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)

  In less than a minute, the propellant for the first-stage engines would run out. At that point, the stage would have to be severed and allowed to fall away from the ship. The engines continued to burn staggering amounts of propellant, causing the ship to grow lighter and g-forces to increase, pressing the astronauts into their seats with up to four times the force of gravity on Earth, making each man’s arm feel as if it weighed about thirty-six pounds. At an altitude of about 215,000 feet, the spacecraft reached a speed of 4,236 miles per hour. With the onboard clock nearing two and a half minutes’ elapsed time, the first stage shut down, explosives fired, then retro rockets ignited, separating the first stage from the rest of the Saturn V and enveloping all of Apollo 8 in a cocoon of fire. To many of those watching from the ground and on television, it appeared that the entire ship had exploded, but it was just the precursor to the first stage falling back toward the Atlantic, glowing a brilliant goodbye. Inside the spacecraft, the sudden shutdown of the first stage caused g-forces to drop from four to zero almost instantly. Having been severely compressed, the 363-foot tower of aluminum alloy suddenly sprang back, flinging the astronauts forward with explosive force. By instinct, Anders threw up his hand in front of his face to prevent being catapulted through the instrument panel, but by that time, the five J-2 engines of the second stage had kicked in and the acceleration threw Anders’s outstretched hand back so hard against his head that the wrist ring on his glove carved a gouge in his helmet. As with the launch itself, simulations hadn’t come close to preparing the astronauts for the violence of this moment. Pinned back once again by the force of five screaming engines, the crew began to check instruments to make sure all was okay. Out of the corner of his eye, Anders glanced to check whether Borman or Lovell had noticed the gouge in his helmet, the sure mark of a rookie astronaut. Thankfully, it seemed they hadn’t. A few seconds after the first-stage booster fell away, Borman prepared to get rid of the other end of the vehicle, the thirty-four-foot-tall spire-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.

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

  social equality. Most people expected to spend their lives being given orders and showing deference, so when someone ordered dramatic change, it was a question of obeying rather than making a personal choice. Once they had obeyed, the religion which they met was as much a matter of conforming to a new set of forms of worship in their community as of embracing a new set of personal beliefs. Christian missionaries were just as much at home with worldly as with supernatural power. They expected people to be unequal, that was what God wanted, and inequality was there to be used for God’s glory. Mass rallies were not their style; most evangelists were what we would call gentry or nobility, and they normally went straight to the top when preaching the faith. That way they could harvest a whole kingdom, at least as long as local rulers did not have second thoughts or take a better offer. Above all, Christians everywhere had a big advantage in being associated with the ancient power that obsessed all Europe: imperial Rome. The Latin-speaking Church became a curator of Romanitas, Romanness. That was a paradox, since Jesus had been crucified by a Roman provincial governor and Peter by an emperor, but the cultural alliance stuck. By Bede’s account, when discrepant methods of calculating Easter in the Atlantic Isles were debated at the Synod of Whitby in 664, King Oswy of Bernicia decided in favour of the Roman method over the Celtic because Peter was the guardian of the gates of Heaven and Columba of Iona was not.45 Everyone wanted to be Roman: the memory of the empire stood for wealth, wine, central heating and filing systems, and its two languages, Latin and Greek, could link Armagh to Alexandria. But, as King Oswy’s judgement showed, there was more to mission than simple material matters. People hungered for meaning; they were terrified of their own frailty. Famously, Bede told a story that when Oswy’s father-in-law, King Edwin of Deira and Bernicia, was weighing up whether or not to become Christian in the 620s, one of his advisers reminded his master of the baffling brevity and inconsequentiality of human life: he compared it to a sparrow which swoops in suddenly through one door into the warm, brightly lit, noisy royal hall and then flies straight out through the other door, back to the darkness and storms outside.46 Bede probably made the speech up, as historians did at the time, but he made it up because he thought that his readers would think it plausible. The troubled people of Europe sought not only good drains and elegant tableware, but a glimpse of the light which would make sense of their own brief flights out of the darkness. The missionaries of Christianity talked to them of love and forgiveness shaping the purposes of God, and there is no reason to believe that ordinary folk were too obtuse to perceive that this could be good news. As the Anglo-Saxons travelled east into mainland Europe, so did their

