “Go ahead, Apollo 8. Read you broken and loud.” Borman jumped in. “Roger. This is a real fireball.” One hundred thousand feet below, the USS Yorktown found Apollo 8 on its radar. A minute later, the spacecraft was at an altitude of just 40,000 feet and plummeting at a speed of about 680 miles per hour. At around 30,000 feet, an altitude sensor fired explosives to jettison the top of the heat shield at the pointy end of the spacecraft. A moment later, two drogue parachutes shot out of the ship, making a giant thwack that Borman heard as they streaked up into the sky. The ship jolted when their lines went taut. These were not the chutes that would lower the craft to the water, but rather the smaller ones designed to stabilize Apollo 8, to keep it from wobbling and make it ready for the primary chutes. By the time they were out, the spacecraft was just 20,000 feet above the Pacific, but now its descent rate had slowed. Inside the cabin, an air vent opened to equalize inside and outside pressures. Falling at a speed of 300 miles per hour, Apollo 8 rode gravity until an altitude of 10,000 feet, when the three main 80-foot parachutes were deployed. When their lines pulled tight, the spacecraft jerked hard. Anders worried that he’d felt only one jerk, not three. He knew that the Soviets had experienced trouble with their parachutes and that the technology, in general, was unreliable. Neither he nor the others could see the parachutes in the dark, but when Borman and Lovell checked their instruments, they could tell that the craft’s sink rate had declined significantly, indicating proper functioning of all three chutes. With the red-and-white parachutes fully blossomed, Apollo 8’s descent rate fell to just 19 miles per hour. On board, thrusters were ignited and their tanks purged of propellant to prevent harmful substances from polluting the splashdown and recovery area. The fire spitting from the burning thrusters lit the still-dark sky, giving the astronauts their first view of their parachutes, and good reason to believe

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

  shaped escape tower and conical boost protective cover, which had ridden atop Apollo 8, poised to rocket the command module away from the Saturn V in case of emergency. Cutting it loose meant a great saving in weight. If an abort was necessary after losing the escape tower, the crew would use propulsion systems built into the command and service modules to separate from the Saturn V, redirect their course, and ride the command module back to splashdown. Borman threw a switch, causing a small rocket motor to jettison the escape tower. Instantly, the cabin was awash in sunlight, its five windows no longer obstructed by the boost protective cover. Now at an altitude of 300,000 feet, the astronauts could see the curvature of Earth against a blue sky that melded into the deep purple-black of onrushing outer space. Two minutes later, Apollo 8 reached 100 miles altitude as it arced almost horizontally over Earth. The ship was now 350 miles downrange of Cape Kennedy and just about high enough for its planned Earth orbit. Speed, however, was another matter. To achieve orbit, the spacecraft needed to reach approximately 17,425 miles per hour; anything less and Earth’s gravity would pull it back down. At the moment, six minutes into the flight, it was traveling only 10,000 miles per hour. Apollo 8 needed a big push, and that was the job of the five second-stage engines. Borman could see indicators of the ship’s speed galloping forward on a five-digit readout on the instrument panel. If the Saturn’s second stage failed now, the crew could use the rocket’s single third-stage engine to get them to orbital speed—but if that happened, they wouldn’t have enough propellant left to send the spacecraft on to the Moon, and Apollo 8 would become a days-long Earth-orbital checkout mission. That was the scenario Borman dreaded. So far, however, the second-stage booster was flying true and smooth as it pushed the spacecraft’s speed from 10,000 to 14,000 miles per hour in just two minutes’ time. The five engines needed to burn for only another forty-five seconds before falling off and giving way to the third stage. Even for a conservative pilot like Borman, those forty-five seconds seemed a near certainty now. And then he felt something go wrong. The rocket beneath him started to shake furiously—a pogo—a problem similar to the one that had afflicted the unmanned Apollo 6 on the Saturn

