Rocket Men Page 15

  A team of technicians, dressed in surgical masks to avoid spreading germs, descended on the astronauts, ordering them into their long johns and biometric sensors (to transmit physiological data to Houston), then helping them don their suits. Borman’s equipment specialist would be Joe Schmidt, an all-around good guy, and the same sergeant who’d helped him into his pressure suit so many times at Edwards Air Force Base, where Borman had been a test pilot. The two were old hands at this kind of dance.

  To enter the space suit, Borman had to shimmy and shake his way in through a tight zipper opening in the back of the garment, favoring no limb over any other lest the rest of him be left behind. After he popped his head through the neck ring, oxygen and cooling hoses were attached to blue (input) and red (output) valves at his torso. The next piece went on easily—a soft cap like the ones worn in the 1930s by barnstorming pilots, the men who gave rides to kids like Borman, Lovell, and Anders. (NASA’s caps, however, were woven with state-of-the-art communications gear—no yelling above the wind required.) Gloves were affixed and secured. Finally, a transparent bubble helmet was attached to the neck ring. (Borman’s head was so large that his helmet cost an extra $45,000 to build.) Now fully kitted up, with pure oxygen flowing into their suits from portable ventilators, Borman, Lovell, and Anders were already separated from Earth, the only three men on the planet who needed the planet no more.

  On the way out of the suiting room, Lovell’s technician gave him a pocket handkerchief to dress up his space suit, while Schmidt presented Borman with a small paper Christmas tree. The gifts weren’t intended to be brought on board, but it was the thought that counted.

  Carrying their briefcase-sized oxygen ventilators, the crew of Apollo 8 lumbered down a long hallway, waving to a photographer as they made their way to the elevator that would carry them to the building’s exit. Television cameras and a small group of well-wishers greeted them as they left the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building and boarded the astronaut transport van for the first leg of their journey, an eight-mile ride to the launchpad. Emblazoned on the van’s inside door was the figure eight insignia Lovell had designed for this mission, along with a reminder in bold red letters: NO SMOKING.

  As the van made its way to the pad around 4:30 A.M., a NASA official drove Marilyn Lovell and her four children to a sand dune about three miles from the launch site, the closest NASA allowed observers to be for lift-off. The family were alone when they arrived, except for the coffee and doughnuts NASA had waiting for them. It was still dark. Marilyn pulled a pack of Pall Malls from her purse. Often, she and Susan Borman met in the mornings for a cup of coffee and a smoke, but Marilyn was solo today, so she shook a cigarette loose and lit up by herself. In Houston, the Borman and Anders families began to wake and get ready for a day glued to their televisions.

  Upon reaching Pad 39A, the astronauts exited the van and bent backward, straining in their suits and helmets to get a view of the behemoth before them. From a distance of just a few yards, the Saturn V was mythically tall. The idea that it could move, never mind fly, seemed impossible from up close.

  The astronauts walked to the middle of the launchpad, then boarded a small service elevator built into the crisscrossed steel beams of the service tower, which carried them thirty-two stories into the air. Then they walked across an access arm to a small loading area, where technicians would make a final check of the space suits. From there it was a short walk for the astronauts across a small metal bridge and into the spacecraft. It was 4:58 A.M., still dark outside. From his vantage point, Lovell couldn’t help but think of the old astronaut joke—How does it feel to sit atop a vehicle built by the lowest bidder?

  A NASA staffer gave the signal for the astronauts to start loading. Borman went first and, after some maneuvering, settled into the left-hand seat of the command module, lying flat on his back as an airline pilot would if his airplane were tipped back onto its tail. A technician gave Anders a hug, then sent him, too, into the spacecraft, where he took the right-hand seat in the small cabin. As Anders worked to get himself settled, Lovell looked down to the ground 320 feet below. He could see the lights of the press corps as they arrived at their designated sites, and all of a sudden it hit him: These NASA people are serious. They’re going to send us to the Moon. My God, we really are doing this. He took a deep breath, then walked across the bridge, put his feet through the hatch of the spacecraft, and lowered himself into the seat between Borman and Anders.