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

  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 they were floating down as planned. Under the chutes’ risers, the capsule was tipped on an angle to allow it to knife into the water rather than belly-flop onto its blunt base. At an altitude of just 8,000 feet, Apollo 8 was less than five minutes from scheduled impact with the water. Moments later, one of the recovery aircraft made radio contact with the spacecraft. “Welcome home, gentlemen,” a crewman called to the astronauts, “and we’ll have you aboard in no time.” At three minutes to splashdown, recovery helicopters spotted flashing beacons from the falling spacecraft. Apollo 8 was almost directly over the Yorktown, a bull’s-eye of almost unimaginable accuracy. “Stand by for Earth landing!” Borman called from his commander’s seat. At their homes in Houston, the astronauts’ wives stared at their televisions. For Valerie, it was thrilling to hear that the parachutes had opened—that meant Apollo 8 was somehow reconnected to Earth. But she thought, “They’re heading for a big, dark, rough ocean, and the ships still don’t know where they are.” At one thousand feet altitude, radio traffic from the recovery forces grew so voluminous that the astronauts couldn’t communicate with one another. “Turn him down!” Anders told his partners. “Christ, we can’t get anything done.” Just a hundred or so feet remained. The crew braced themselves, not knowing exactly when impact might come. Borman called to Lovell and Anders. “Maybe we better get these—” At that moment, Apollo 8 came in flat, not on its intended angled edge, and bashed into the Pacific Ocean, its blunt end colliding against the upswell of a wave, just about the most violent impact possible. Inundated by water (and perhaps stunned by the crash), Borman could not flip the switch to cut the parachutes from the capsule, and Apollo 8 was dragged over by its chutes and turned upside down in the ocean. None of the men was ready for an impact that jarring; nothing in simulation had come close. By the time Borman came around a few seconds later and cut the lines, all three men were hanging upside-down in their straps. Garbage that had collected in the cabin streamed down on them, and water poured over their bodies and faces.

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

  —Borman greeted his wife with a kiss and told her about the new mission. As always, Susan smiled and clasped his hand. Inside, she was dying. The Moon? she thought, trying to absorb what he was telling her. It was August. NASA hadn’t even tested the command module yet. December—that was what, four months away? Usually crews trained for a year or more. To the Moon ? She told Frank how proud she was, how important the mission sounded, that there was no better man for the job. Then she turned and went into another room, where she wished she could kick down a door. They’re rushing it, she thought. They’re leapfrogging, they’re too anxious to get it going . Over the course of Frank’s career, she’d closed her eyes and hoped for the best, but she could see that this mission was different, that she needed to stop living in a cocoon and pretending her husband would always be home for Sunday dinner, because this time Frank wouldn’t just be running another test flight—this time he would be leaving the world. As always, Frank thanked God for Susan. She always supported him, never made him worry about her or their two teenage boys. He had no inkling of what was going on inside her, or how badly she’d been hurting since Apollo 1 had taken Ed White, the husband of her close friend Pat White. Susan knew Frank had enough pressure at work, and she considered it her mission to make home a place where he never worried. Borman told the news to his two sons, Fred and Edwin. To the boys, the Moon sounded pretty cool. Borman would have showed them where he was going if only he’d owned a lunar map. At his home, Anders shared the news with his wife, Valerie. Even as he spoke she thought This is a big and scary change, but she also had been steeling herself to danger since she was a little girl (her father had been a motorcycle-riding California Highway Patrolman), and she believed beating the Soviets to be a worthy goal. Bill had always been straight with Valerie, and it would do no good to sugarcoat things now. He laid out his thinking on the risks. He thought there was a one-third chance of a successful mission, a one-third chance of a failed mission that managed to make it back home, and a one-third chance the crew wouldn’t return at all. He hated to worry her, but he knew if she sensed he was bullshitting, she just would have worried more. Valerie trusted that these odds were accurate, though they were not numbers any young mother of five liked to hear. She thought about other military wives, some of whom had husbands missing in action, and she remembered that her husband, like most astronauts, would be fighting in Vietnam—eagerly—if he weren’t training to fly to the Moon.

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

  first in the 1520s the pragmatism of the Graubünden in Switzerland, then the Hungarians and Transylvanians in the Declaration of Torda, soon followed by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s Confederation of Warsaw (see pp. 639–43). Just as the increasing confessional rigidity of old Europe was turning from these sixteenth-century ideals, a new European enterprise was taking up the challenge. THE FIGHT FOR PROTESTANT SURVIVAL (1660-1800) The growing success and stability of these new transatlantic Protestant polities (gained at the price for Native American societies of increasing disruption and exile westwards) contrasted with a long-drawn-out crisis for Protestants in late- seventeenth-century Europe. The Habsburgs began systematically dismantling a century and more of Protestant life in central Europe from Bohemia to Hungary, Catholic advance in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth continued apace, and France re-emerged under Louis XIV (reigned 1643–1715) as a major European power with an aggressively Catholic agenda. The Stuart dynasty restored in Britain in 1660 was from its return a client of Louis, seeking his financial support against its stridently but selectively loyal and inconveniently Anglican English Parliaments. Charles II and James II became pawns in Louis’s plans, which included improving, or better still reversing, the marginal position of Catholics in the Atlantic Isles.30 Louis XIV died an exhausted and defeated old man, but in his prime he directed an army of 400,000, supported by a taxable population of twenty million; he had increased the size of that army fivefold in four decades.31 Beyond his own borders, he spurred on the Duke of Savoy in murderous campaigns against Savoy’s Protestant minority, and in 1685 he overturned his grandfather Henri IV’s religious settlement for France by revoking the Edict of Nantes — 150,000 Protestants are estimated to have fled France as a result, the largest displacement of Christians in early modern Europe.32 Louis conquered largely Protestant lands of the Holy Roman Empire in Alsace, making a Catholic Strasbourg out of Lutheran Strassburg, which long before in Martin Bucer’s time had been the prime candidate to lead the Protestant world (see pp. 629–30). In his military campaigns of 1672, Louis nearly succeeded where the Spanish monarchy had failed, in overwhelming the United Provinces of the Netherlands — and in that ambitious venture lay the seeds of his own failure. For the outrage of France’s invasion provoked Prince Willem of Orange, appointed Stadhouder (the word which in French would be ‘Lieutenant’) by most provinces in the

