Rocket Men Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Kurson Creative, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Kurson, Robert, author.

  Title: Rocket men : the daring odyssey of Apollo 8 and the astronauts who made man’s first journey to the Moon/ Robert Kurson.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017009386| ISBN 9780812988703 (hardback) | ISBN 9780812988727 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Project Apollo (U.S.) | Space flight to the Moon. | Apollo 8 (Spacecraft)

  Classification: LCC TL789.8.U6 A5438 2018 | DDC 629.45/4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017009386

  Ebook ISBN 9780812988727

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  randomhousebooks.com

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  First Edition

  Book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook

  Frontispiece photographs courtesy of NASA

  Images on this page and this page adapted from NASA/Mitch Lopata

  Cover design: Carlos Beltrán

  Cover photograph: courtesy of NASA/Apollo Image Gallery

  v5.2

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  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

  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 United States government—might turn against NASA. The fate of the entire space program hangs on the crew’s safe return.

  As the moment of launch draws near, one of the astronauts spots a mud dauber wasp building a nest on the outside of one of the spacecraft’s tiny windows. Back and forth the insect moves, grabbing mud and adding to its new home. The astronaut thinks, “You are in for a surprise.”

  Vapors begin to spew from around the base of the giant rocket. Less than a minute remains before lift-off. When the five first-stage engines ignite, they will deliver a combined 160 million horsepower. In the final few seconds, a typhoon of flames unfurls to either side. Beneath the astronauts, it is not just the launchpad that begins to shake, but the entire world.

  August 3, 1968—Four months earlier

  AS HE SAT ON A BEACH in the Caribbean, a quiet engineer named George Low ran his fingers through the sand and wondered whether he should risk everything to win the Space Race and help save the world.

  At forty-one, Low was already a top manager and one of the most important people at NASA, in charge of making sure the Apollo spacecraft was flightworthy.

  Apollo had a single goal, perhaps the greatest and most audacious ever conceived: to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy had committed the United States to achieving this goal by the end of the decade. Never had a more inspiring promise been made to the American people—or one that could be so easily verified.

  Now, Kennedy’s end-of-decade deadline was in jeopardy. Design and engineering problems with the lunar module—the spidery landing craft that would move astronauts from their orbiting ship to the lunar surface and back again—threatened to stall the Apollo program and put Kennedy’s deadline, just sixteen months away, out of reach. And that led to another problem. Every day that Apollo languished, the Soviet Union moved closer to landing its own crew on the Moon. And that mattered. The nation that landed the first men on the Moon would score the ultimate victory in the years-long Space Race between the two superpowers, one from which the second-place finisher might never recover.

  For months, NASA’s best minds had worked around the clock to fix the issues with the lunar module, but the temperamental and complex landing craft only fell further and further behind schedule. By summer, many at the space agency had abandoned hope of making a manned lunar landing by the end of the decade.

  And then Low had an idea.

  It had come to him just a few weeks before he’d arrived at this beach, and it was wild, an epiphany, a dream. It was also dangerous, risky beyond anything NASA had ever attempted. But the more Low though
t about it, the more he believed it could keep the Apollo program moving and save Kennedy’s deadline—and maybe even beat the Soviets to the Moon.

  Low inhaled the fresh, salty air and tried to push space travel out of his thoughts. At home, his mind burned nonstop with ideas, formulae, trajectories. Now he needed a break, and it should have been easy to find one in this tropical paradise. About the only reminder of America was the local newspaper, which told of the Newport Pop Festival in Costa Mesa, California, where more than a hundred thousand music fans were expected, and brought word of potential protests at the coming Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It had been an explosive year already, with assassinations, riots, and violence. A quiet beach was just where a man like Low needed to be.

  But Low could not relax. He walked the beach, looking out over the ocean toward Moscow and the Moon, thinking, imagining, America and the world on fire behind him.

  * * *

  —

  Five days after Low returned from vacation, a serious man with an oversized head went to work inside a giant assembly plant in Downey, California. His mission: to build a machine from the future that would help make the world safe for democracy.

  Over and over, astronaut Frank Borman opened and closed the hatch on the Apollo command module, a cone-shaped capsule made to fly a three-man crew to the Moon. He’d already certified that the hatch worked, then certified it again, but he would not stop pushing on it, making sure it opened, no matter what.

  Nearby, Borman’s two crewmates, Jim Lovell and rookie Bill Anders, got ready to test the hundreds of dials, switches, levers, lights, and gauges that made the command module work. The spacecraft was small, measuring just eleven feet tall and thirteen feet wide at its base, but every inch of it had been designed by Borman and others to be impervious to a galaxy of deadly forces.

  A nearby transistor radio played Top 40 music, which caught Borman’s ear.

  “That’s a pretty slick song,” Borman said. “Who’s the fella singing it?”

  “That’s the Beatles, Frank,” Lovell said, laughing.

  Borman preferred the standards. As a kid, he’d memorized the lyrics to all the great Western songs played on the radio in Arizona. He could still sing “Cowboy Jack”—a ditty that dated to the nineteenth century—but didn’t dare start, because he knew Lovell and Anders would insist that he sing it to the end.

  Borman stuck to classic films, too. Alone among astronauts, it seemed, he hadn’t bothered to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, the new Stanley Kubrick film released in April that showed men flying to the Moon. That stuff was science fiction, Borman told his colleagues; America had real people to get to the Moon.

  Borman and his crewmates knew that the lunar module was troubled and behind schedule. But until designers and engineers could make the fixes, these astronauts could do little more than make certain that the command module was perfect. So they climbed inside their spacecraft and began testing it, pushing the command module mercilessly, because that’s what outer space would do to it, too.

  And then the phone rang.

  Smart people knew better than to bother Borman at work. But the man on the line went back a long way with Borman. And he said it was urgent.

