Rocket Men Read online

  Borman and Lovell said farewell to their families at home, wished them a merry Christmas in advance, and told them they’d celebrate the holiday after they returned to Earth. Anders did the same, but then he gave Valerie a small package. It contained an audiotape. He asked that she play it in the event he didn’t make it back. Anders was a private person and didn’t tell anyone what he’d said on the tape. It began, “You children and your mother are the most important…” Much of the rest of it came down to this: expressions of love for Valerie and the kids; a reminder that he missed them already; a hope that Valerie would marry again in the future; and an assurance that he’d died doing what he wanted to be doing.

  At the Cape, the men checked in to their new quarters, each getting a tiny room with little more than a steel bed and a steel desk, but with a large adjoining living room to share. Framed copies of classic paintings competed with lunar maps for space on the walls. It was a comfortable, if cramped, existence, and one deemed necessary by NASA to prevent the crew from catching bugs or viruses from the outside world that might short-circuit their ability to fly. The sole luxury came in the form of a personal chef.

  No sooner had the astronauts arrived at the Cape than they had to pack their bags again. Lyndon Johnson had invited them and their wives to the White House for a formal dinner and send-off, just twelve days before the flight. System checklists and countdown procedures swimming in their heads, the astronauts boarded a charter flight to Washington. Doctors didn’t like the idea. The Hong Kong flu pandemic—which would kill more than thirty-three thousand in the United States alone in a six-month span—was reaching its peak, and the astronauts were supposed to be in quarantine. When a NASA doctor tried to object, LBJ issued a Texas-sized Who the hell does he think he is? For the crew of Apollo 8, there was a silver lining—a last, unexpected chance to kiss their wives goodbye.

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  As the astronauts flew to the White House, the family of one of the thirty thousand Americans killed so far during the fighting in Vietnam prepared for their own visit to the nation’s capital.

  On October 31, 1967, just a month before he was to return home, Captain Riley L. Pitts of the U.S. Army led his company on an assault of a Vietcong position in the dense jungle of Ap Dong, South Vietnam. After enduring withering fire, Pitts threw his body on top of an enemy hand grenade and waited to die. When the grenade failed to explode, Pitts moved his company forward, putting himself in the direct line of enemy fire until he was cut down in a hailstorm of bullets.

  As the crew of Apollo 8 arrived with their wives at the White House, Capt. Pitts’s widow, Eula, laid out a dark suit and a bow tie for her five-year-old son, Mark, and a fine white blouse for her seven-year-old daughter, Stacie, at their home in Oklahoma City. The next day, the president would make her husband the first African American officer ever to receive the nation’s highest military decoration, the Congressional Medal of Honor. Millions of Americans considered astronauts to be the epitome of American courage. To Borman, Lovell, and Anders, that label better belonged to men like Pitts.

  Joining the crew of Apollo 8 and their wives at the black tie gala were twenty other astronauts, Chris Kraft and Wernher von Braun, and former NASA chief James Webb, who was to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom later in the evening. Also present was Charles Lindbergh, who’d stunned the world when he flew nonstop from New York to Paris in 1927. To many at NASA, despite his controversial political views, Lindbergh was a pinnacle aviation hero, a man who had taken to the skies to do the impossible.

  Before dinner, a small concert was staged in the East Room. When Valerie Anders took her place in the audience, she was dismayed to hear dozens of people coughing and sneezing. This is so stupid, she thought. They are putting this crew at risk. And yet there was no escape for any of them. So they stayed, droplets of the Hong Kong flu and who knows what else atomizing into the room.

  During dinner, Kraft got to talking to Lindbergh about airplanes, a nuts-and-bolts conversation between one of the great original aviators and an old flight test engineer. Seated nearby with the president, Borman stole glances toward Kraft’s table, envying the conversation he was missing. He also noticed that LBJ seemed irascible, describing his annoyance at a press corps—and maybe an entire swath of the American public—whose criticism of his Vietnam policies seemed to have beaten him down. Listening to the president rail against the media, Borman felt empathy for Johnson, not just for the stigma of Vietnam that would attach to his legacy, but for how it must feel to be a man in the final days of his standing, knowing that soon he would never again matter in the way he once had.