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

  Out his window, Anders saw a terrifying sight—baseball-sized chunks of the heat shield flying off, many times larger than the grain-sized pieces NASA expected—and he waited for the heat to sear through the spacecraft and melt the crew. But Apollo 8 did not melt. Instead, after about a minute of this peak intensity, the onboard computer automatically began to roll the spacecraft. Though the ship had no wings, its designed shape and offset center of mass made it capable of lift if positioned correctly, and now it began to climb a bit back out of the atmosphere, lowering the g-forces and cooling down in the process. “Cabin temperature is still holding real good,” Anders called to his crewmates, sounding a bit astonished and relieved. “Quite a ride, huh?” “Damnedest thing I ever saw,” Borman said. Three minutes after losing contact with the spacecraft, Houston began calling to the ship, but CapCom Ken Mattingly couldn’t get through. Apollo 8 had swooped back down for its second grind into the atmosphere. The crew held on. “How much will this one go up, do you think?” Anders asked of the building g-forces. “Three!” Lovell called. Twenty seconds or so later, the spacecraft had been slowed by the atmosphere to suborbital speeds and began rolling one way, then the 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.

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

  At the Anders home, Valerie scrambled to round up her five children, seating them atop the toy box in the playroom where the family kept their new color TV. Joining them were Bill’s aunt and uncle, several family friends, and the wives of some of the other astronauts (Bill’s parents were at home in San Diego to watch the launch). Valerie tried to stay in the moment, absorbing everything, even the fear, full of hope. Among those watching the countdown from behind a giant window at the Launch Control Center at the Cape was backup crew member Neil Armstrong, who couldn’t get over the moxie NASA had shown in conceiving the mission. The Saturn V had never been flown with men aboard and had suffered profound problems on its second and most recent test. To put a crew on that rocket now, and to point that crew at the Moon, seemed astonishingly aggressive—and wonderful—to him. Just twenty minutes remained until launch. For miles along the Cape, thousands of cars and motorcycles and buses and campers jammed the beaches and roadways, a quarter of a million people standing on hoods or in sand or on one another’s shoulders, craning their necks for a view of the rocket, passing binoculars back and forth, checking their watches every few seconds. An eighty-year-old woman from South Dakota, who’d traveled in her son’s trailer to witness the launch, said, “Those men, what they will do! And I have lived to see it. I am still alive to see it.” “T minus 7 minutes, 30 seconds and counting, still aiming toward our planned lift-off time,” King told a riveted nation. In the morning light, the view from the spacecraft became clearer. For several minutes, Anders watched a mud dauber wasp build a nest on the capsule window. At T minus 5 minutes, the access arm and loading area pulled away from the spacecraft and retracted. At Mission Control in Houston, Chris Kraft stared at a giant color screen that was broadcasting a view of the spacecraft. He had always considered launch to be the riskiest part of manned spaceflight, and that was true even with proven rockets. Now, feeling scared to death, he watched as his agency prepared to catapult three good men from the planet aboard the most powerful machine ever built, despite the fact that this machine had never lifted a living thing, not even a mealworm, off the ground. At T minus 3 minutes, 6 seconds, computers took over full checkout of the rocket. In the Borman and Anders homes, hands were squeezed tight. On the sand dune, Marilyn Lovell huddled with her children. Photographers from various media outlets were stationed with all three families, pressing shutter buttons and swapping film rolls as fast as they could, desperate not to miss a moment. In Mission Control, Flight Director Cliff Charlesworth and CapCom Mike Collins watched the monitors.