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

  to the couple’s first child, Barbara. Two months later, in February 1954, Lovell earned his wings and was ordered to the Naval Air Station at Moffett Field in California, a few miles from Palo Alto. He was assigned to VC-3, a squadron that supplied fighter pilots trained in night operations to aircraft carriers in the Pacific. Few assignments tightened a flier’s throat like landing a jet on a darkened deck just a few hundred yards long in the dead of night—a tiny moving runway on roiling seas. Small errors could become deadly mistakes. One moonless night in early 1955, after launching from the deck of the USS Shangri-La in an F2H Banshee jet fighter off the coast of Japan, Lovell embarked on his first combat exercise over foreign waters. Bad weather had prevented takeoff for the last of the four fliers in Lovell’s patrol. The jets that had already launched were ordered to circle the ship until they burned down their fuel, then land. Cloud cover forced the Banshees to stay just 1,500 feet above the choppy seas. Lovell banked to join his teammates in formation, but when he reached the rendezvous point he was alone. His automatic direction finder (ADF) indicated he was heading straight for the carrier, but the ship wasn’t there. The other pilots reported that they were already circling the Shangri-La. Something in Lovell’s navigation had gone wrong. He checked his ADF and confirmed he was locked on to the ship’s frequency. But he was not, in fact, locked on to the ship. His instrument had instead picked up a Japanese tracking station broadcasting on the same frequency. Without knowing it, he was following that signal, in total darkness, to the coast. Sensing that something was wrong, Lovell banked 180 degrees to look for his wingmen. All he found were empty skies. He reached for the flight plan to make sure his radio numbers were correct, but it was too dark to read the small print by the jet’s ambient light. Lovell had a solution for that. He’d designed and built a small light, which he’d carried along and now plugged in. Circuits blew. Every light in the cockpit died. The airplane turned as dark as the night. Lovell had to make a choice. He could ask the carrier to turn on its lights, an embarrassment from which he might never recover. Or he could

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

  to his crewmates. “Did you guys ever think that one Christmas you’d be orbiting the Moon?” “Just hope we are not doing it on New Year’s,” Anders replied, his wit growing drier with each orbit. There was a dark truth behind Anders’s humor. If Apollo 8 was still here in a week, it meant the crew was never coming home. Susan Borman knew it, too. She cleared her kitchen table, sat, and started to compose Frank’s eulogy. She needed to be ready—not like her friend Pat White, who’d been taken by surprise by the death of her husband in the Apollo 1 fire, and by the swiftness with which government officials moved in to orchestrate funeral arrangements. This time, Susan would be in charge. She would do it the way she and Frank wanted it, and the way that was right for their sons. It seemed to her a better fate for a man like Frank to die in space than to burn up on the launchpad while training, and a better fate for her, knowing Frank was in a place he’d be forever, a beautiful Moon she could see in the night, a place where she could always find him. — Just eight and a half hours remained before Trans Earth Injection. On board Apollo 8, Anders secretly hoped something would go wrong— nothing catastrophic, of course, just enough that he could show Houston, and his crewmates, how beautifully he’d mastered the spacecraft and its systems. But the ship was proving to be a jewel. As the spacecraft readied to reconnect with Houston and begin its seventh pass across the lunar near side, Borman called out to his crewmates. “Oh, brother! Look at that!” “What was it?” Lovell asked. “Guess,” Borman said. Lovell did some quick computations. The ship was above the far side, at around 120ºE longitude, and at the most southerly part of its orbit. For Borman to react like that, he must have seen Tsiolkovsky, one of the far side’s most impressive craters, 115 miles wide, with a peak rising 2 miles

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

  two days, and I didn’t—didn’t even get much to eat today.” “Pretty sunrise,” Anders remarked. Inside Mission Control, there was little anyone could do but wait. Soon, people began talking and milling about. That made Kraft furious. He got on his intercom and told anyone who could hear him to shut up so that he could pray or do whatever the hell else he could dream up to make sure Apollo 8 came out on the other side of the Moon when it was supposed to. A few minutes later, the clocks in Mission Control read midnight. It was now Christmas Day in Houston, much of America, and the world. No one had ever been farther from home on this important family day than Borman, Lovell, and Anders. From their windows, which faced toward the lunar surface, it appeared to the astronauts as if they would be headed for trouble when the rocket lit. “It looks to me like I’m going to burn right into the ground,” Borman said. But the men didn’t have time to worry about that. They’d long since maneuvered the spacecraft to the attitude NASA had calculated. They had faith that the agency had gotten it right. Just thirty seconds remained until TEI. “Flight recorder going to record,” Anders called. He’d made this flight believing he had a one-third chance of dying. Trans Earth Injection had been a major part of that calculus. “Stand by to start ullage,” Lovell called. Lovell believed that at certain points in life, a person just had to have faith. “Two valves,” Borman called. Borman had come for America, because he believed it was the greatest country on Earth and he would have died in order to protect it. In Mission Control, people could barely breathe. It was this moment that had so shaken James Webb when he heard of Low’s plan. It wasn’t just that the mission allowed only four months’ preparation rather than the usual year and a half, or that it required manning a rocket that had flown only twice (and experienced myriad problems the second time), or that the crew would have no backup if the SPS engine failed, or that so much would have to be done for the very first time. What had shaken Webb most deeply was the idea that if the crew of Apollo 8 were stranded in lunar orbit on December 25, no one would ever look at Christmas, or the Moon, the same way again. Five seconds remained until Trans Earth Injection. Inside the spacecraft, the number 99 flashed on a display, asking the crew for the go-ahead to light the SPS engine and begin the burn. If no one pressed the Proceed key, ignition would not occur. Lovell looked to Borman, and Borman nodded. Lovell reached forward. He pressed Proceed. And then there was only silence. Chapter Twenty-Two