  THE CREW OF APOLLO 8 RETURNED to their quarters at Cape Kennedy on December 10. Just eleven days remained until their mission. Their schedule would be simple from this point forward: train in the simulator, study the flight plan, jog. At night, when he could find a spare moment, Borman walked outside his tiny bedroom and looked up at the Moon.

  On December 15, at 7 P.M. EST, NASA began its official launch countdown, five and a half days before the planned lift-off. That gave everyone associated with the flight time to coordinate, and to fix any problems that might arise along the way. As the clock started ticking that Sunday evening, Lovell borrowed a car and drove sixty miles north along the Florida coast to a town called Edgewater, where he rang the doorbell at a house near the beach.

  His mother, Blanch, opened the door. She lived here now. Her seventy-third birthday was approaching, and her son had come to celebrate early. Over dinner, Jim explained the mission to his mother. Sitting shoulder to shoulder on the living room couch, Jim sketching out his rocket’s trajectory, Blanch wearing her glasses and leaning in for a closer look, the two might have been in Milwaukee thirty years earlier, a mother and her young son who had only each other to rely on, each present for the other one’s dreams.

  The next day, NASA chief Tom Paine flew to the Cape to visit with the astronauts and to deliver an important message. After dinner—and a few drinks to loosen things up—Paine spoke frankly to Borman, Lovell, and Anders, with one final statement he wanted them to remember. He laid it out like this:

  First, if any of them had any reservations going into the flight, anything they hadn’t felt comfortable discussing with Chris Kraft or Deke Slayton or anyone else at NASA, even if it was nothing more than a feeling or an intuition that something wasn’t right, he should feel free to bring those concerns to Paine, and he would personally see to it that the issue was addressed and fixed, no matter what, and without consequence to them.

  Second, if the crew had any doubts or worries during the mission—with how the flight was progressing, with the function of the spacecraft or systems, with anything—he should feel free to abort the mission and bring the ship back early, and Paine would guarantee a seat on a subsequent flight as soon as possible. No one, he told the astronauts, would lose his chance to go to the Moon for ending a flight in the name of safety.

  Borman, Lovell, and Anders thanked Paine for the offer, but none of them expressed any concerns about Apollo 8. All of them expected it would require a hell of a lot more than a feeling or an intuition to U-turn a spacecraft bound for the Moon.

  On December 17, four days before scheduled lift-off, Marilyn Lovell and her four children landed in Florida and checked in to a beachside cottage. Valerie Anders, too, had managed to make the trip, catching a ride with a NASA contractor. Valerie had come only for the day, to squeeze in a final goodbye with her husband before returning home to be with their children.

  The next day, Jerry Lederer, director of NASA’s Office of Manned Space Flight Safety, spoke to a group of aviation enthusiasts in New York. Apollo 8, he said, had one safety advantage over the voyage undertaken by Christopher Columbus in 1492: “Columbus did not know where he was going, how far it was, nor where he had been after his return. With Apollo, there is no such lack of information.” There was, however, t
he matter of complexity. “Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and 1,500,000 systems, subsystems and assemblies,” Lederer noted. “Even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects.” For that reason, Lederer concluded, Apollo 8’s mission would involve “risks of great magnitude and probably risks that have not been foreseen.”

  As darkness fell in Florida that night, Lovell took Marilyn out on a date. They didn’t go to a restaurant or a movie, but rather to a place virtually no one on Earth could access, to see one of the newest wonders of the world. And no matter how high Marilyn looked when they reached the Cape, she still could not see where the great Saturn V ended, it just kept stretching upward, more than 250 feet taller than the rocket that had carried Lovell on his Gemini missions, a colossus lit white by floodlights against an inky black sky.