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

  the whole city of Zürich. To opt in to baptism as an adult was to split the wholeness of the community, into believers and non-believers. That would end the assumption which both he and Luther held as dear as the Pope, that all society should be part of the Church in Christendom. So from 1526 Zürich, embittered by the recent Farmers’ War, persecuted Anabaptists to the extent of drowning four of them in the River Limmat, just at the time when the old Church began persecuting champions of the magisterial Reformation. The Anabaptists were harried out of ordinary society. Their one alliance with a magistrate, when Count Leonhard von Liechtenstein allowed them to take over the Moravian town of Nikolsburg and form an established Church professing believers’ baptism, ended abruptly in 1527 on the orders of the Count’s Habsburg overlords; the Habsburgs burned at the stake the would-be Zwingli of Nikolsburg, a former senior academic called Balthasar Hubmaier. Accordingly, radicals began stressing their difference from ordinary society.When they turned to the Bible for guidance, such people noticed quite correctly that early Christians had separated themselves from the world around. The Book of Acts talked of Christians holding all goods in common (see pp. 119–20). ‘Do not swear at all,’ said Jesus Christ (Matthew 5.34). ‘Commit no murder,’ said the Ten Commandments. So radicals looked for the rare corners of Europe where they had a chance to create their own little worlds, in which goods could be held in common, where no one would force them to swear the oaths which governments and magistrates required, or take up the sword when rulers ordered them to. They took a selective view of the demand for obedience in Romans 13.1, infuriating and frightening the superior powers. Many looked back to the nearest thing that ‘Anabaptists’ ever had to a common confessional statement: articles drawn up in 1527 at the Swiss town of Schleitheim, which were insistent on ‘separation from the Abomination’. Their principal author was a former Benedictine monk, Michael Sattler, and it is tempting to see the communal institutions of radicals as a new effort to return to the early Benedictine ideal. Yet one feature was far from Benedictine: it returned radicals to a still earlier Christianity, which had suffered from official persecution. ‘True believing Christians are sheep among wolves, sheep for the slaughter. They must be baptized in anguish and tribulation, persecution, suffering, and death, tried in fire, and must reach the fatherland of eternal rest not by slaying the physical but the spiritual,’ wrote the young Zürich patrician Conrad Grebel to Thomas Müntzer, a year before Müntzer, a leader in the 1525 revolts, was cut down by the vengeful soldiers of princes.24 More frightening still for Christendom was that, even after the defeats of 1525, some radicals continued to believe that they needed force to usher in the

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

  One model of Anders’s jet was armed with two rocket-propelled missiles, each with a 3.5-kiloton nuclear warhead attached—combined, it equaled about half the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. To fire the weapons, the radar operator in the backseat had to throw a switch, and the pilot in the front seat had to throw his own switch. That’s all it required. Officially, the crew needed an order from the ground, but if Anders and a buddy wanted to start World War III, they could do it on their own. “That’s the Cold War,” Anders told Valerie. “It’s up to us not to screw up.” In February 1957, the Anders family welcomed their first child, Alan. And in July 1958, Valerie gave birth to Glen. Raising a young family in California was idyllic, with the warm weather and abundant culture, maybe too good to be true, so it came as little surprise when Anders got a new assignment: Iceland. Valerie would stay with the kids in California while her husband moved four thousand miles away. Again, Anders’s job was to fly interceptors. This time, he would be going after Soviet bombers, long-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.

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

  “Seven g’s is seven times their weight on Earth, so these one-hundred- fifty-pound astronauts weigh something like one thousand fifty pounds, would be the effect as they are pressed against their couches.” Apollo 8 crashed even harder into the atmosphere. Despite the g- forces making it difficult to move, or even breathe, the ride was smoother than on lift-off, and the astronauts could still look out their windows and see the pink gases of the ionizing atmosphere turn a deeper reddish-blue; to Anders, he and his crewmates looked like flies caught in the middle of a blowtorch flame. In the distance, a Pan Am pilot flying in the darkness from Hawaii to Fiji watched the fireball created by Apollo 8 and estimated its cometlike tail to be more than one hundred miles long. Moments later, at maximum g-force load, the inferno surrounding the astronauts turned pure white as the temperature at the surface of the spacecraft rose to half that of the surface of the Sun. Out his window, Anders saw a terrifying sight—baseball-sized chunks of the heat shield flying off, many times larger than the grain-sized pieces NASA expected— and he waited for the heat to sear through the spacecraft and melt the crew. But Apollo 8 did not melt. Instead, after about a minute of this peak intensity, the onboard computer automatically began to roll the spacecraft. Though the ship had no wings, its designed shape and offset center of mass made it capable of lift if positioned correctly, and now it began to climb a bit back out of the atmosphere, lowering the g-forces and cooling down in the process. “Cabin temperature is still holding real good,” Anders called to his crewmates, sounding a bit astonished and relieved. “Quite a ride, huh?” “Damnedest thing I ever saw,” Borman said. Three minutes after losing contact with the spacecraft, Houston began calling to the ship, but CapCom Ken Mattingly couldn’t get through. Apollo 8 had swooped back down for its second grind into the atmosphere. The crew held on. “How much will this one go up, do you think?” Anders asked of the building g-forces. “Three!” Lovell called. Twenty seconds or so later, the spacecraft had been slowed by the atmosphere to suborbital speeds and began rolling one way, then the