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

  an old familiar face. “Look who’s coming there, would you?” he said. “What?” Lovell asked. “The Moon.” A minute later, Borman checked his indicators. “Well, men, we’re getting close.” “There’s no turning back now,” Anders said. “Old Mother Earth has us,” Lovell said. Two minutes later, Anders noticed a change in the view outside his window. “What is that?” he asked. Borman and Lovell, the old spaceflight pros, decided to have a little fun with the rookie. “That’s right, you’ve never seen the airglow. Take a look at it,” Lovell said. “You can’t get your [astronaut] pin without seeing the airglow,” Borman said. Apollo 8 plunged, blunt end first, toward Earth at more than 24,750 miles per hour, breaking below one hundred miles altitude and pushing its crew faster than any humans ever had traveled. On board, the astronauts, seated with their backs to the direction of travel, began to feel the first drag from the atmosphere and could see the dark sky begin to ionize and glow around them. Borman and Lovell might have experienced reentry before, but never at these speeds. They weren’t kidding with Anders anymore. “That’s the airglow we are starting to get, that’s what it is, gentlemen,” Lovell said. The three men braced themselves. “Goddamn,” Borman said. “This is going to be a real ride. Hang on!” Chapter Twenty-Four THE MEN WHO SAVED 1968 The world outside the spacecraft lit up even before the astronauts expected it. “I’ve never seen it this bright before!” Borman told his crewmates. “You got zero point oh-five g yet?” “Zero point oh-five g!” Lovell answered, checking a readout on the console. “Okay, we got it!” Anders called. The spacecraft neared 25,000 miles per hour. “Hang on!” Borman yelled. Out his window, Lovell could see a pink glow turning brighter by the second, and he felt the g-forces building. Temperatures rose fast around the command module as it collided with the atmosphere. The crew could only hope the heat shield would do its job; no manned ship had ever endured the heat loads Apollo 8 was about to experience. A second later, Houston lost contact with the spacecraft as Apollo 8 became enveloped in ionized gas. On CBS, Walter Cronkite narrated over an animated rendering of the command module entering a fiery atmosphere. At their homes, the astronauts’ wives watched the broadcasts, willing their husbands home in these hand-drawn capsules. Inside the spacecraft, the g-forces increased fast. “They’re building up!” Lovell called. “Call out the g’s,” Borman told him. “We’re one g,” Lovell answered. The men’s labored breathing could be heard on their intercom system as the forces multiplied. “Ohhh!” Lovell groaned. “Five!” he called, straining to speak. “Six!” Cronkite explained to the nation what the astronauts were enduring.

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

  Apollo 8 into a burning meteor. If it came in too shallow, it would bounce off the atmosphere like a stone skipped on water and coast back out into space. Without the service module, Apollo 8 lacked any means of propulsion and could not apply the brakes sufficiently to reenter Earth’s atmosphere. At that point, each astronaut would have a chat with his wife and children before drifting away from Earth in a ship with only a few hours’ life support, to embark on a long elliptical orbit, one that would be fatal. But even if the spacecraft hit the entry corridor perfectly, the friction created by the drag of the atmosphere on an object moving at almost 25,000 miles per hour would generate temperatures of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. To enable the astronauts to survive it, the command module had been covered by a heat shield made of a reinforced phenolic resin injected into a fiberglass honeycomb. Rather than defeat the heat in combat, the shield was designed to succumb to it and then vaporize away, leaving a new layer of shield beneath to continue the fight, all while keeping the command module cool. Even if it worked and the astronauts weren’t fried to a crisp, they would be undergoing tremendous g-forces as the atmosphere slowed the ship. They would also lose all communications with Earth as gases around the spacecraft ionized from the shock wave, creating a kind of wall through which radio signals could not pass. To mitigate the fantastic amount of heat and g-forces caused by reentry, Apollo 8 wouldn’t simply plunge through the atmosphere; rather, it would use its aerodynamic design (its slightly off-center weight distribution turned the spacecraft into a kind of wing), allowing it to achieve lift and dip up and down, extend its path, shed velocity, and diffuse the heat that it had to endure as it aimed for the designated landing site. The whole process would take about five minutes. If all went well, the spacecraft would have slowed enough to make its final drop to Earth. The astronauts’ lives would then depend on the command module’s parachute system, and the recovery forces that even now moved back and forth in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii like predatory big cats on the hunt. —