  “I don’t want you to worry,” Lovell said, holding Marilyn’s hand. “When we lift off, the rocket is going to tilt, it might even look like it’s going to fall over, but that’s normal, it’s exactly how they designed it. Also, the Earth is going to shake in a different kind of way. That’s normal, too.”

  By the morning of December 19, just forty-eight hours before lift-off, journalists were swarming at the Houston homes of the astronauts. Valerie and Susan were gracious, smiling for everyone, their hair and makeup done, all of them expressing support and admiration for their husbands. Valerie always wore the same dress for appearances on television—yellow, with a close-fitting waist and knee-length skirt. Her mother noticed and asked her about it. Valerie had to confess: It was the only good dress she owned. Her husband was about to become one of the most famous men in the world, yet he still earned military pay, about $16,000 per year (plus another $16,000 from Life magazine), which went only so far with five children to feed.

  That night, Valerie decided to slip out of the house with three-year-old Eric to go for some groceries. She stole out the back gate and headed for the garage but was greeted in her driveway by an ocean of reporters and bursting flashbulbs. The next day, photographs ran across the country showing Eric in his mother’s arms, sucking his thumb, along with the caption THUMBS UP FOR DAD! Valerie loved the photo, but she knew it meant she would be a captive in her own home from that moment forward.

  On December 20, the day before the flight, the Soviets let the world know what they thought about Apollo 8. “It is not important to mankind who will reach the Moon first and when he will reach it,” said cosmonaut Gherman Titov, the second man ever to orbit Earth. Not many in the Soviet Union were worried. Even with the American countdown clock at T minus 24 hours, few Soviets believed NASA would be crazy enough to launch.

  That afternoon, Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow, joined the astronauts in Florida for lunch. Anders suspected the visit to be a public relations stunt arranged by NASA, but he changed his mind after hearing the passion in Lindbergh’s questions about Apollo 8. After a few minutes, the four men—and Anne, also a pilot—were immersed in conversation about flying. Not one of the astronauts resented the imposition on his time. By now, there wasn’t any sense in cramming more pages from a flight manual or checklist; with twenty hours to go until launch, you either knew your stuff or you didn’t.

  The conversation turned to spacewalking, and how it compared to the old barnstorming stunt of wing-walking. The Lindberghs were interested to hear that one’s sensation of altitude decreased as one flew higher, until it hardly seemed to register in space (where the familiar scenery that helped people judge distance from the ground all but disappeared), and to learn that in space there was no up or down. The astronauts were equally interested to learn of a conversation Lindbergh once had in the 1930s with Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocket engineering. It was theoretically possible, Goddard had told Lindbergh, to design a rocket powerful enough to reach the Moon, but the money required to build it—as much as a million dollars—would likely keep such a wonder in the realm of science fiction. The astronauts had a good laugh at that one.

  Lindbergh performed a back-of-napkin calculation after learning how much fuel the Saturn V required to send Apollo 8 to the Moon. “In the first second of your flight,” Lindbergh said, “you’ll burn more than ten times as much as I did flying the Spirit of St. Louis all the way from New York to Paris.”

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  Later that day, Anders’s childhood priest arrived at crew quarters. Father Dennis Barry had come to give Anders—a devout Catholic since childhood—communion. This visit annoyed Borman, who was growing edgier as the hours to launch counted down. The longer Father Barry stayed, the more irritated Borman grew. Finally, Borman snapped.

  “Are you gonna take communion every thirty seconds before the flight?” Borman asked.

  “No, Frank. He’s just visiting,” Anders said.

  “Well, then, get rid of the guy!”

  Borman was sorry he said it, even sorrier when he saw that his remark had hurt Anders. But he thought the crew didn’t need distractions so close to launch.

  Anders had more visitors coming. One was his thesis adviser and head of the Department of Physics at the Air Force Institute of Technology; the other was the man’s brother, who was a Jesuit priest. He considered both to be very good friends. Around sunset, Anders took them to the parking lot outside crew quarters, where they all lay back on the hood of a car. By now, the sky had darkened, and the men picked out the slivered crescent of the Moon in the sky.