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

  and thumping in ways it shouldn’t. At the same time, he heard one of the spacecraft’s thrusters fire. Instantly, he was transported back to 1966, when he’d been on duty as CapCom for Gemini 8, the mission that had gone terribly wrong when a thruster could not be shut down, causing the ship to go into a violent and ever-accelerating tumble. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott had fought to stay conscious and regain control, which they finally managed by disabling the primary system and firing a set of reserve thrusters. As Anders saw the eight ball on his own spacecraft spin, he believed the same to be happening to Apollo 8. To counteract the rotation, Anders used his hand-controlled thruster, but the ball just kept moving, so Anders added more thrust. Soon the spacecraft was in full rotation, and it was anyone’s guess which way the nose was pointing in the cosmos. By now, Borman had awoken from the commotion. “What the hell’s going on?” he called out. “Stuck thruster!” Anders answered. But what to do? Armstrong and Scott had been in Earth orbit when it happened to them, and they barely made it out alive. Here, 185,000 miles farther away, it might be impossible to pull Apollo 8 out of its tumble and get it pointed back toward home. Anders had stared down Soviet bombers, had landed on sheets of ice in his fighter planes, and always he’d run cool. This scared the hell out of him. He looked back at the eight ball to assess the spin. Now it had frozen and was therefore useless. Yet the spacecraft was still turning—Anders knew it because he could see the cabin rotating against the pattern of sunlit dust motes floating freely inside it. By now, Lovell had called to Anders and Borman that he’d made a mistake by resetting the guidance system. That explained why the eight ball had rotated to its launch orientation. And that explained why a thruster was not the problem. The thruster Anders had heard had fired automatically by program, a coincidence. Furious at Lovell’s mistake, Borman made his way to the control area, but already Anders had begun to fight the spacecraft’s roll. He couldn’t use the seized-up eight ball to judge how to rotate the ship, so he turned to a more ancient indicator the men had on board.

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

  of his vision of 1260, later episodes of mass flagellation were certainly not so benevolent, for, like the earlier campaigns to gather crusader armies, they were often associated with crowds turning in violence on Jewish communities. Yet the spontaneous character remained: these were outbreaks of religious fervour which the Church authorities had done nothing to inspire and which they often found frightening and sought to suppress. Such religious energies could as readily turn against the Church as be absorbed by it. Punishment was thus directed to outsiders as well as to sinful Christians. One of the characteristics of Western Christianity between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries is its identification of various groups within the Western world as distinct, marginal and a constant potential threat to good order: principal among such groups were Jews, heretics, lepers and (curiously belatedly) homosexuals.8 In 1321 there was panic all over France, ranging from poor folk to King Philip V himself, that lepers and Jews had combined together with the great external enemy, Islam, to overthrow all good order in Christendom by poisoning wells. Lepers (as if they had not enough misfortune) were victimized, tortured into confessions and burned at the stake, and the pogroms against Jews were no less horrific. Muslims were lucky enough to be out of reach on that occasion.9 From the mid-twelfth century, a particularly persistent and pernicious community response to the occasional abuse and murder of children was to deflect guilt from Christians by blaming Jews for abducting the children for use in rituals. This so-called ‘blood libel’ frequently resulted in vicious attacks on Jewish communities. Sometimes higher clergy did their best to calm the community hysteria in such cases; sometimes they allowed shrine-cults of the murdered victims to develop. Recurrences of the blood libel persisted into the twentieth century as a blemish on Christian attitudes to Jews, spreading from the West into Orthodoxy in later centuries.10 A PASTORAL REVOLUTION, FRIARS AND THE FOURTH LATERAN COUNCIL (1200-1260) A more complex and positive response to dynamic popular movements emerged at the end of the twelfth century, although in the end it allied itself and indeed helped to structure this ‘formation of a persecuting society’. It produced two great religious leaders, Dominic and Francis. They were utterly different personalities, but they founded in parallel the first two orders of friars (an English version of the word fratres, Latin for ‘brothers’). In 1194 Dominic became a priest in a community in Osma in northern Spain, living under

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

  In 1972, the agency would add the word “Defense” to its title and be renamed DARPA.) In September 1958, Eisenhower signed into law the National Defense Education Act, which provided billions of dollars for the education of young Americans in science and related subjects. And in October, he opened a space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, known as NASA, which took on the eight thousand workers and $100 million budget of its predecessor agency, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Many of its employees were young scientists, engineers, and visionaries. In December 1958, just about a year after Sputnik had launched, NASA announced Project Mercury, a program designed to put a human being into orbit around Earth and return him and the spacecraft safely. Seven brave men were chosen for the task from a pool of military test pilots. They would be known as astronauts—“star sailors”—and would explore the oceans of space. —America elected John Fitzgerald Kennedy president in November 1960. He’d accused Republicans of being weak on defense and Communism, and Eisenhower of allowing the United States to fall behind in production of intercontinental ballistic missiles—a so-called missile gap. According to the nation’s new president, America could not afford to be second to the Russians in anything. On April 12, 1961, less than three months after Kennedy’s inauguration, tracking stations controlled by American intelligence picked up the flight of a Soviet spaceship and detected something startling inside. Minutes later, the Soviet government announced that they’d put the first man into space—whom they called a cosmonaut, or “universe sailor.” And he’d already made a complete orbit around Earth. For the first time, a man had broken the bonds of his home planet. Yet as the twenty-seven-year-old cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin whirled around the globe, few knew the extent to which the Soviets had rushed the mission, the myriad risks they’d taken, or the critical tests they’d skipped. Near the 108-minute flight’s end, after reentering the atmosphere, Gagarin’s spaceship began spinning uncontrollably and plummeted toward Earth. He managed to eject and parachute down, unharmed but almost two hundred miles off course. He landed in a field near the tiny village of Smelovka, east of the Volga River in southern Russia, where he was discovered by a woman and a little girl. The girl ran away, startled by the sight of this alien being who had dropped from the sky, but Gagarin waved his arms and called out, “I’m one of yours, a Soviet, don’t be afraid.” He struggled to walk in his space suit but managed to reach the girl and reveal an incredible truth—he had just come from outer space. In 1945, the Soviet Union had lain in ruins. Now, sixteen years later, it had put the first man into orbit around Earth. Gagarin was given a parade in Red Square, an event as big as or bigger than the one held to celebrate the end of World War II.