  Technicians closed and secured the hatch on the Apollo 8 spacecraft at 5:34 A.M. Inside the cabin, the countdown clock read T minus 2 hours, 17 minutes and counting. Lying flat on their backs, there wasn’t much the crew could do to help things along. Borman wished NASA could just get the damned thing into the air, but knowing that wasn’t possible, he wished for something more realistic—that the launch would actually occur. He didn’t want another episode such as John Glenn endured in the Mercury days, when his flight was scrapped with twenty-nine minutes to go. If a guy was going to suit up and climb aboard with his nerves on edge, the least a rocket could do was go up.

  In the command centers at the Cape and in Houston, controllers took their places, settling in to legacy aromas of stale pizza and burnt coffee, checking their consoles and lists and running through their responsibilities as they had done for the past four months in their offices, at dinner with their families, in bed after their wives had fallen asleep. The Cape would be in charge of the launch (since they would be on scene), then turn over command to Houston shortly after lift-off. Both command centers vibrated as hundreds of controllers moved into position.

  At the helm would be Flight Director Cliff Charlesworth, in charge of the flight from the ground. Charlesworth could take any action he deemed necessary to ensure the safety of the crew and the success of the mission. The CapCom—always a fellow astronaut—would do most of the communicating with the crew of the spacecraft as it flew, and he would be the crew’s advocate in Mission Control. The facility would operate around the clock in eight-hour shifts, as long as the mission lasted. Each team of flight controllers was designated by a color. The primary CapCom, Mike Collins, was on Charlesworth’s Green team and would cover launch through to the historic TLI maneuver.

  Overseeing them all in Houston would be Chris Kraft, the director of flight operations. Even now, Kraft might have been the most nervous of them all. He’d been with NASA since its inception in 1958. More than anyone else, he knew how much could go right—and wrong—when men left Earth.

  The astronauts occupied themselves by checking switches, confirming checklists, and eavesdropping through their headsets on launch personnel. They could not hear NASA public affairs officer Jack King, whose baritone voice and slight Boston accent had kept the world updated live on launch countdowns since the Mercury flights. Borman, Lovell, and Anders shivered in their space suits, their cabin freezing in the still-chilly morning air.

  The astronauts could do little more than wait. Through a tiny porthole in front of him, Borman watched two seagulls flying around the spacecraft and checking out the strange, tall bird—the Saturn V—that now shared their sky. From his middle seat, Lovell scanned the instrument panel and admired the detail of the Apollo simulators; nothing inside the command module looked or felt different from what the crew had practiced with on the ground. And in a testament to the cool that runs through the bloodstream of fighter pilots, Anders fell asleep, ready to awaken when things got good.

  By 7 A.M., network coverage of the launch had gone live on televisions and radios across America and the world. As the countdown clock ticked under an hour, a crowd gathered around the color television in the living room of the Borman home. Susan, her two sons, Frank’s parents (who had arrived at three A.M. and now fidgeted nervously on the couch), and family friends had come to watch the launch. Joining them were a Life magazine photographer, along with the wives of seven other astronauts, some of whom had brought devi
led eggs and champagne. Though she smiled for newspaper photographers while scratching the tummy of the family’s shaggy dog, Teddy, Susan’s insides were in knots. At every chance, she hurried back to the squawk boxes NASA had installed in her home so that she could listen directly to the communications between Apollo 8 and Mission Control.

  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. George Low, the man who’d conceived a mission the Soviets still didn’t believe would fly, breathed deeply as the clock showed just one minute remaining.

  At T minus 60 seconds, all three stages of the Saturn V were fully pressurized.

  “Twenty seconds,” Jack King announced to the world. “We are still Go at this time.”

  Storms of white vapor began to billow near the base of the rocket, liquid oxygen boiling off during the Saturn V’s final moments on Earth. Inside the spacecraft, Borman felt the rocket sway a bit in the wind.

  “T minus fifteen,” King called, “fourteen…thirteen…twelve…eleven…ten…”

  Heart pounding, Borman’s left hand remained gripping one of the spacecraft’s controls, ready to twist it to the left and abort the mission in case of a catastrophic problem. The three men listened to propellant pumping through the engine manifolds. On the beach, Marilyn reminded herself that the rocket would lean when it took off, just as Jim had warned.