  Donald Kent “Deke” Slayton was in charge of managing astronaut training and choosing crews for manned space missions. If an astronaut flew on board a NASA spacecraft, it was because Slayton had chosen him to go.

  When Borman heard who was calling, he wriggled out of the capsule and grabbed an extension.

  “Deke, I’m in the middle of a big test here,” he said.

  “Frank, I need you back in Houston.”

  “Talk to me now.”

  “No, I can’t talk over the phone. It’s gotta be in person. Grab an airplane and get to Houston. On the double.”

  Borman grimaced—America did not have time for nonsense and delays—but Slayton was in charge, and NASA, no matter its official designation as a civilian organization, was a military operation to Borman, so he took his orders. Poking his head back inside the spacecraft, he told his partners, “You guys are stuck with the module. I’ve gotta go back to Houston.”

  Borman grabbed his rental car, drove to Los Angeles International Airport, and hopped into a T-38 Talon, a two-seat twin-engine supersonic jet used by astronauts for training, commuting, and even some fun, and pointed it toward Texas. At forty, he still looked every bit the West Point cadet: sandy blond near-crewcut, square jaw and chin set for combat, arched eyebrows that seemed a radar for anything askew. Even his head was military issue, all right angles and slightly larger than life, a feature that had earned him the childhood nickname Squarehead.

  Borman couldn’t imagine why he was needed in Houston, and so suddenly. He was commander of Apollo 9, the third of four manned test flights NASA planned before it would attempt to land on the Moon. Apollo 9 was to be a basic mission—orbit Earth, test the spacecraft, come home. It wasn’t scheduled to launch for another six months. Still, Borman knew he hadn’t been summoned for nothing. The last time he’d received a “drop everything” call had been the darkest day in NASA’s history.

  It had happened about a year and half earlier, on January 27, 1967, when a fire broke out in the spacecraft during a simulated countdown on the launchpad in Florida. The Apollo 1 rehearsal should have been safe and routine for the three astronauts inside, who were preparing for the actual flight about four weeks later. But a spark occurred in the electrical system and the men were trapped as the sudden fire spread in pure oxygen. Even Ed White, the strongest of all NASA’s astronauts, couldn’t muscle open the command module’s hatch as flames spread through the spacecraft.

  Borman had been enjoying a rare break with his family at a lakeside cottage near Houston, where they lived, when Slayton’s call came in that day.

  “Frank, we’ve had a bad fire on Pad Thirty-four and we’ve got three astronauts dead—Gus Grissom, Ed White, and one of the new boys, Roger Chaffee. Get to the Cape as quick as you can; you’ve been appointed to the investigative committee.”

  The news stunned Borman, who considered Ed White the brother he’d never had. And it devastated Borman’s wife, Susan, who counted Pat White among her best friends. Borman told Slayton he’d fly to Florida right away but first needed to stop at the Whites’ home in Houston.

  When he and Susan arrived, Pat was hysterical. She was the mother of two children, ages ten and thirteen, who suddenly had no father. Even in her raw grief, just hours after receiving the news, a Washington bureaucrat had informed her that despite Ed’s wishes to be buried at West Point, the three fallen astronauts would all be laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery.

  “Give me the guy’s name,” Borman said.

  He had the man on the phone a minute later.

  “It’s already been decided in Washington,” the man insisted.

  “I don’t give a good goddamn what’s been decided,” Borman said. “Ed wanted to be buried at West Point and that’s what’s going to happen, and I’ll go all the way to President Johnson to make sure it happens, so you better fucking well do it.”

  Four days later, White was buried at West Point. Borman and Lovell were among the pallbearers. Anders also attended.

  After the funeral, Borman began his work on the investigative committee convened by NASA. He was the only astronaut on the panel, a sign that NASA considered him to be among its best. His first job was to help supervise the disassembly of the Apollo 1 spacecraft at Cape Kennedy in order to determine the cause of the fire. Days later, he became the first astronaut to enter the cabin. He found a burned-out nightmare. Rows of equipment and panels had been charred and covered in soot, debris was scattered everywhere. Hoses connecting the astronauts to their life support systems were melted. No matter where he looked, Borman could see no color, only grays and blacks.

  That night, he joined Slayton and othe
rs at a restaurant in Cocoa Beach called The Mousetrap, a NASA haunt. Borman seldom drank to excess, but the smell of the scorched spacecraft needed bleaching, and he started in early. He raised toasts to his fallen brothers, then threw his glass into the fireplace. White was among the straightest arrows Borman had ever known—honest to a fault, a true patriot, and a man who didn’t mess around with the sports cars or fast women so readily available to astronauts. For both men, family came first. The Bormans and Whites often shared a house on a lake near Houston for fishing trips. Borman couldn’t remember missing someone as much as he missed Ed White that night.

  Borman spent the next two months inside the burned spacecraft, studying the design, searching for flaws, making fixes in his mind. In April 1967, Congress held hearings into the cause of the fire, and Borman was called to testify.

  Much of the questioning was aggressive and antagonistic, full of second-guesses and should-haves and pointed fingers, but Borman held firm, hiding nothing and acknowledging NASA’s responsibility, but never allowing congressmen to kick the agency just because it was down. He still ached for the loss of his friend, Ed White, but never allowed those emotions to spill into his report. Near the end of the hearings, he offered some of its most memorable testimony.

  “We are trying to tell you that we are confident in our management, and in our engineering, and in ourselves,” Borman said. “I think the question is really: Are you confident in us?” A few days later, he told lawmakers, “Let’s stop the witch hunt and get on with it.” At NASA, it seemed there wasn’t a person, from the administrator to the janitors, who didn’t cheer him on. In the end, Congress took his advice and NASA continued on its mission to land men on the Moon.