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

  —NASA kicked off 1968 by flying Apollo 5 in January, an unmanned test of the lunar module, the landing craft that would shuttle astronauts between the orbiting spacecraft and the lunar surface. The mission used a smaller rocket, and despite a few problems it was classified a success. And then came Apollo 6. It would be just the second test of the Saturn V, a necessary step before NASA would certify the booster for manned flight. Lift-off was proceeding normally on the morning of April 4, 1968, but just a few minutes into the flight, things started to go wrong. The rocket’s first stage began to “pogo”—to shake violently up and down. Pieces of the spacecraft flew off. Later in the flight, two of the five engines on the second stage shut down prematurely. Still, the third stage struggled into orbit, but its engine—the one required to send Apollo to the Moon—failed to reignite. A backup plan was put into effect, but the reentry of the command module into Earth’s atmosphere was too slow to fully test the heat shield. To many at NASA, the ten-hour flight had been a disaster. By the time the Apollo command module splashed down into the ocean, any chance for a lunar landing by the end of 1969 looked to have burned away. “What was illustrated,” wrote The New York Times, “…was the extraordinary difficulty of assuring that every one of the literally millions of components in such an extremely complicated system as the Saturn 5 works perfectly….This fact argues for a slow but sure approach to future Apollo tests, rather than an adventuresome policy aimed primarily at completing the job by the end of 1969.” —On the same day that Apollo 6 went haywire, United States intelligence agencies delivered a report on the Soviet space program. It was marked TOP SECRET and went only to high-ranking government policymakers and top NASA officials. It read: The Soviets will probably attempt a manned circumlunar flight both as a preliminary to a manned lunar landing and as an attempt to lessen the psychological impact of the Apollo program. That much wasn’t news. But the estimate on when it would happen jumped off the page. The report said that 1969 was more likely for this manned circumlunar flight. But the second half of 1968 was entirely possible. NASA had no plans to send men to the Moon in 1968. The soonest they’d be ready to try was mid-1969, when Apollo 10 would orbit the Moon—a test run before Apollo 11 attempted a landing. By that time, a cosmonaut might already have reached the Moon. And that would be more than just the greatest technological achievement in history. It would be a definitive victory for the Soviets in the Space Race. The landing would still matter, of course. But no one ever again would ask, “Can we get there?” By that time, someone else would have answered, “We did.” NASA had little choice but to keep working.

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

  The United States hadn’t even put a man into orbit around Earth; now the president was committing the country to landing astronauts on the Moon, and on an eight-and-a-half year deadline, no less. Even if NASA knew how to fly a man to the Moon—and it did not—it lacked the infrastructure, industry, manpower, and technology required to do it. And yet the president stood there insisting it would be done. And soon. The stakes could hardly have been higher. If America fell short, its failure could not be denied or buried. It would be proof that the nation couldn’t do what its leader said was most important, that its greatest minds had failed, that it might not be the world’s best hope for the future. It would weaken morale at NASA. And it would embolden the Soviet Union, a nation that wouldn’t hesitate to exploit an American embarrassment for propaganda, or press a military advantage. And yet… If NASA could meet Kennedy’s deadline, it would be a statement—to the American people, the Soviets, and the world—that there was nothing the United States could not do if pushed hard enough, that even after losing round after round in the Space Race, falling behind in missiles and bombs, and suffering a humiliation like the Bay of Pigs, the United States could rise in a way no other nation could rise and pull off a miracle. And that’s what Congress seemed to hear as Kennedy kept talking and their applause began to build: that landing a man on the Moon and bringing him back safely might be the single greatest scientific and technological challenge mankind had ever faced, but doing it by the end of the decade was impossible, and it was only by attempting something impossible that a nation could truly know who it was. —While Americans buzzed about Kennedy’s plan, the Soviet Union yawned. It remained far ahead in the Space Race, and had even sent a probe 42.5 million miles away, which had passed by Venus a few days before Kennedy’s speech. In June, Khrushchev bullied Kennedy during a two-day summit in Vienna at which the men discussed Communism and democracy and the relationship between the two superpowers. “Worst thing in my life. He savaged me,” Kennedy told a New York Times writer. “I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts.” Four months later, on October 30, 1961, the Soviets exploded a device known as Tsar Bomba over northern Russia. Packing a force of nearly four thousand Hiroshima bombs, it was by far the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated or even built; for the briefest moment, it equaled 1.4 percent of the power output of the Sun. The device’s blast wave orbited the globe three times and its mushroom cloud rose to more than seven times the height of Mount Everest. The ground around the blast site melted and turned to glass, while people fifty miles away were knocked flat.