  Early that evening, his last night on Earth before launch, Lovell sneaked away from crew quarters to visit Marilyn. She’d been at a party, but when Jim called, she hurried away and met him for a rendezvous at the cottage where she and her children were staying. There he kissed his kids and pulled out a photograph. Taken by one of NASA’s unmanned lunar probes, it showed an angular mountain on the Moon. It was near the Sea of Tranquillity, one of the potential sites Apollo 8 would scout for a future landing mission.

  “I’m going to name it Mount Marilyn,” he said.

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  Wake-up would be at 2:30 A.M. The astronauts were to eat dinner, then go to sleep. Launch, at 7:21 A.M., was just twelve hours away.

  After the meal, the men called their families to say good night and goodbye. Borman spoke first to his boys, then to Susan.

  “Everything’s going to be all right,” he told her. “I’ll be perfectly safe.”

  “I know,” Susan said.

  Before retiring, Borman knelt by his bedside to pray—the Lord’s Prayer, then a request for a successful mission, and finally that he, Lovell, and Anders do their jobs well.

  But he couldn’t sleep, not for hours. He and his crew had been given only four months to train for the flight, and he was concerned about everyone’s ability to perform flawlessly. More than anything, he dreaded the possibility of having to fly the backup mission—ten endless days in Earth orbit—if some anomaly was found after launch that spooked NASA into canceling the lunar part of the journey. He did not want to leave Susan a widow and his boys fatherless, but on this account, he didn’t worry too much; he believed in the rocket and spacecraft the crew would be flying, and especially in the people who’d built and designed them. As Borman saw it, he would be flying with thousands of the world’s best minds aboard.

  Around midnight, ground crews began to pump each of the three stages of the Saturn V with liquid oxygen, an oxidizer necessary for combustion. Ribbons of white vapor danced as the warm Florida air boiled away drops of the liquid oxygen from vents in the tanks. Fuel was next. Three weeks earlier, the Saturn V’s first stage had been filled with 209,000 gallons of highly refined kerosene. Now liquid hydrogen was added to the second-stage booster (260,000 gallons) and to the third-stage booster (69,500 gallons). Added to the 437,000 gallons of liquid oxygen in the stages, the fully fueled rocket would hold nearly a million gallons of propellant and would weigh 6.2 million pounds, all with th
e explosive potential of a small nuclear bomb.

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  At 2:36 A.M. on Saturday December 21, 1968, Deke Slayton knocked on the bedroom doors of the astronauts and told them it was time.

  The men took hot showers, then walked down the hall for a cursory physical exam. After being pronounced fit by a team of doctors, they made their way to the breakfast room, where they were joined by Slayton, George Low, Alan Shepard, astronaut Harrison Schmitt, and two of their three backup crew, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (the third member, Fred Haise, was working inside the spacecraft setting dials and switches).

  In heaping quantities, the astronauts’ personal chef served filet mignon and scrambled eggs (steak and eggs was the traditional send-off meal for astronauts), toast, coffee, and tea—a deliberately low-residue meal, and the last real, hot food that the astronauts would consume for the next six days.

  After breakfast, the crew of Apollo 8 made their way to the suiting room. If astronauts could have flown in thirteenth-century chain mail, they might have preferred it to NASA’s space suit. All of them, however, understood its necessity. The custom-tailored one-piece suits could be pressurized, and they were made fireproof by Teflon cloth. Layers of Mylar, Dacron, and Kapton protected from heat, while other layers provided cooling and controlled pressure. In all, these suits contained more than twenty layers of protective materials, enough to do battle with a universe that becomes hostile to humans just a few miles above Earth’s surface. Fully dressed, the suit’s wearer looked like a futuristic version of the Michelin Man and walked a bit like Frankenstein’s monster, but the suit could be his lifeline during a space flight if the cabin lost pressure.