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

  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 rocket designer, Wernher von Braun, appeared on a nationally televised Disney special, Man in Space . Von Braun showed viewers a prototype space suit like the one Americans would wear “when we make the trip to the Moon,” and he revealed his model for a four-stage orbital rocket ship—about the coolest thing any of the 42 million people watching the program had ever seen. For the next two years, Lovell flew jets at sea and trained pilots while Marilyn raised the children in California. In 1957, he applied to the test pilot school at the Naval Air Test Center at Patuxent River, Maryland. The job of testing experimental aircraft built with the most advanced technology seemed a natural fit. Marilyn backed his decision and packed the Lovells to go. The training program at Pax River lasted for six months. At graduation, Lovell ranked first in his class. His gift from Marilyn was a new daughter, Susan, making them a family of five. Soon after, in 1958, Lovell and some other pilots at Pax River received a telex from a new government agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, ordering them to a meeting in Washington, D.C. They were to dress in civilian clothes and not tell anyone, including family, where they were going, or even that they were going at all. When he arrived, Lovell joined dozens of other military pilots for a briefing in a government office. Robert Gilruth, head of NASA’s Space Task Group, explained that the agency was looking for astronauts for Project Mercury, a program designed to put a manned spacecraft into orbit around Earth and recover it safely. He laid out NASA’s vision, talking of rockets and capsules and head-spinning speeds. Think things over tonight, Gilruth told the men, then report back tomorrow for more. Some participants questioned the wisdom of abandoning a Navy career to enroll in an astronaut program that hadn’t yet started and might not even exist in a few years. As for Lovell, he could hardly believe his luck. Several days later he was in New Mexico, enduring six days of torturous physical exams.

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

  She poured herself a scotch on the rocks, sat on a stool at the wood-paneled bar in the family room, and sobbed. In just ten hours, Apollo 8 would disappear behind the Moon. How had she been so confident all this time? Her husband was disappearing behind the Moon . And that meant he might never come home. —At almost exactly two and a half days into the flight, Apollo 8 prepared for just its second—and final—midcourse correction burn of the outbound leg. It would be accomplished by firing four thrusters on the spacecraft, each of which could produce 100 pounds of thrust. That was only the tiniest fraction of the force that had been required to get Apollo 8 off the launchpad, but it was all the vehicle would need for eleven seconds as it refined its line to the Moon. “Okay, stand by,” Borman called to his crewmates. “Burn,” Lovell said. “Burning,” Anders confirmed. Eleven seconds later, it was done. Houston analyzed the telemetry—the correction had been nearly perfect, and it was just a matter of riding the ship for another eight hours until lunar rendezvous. Despite such close proximity, the crew still could not see its target. To all of them, it felt like sitting with their backs to the screen in a movie theater during a terrific thriller. In Houston, the wives began to prepare for when the spacecraft reached the Moon, scheduled for 4:00 A .M . Houston time, when Apollo 8 would attempt a complex maneuver known as Lunar Orbit Insertion, or LOI. Engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and other scientists had spent years developing the calculations and determining how to make the maneuver work. But on its face, LOI was easy to understand. At 69 hours into the flight, Apollo 8 would pass just in front of the Moon, missing its surface by only 69 miles. That altitude had been chosen for a reason. On future landing missions, it would be close enough so that the lunar module shuttling astronauts to the lunar surface and back wouldn’t require a massive amount of propellant, but far enough away to make it unlikely that the spacecraft waiting in orbit above would crash into the Moon. If Apollo 8 did not fire its SPS engine—or if the engine failed to ignite—after passing behind the Moon, lunar gravity would cause it to slingshot around the far side and head back to Earth, requiring only minor course adjustments in order to hit its reentry corridor and splash down in the Pacific Ocean. NASA had chosen this free return, figure eight trajectory in case of engine failure or other in-flight problems. But NASA planned for Apollo 8 to orbit the Moon. To enter lunar orbit, the spacecraft had to slow itself down enough to be captured by the Moon’s gravity.

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

  Some had compared NASA’s challenge in finding the entry corridor to throwing a paper airplane into a public mailbox slot—from a distance of four miles. There was almost no margin for error. If the spacecraft came in too steep, it would grind too hard into the atmosphere, causing massive g-forces that would crush the ship and crew, and generating heat so intense it would incinerate the men and turn 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. —One hour remained until reentry. It was before dawn at the splashdown site, about a thousand miles southwest of Hawaii. It would still be dark when Apollo 8 arrived.

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

  For the next several days, many of NASA’s top managers and engineers stepped up their already intense schedule and worked around the clock to study the viability of Low’s plan, looking for any showstoppers and keeping it a secret from the wider organization. A few days later, they were convinced: It would take a near miracle, but every problem could be solved, every challenge could be met. Now it was time to go to NASA’s top boss, James E. Webb, for permission. Some at NASA doubted that Webb would even listen. The Apollo 1 fire had nearly put him and the agency out of business, and it seemed unlikely he’d risk another tragedy. But they had to make their pitch now if the agency was to have any hope of sending Apollo 8 to the Moon by year’s end. The job of seeking official permission fell to Webb’s deputy, Thomas Paine, a young, forward-thinking engineer, and to Air Force general Samuel Phillips, director of the Apollo Manned Lunar Landing Program. Phillips at first wanted to do it in person but then thought better of it—a sudden trip to Vienna by high-ranking officials of the American space program might tip off the Soviets that NASA was planning something big. The better idea was to use a secure telephone line and hope for the best. Paine and Phillips reached Webb at the American embassy in Vienna. They had reason to hope Webb would see the genius of the new plan. Since Kennedy’s speech in 1961, Webb had been a champion for Apollo, protecting and advancing the program with Congress, playing by street rules when necessary. So the men laid out their vision for Apollo 8. “Are you out of your mind?” Webb yelled. He began to count off the risks of sending Apollo 8 to the Moon in December, only to grow more indignant with each one, and his list didn’t seem to end. “You’re putting the agency and the whole program at risk!” Webb finally said. And it was hard to argue with any of it. Three astronauts had died a horrific death on the launchpad less than two years earlier. Congress would not abide another three dead, especially if it occurred because NASA had hurried. And Webb added a final point. “If these three men are stranded out there and die in lunar orbit, no one—lovers, poets, no one—will ever look at the Moon the same way again.” No one had considered that. But it was true of Christmas, too. Borman, Lovell, and Anders would be in lunar orbit on December 25. If they died then, Christmas would never be the same in America. Or maybe in all the world. Every year, it would be a tragic reminder of a mission gone horribly wrong. Webb had little to gain by signing his name to such a risky plan. And though he hadn’t announced it, he planned to resign in a few months, ending his seven-year tenure at NASA.

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

  of Megiddo, they were more exposed to the commerce and activities of great powers to the south and north, so they were more cosmopolitan and more inclined to take an interest in other cultures and religions than were the rather introverted rulers of Judah, who resentfully guarded their Jerusalem Temple for Yahweh. Nevertheless both kingdoms produced kings prepared to experiment with the gods of more powerful people who might be allies or overlords. The time of the Judges and then of David and Solomon had coincided with weakness in Egypt and an Assyrian monarchy which was preoccupied in another direction; these circumstances may have afforded opportunity for the brief success of the united kingdom of Israel. From the mid-eighth century, the Mesopotamian empire of Assyria was ready to intervene more actively in Palestine/Israel, enjoying a third phase in a long history of military success which now spread its power from the Persian Gulf to the frontiers of Egypt. To judge by the inscriptions and imagery of their victory monuments, the Assyrians delighted in the use of terror and punitive sadism to seal their military success. The rise of this horrifying new threat to the north inevitably affected Israel, the northern kingdom, more than Judah. As both the Bible and Assyrian records confirm, Israel suffered frontal assault and destruction by the Assyrians around 722 BCE; thousands of its people were exiled and its political organization disappeared for ever.21 That left the kingdom of Judah standing alone, delivered from total conquest because the Assyrians were distracted by revolts elsewhere, a historical accident which the biblical chroniclers naturally interpreted in terms of divine deliverance. Judah survived for another century and a half, but once more Palestine/Israel had become the object of land-grabbing by external powers and, apart from the century-long interlude of the Hasmonean regime from 167 BCE (see pp. 65–71), that has been the case until modern times. This new reality would have a major impact on Judaism. The gathering crisis for the two kingdoms in the ninth and eighth centuries reinforced the role in Jewish culture and society of figures who presented themselves as mouthpieces of Yahweh, carrying urgent messages for his people: the prophets. The modern meaning of the word ‘prophecy’, relating it to the future, may mislead; in Greek, prophēteia means the gift of interpreting the will of the gods. As ancient Middle Eastern archives rediscovered from the nineteenth century onwards have revealed, Israel was not the only ancient society in the region in which prophets played a major role: long before, in the eighteenth century BCE, they can be found in the Mesopotamian Babylonian kingdom of Mari, and they also appear among the Jews’ then contemporary enemy Assyria. Yet the peculiar circumstances of Israel’s history and the consequent preservation of documents by and about the Israelite prophets