  “Nine…We have ignition sequence start, the engines are armed!” King said, as a fury of orange-yellow flames lit beneath the rocket and exploded against the launchpad.

  “Four…”

  “Three…”

  Flames spread from beneath the rocket and erupted out to the sides, a typhoon of fire awakened and screaming as the ground began to shake.

  “Two…”

  A man-made thunder crashed into people and windows and buildings for miles around.

  “One…”

  Borman loosened his grip on the abort handle. He would have rather died than twist it by accident in the violence unfolding beneath him.

  “Zero. We have commit…We have…”

  King paused for a moment, as if he didn’t quite believe what he was seeing.

  Susan Borman, Marilyn Lovell, and Valerie Anders didn’t breathe.

  At 7:51 A.M., King called it.

  “We have lift-off.”

  And Apollo 8 began to move.

  APOLLO 8 STRAINED TO SEPARATE FROM Earth, explosions of smoke and fire channeled to the sides of the launchpad by a massive, wedge-shaped flame deflector designed to prevent the fire from rebounding back up into the rocket. Four hold-down arms held the rocket in place, waiting for the Saturn V’s engines to attain perfect, proper thrust. A fraction of a second later, these arms released to allow the machine to ascend. Five swing arms, each weighing more than twenty tons, remained for a split second longer with their connections to the rocket intact. As the Saturn V began to rise, they, too, withdrew, and the six-and-a-half-million-pound beast broke free from its bonds.

  A half inch off the pad, it was already too late for the rocket to settle back safely if something went wrong. System design would not allow shutdown of the engines for thirty seconds even in the event of catastrophic failure, since this would cause the Saturn V to fall back onto the launchpad and explode. If there was any major failure now, Borman would have to twist the abort handle and allow the rocket-propelled escape tower at the top of the spacecraft to pull the command module free and hurtle them out to sea.

  There was no failure. Each engine was erupting and functioning just as von Braun had envisioned, producing a combined 7.6 million pounds of thrust, or 160 million horsepower—enough energy to power the entire United Kingdom at peak usage time—as the rocket began to inch upward. Blocks of ice formed by the supercool liquid oxygen in the rocket’s first stage shook free from the Saturn’s torso and splintered into a white confetti that rained into the firestorm below.

  A few feet off the pad, the Saturn V began to lean away from the support tower. This was the maneuver Lovell had described to Marilyn, designed to keep the vehicle safe from wind gusts that might throw it back into the tower. Down the nearby beaches, the ground began to shake, and people’s chests were pounded by the pressure waves, and it spread out at the speed of sound for miles around the Cape.

  Inside the command module, the noise had already become deafening for the astronauts, their headsets rendered useless for communicating with the Cape or with one another. Borman and Lovell could sense the slowness of the acceleration due to the sheer weight of the Saturn V, a much different kind of movement than they’d experienced from the nimble Titan II rocket that had powered the Gemini program just two years earlier. But it wasn’t just the speed that was different. The cabin shook so violently that Anders believed the rocket’s fins were grinding through the girders of the launch tower and being shorn off. He tried to find an instrument or a gauge to monitor, something that would confirm the disaster unfolding beneath him, but his head was being shaken with such force he couldn’t focus or even think, and even if he could have, he never could have communicated any information to Borman, either by speaking or signaling, since he was no longer in control of his body and his arms had turned to lead. None of this had been predicted or simulated. In the mountains of books and reams of papers, no one had mentioned that even be
fore the rocket cleared the tower, the world inside it would be coming apart. Holy shit, Anders managed to think as the bodies of the three astronauts were rag-dolled against their straps, what the hell is going on?

  And the rocket still hadn’t cleared the launch tower.

  Groaning under its own weight, the Saturn V began to move higher, bending farther away from the tower as the spitting tail of flame grew longer. The flight was now just ten seconds old, but Anders already felt like a rat in the jaws of a giant, angry terrier, helpless to do anything but hang on and breathe while the five massive F-1 engines constantly swiveled their thrust to keep the 363-foot rocket from toppling over. Again, Anders tried to pick out instruments to get an idea of what was happening, but the rocket kept thrashing him into Lovell, against the wall, into his straps. The crew had trained for hundreds of hours for every kind of emergency, but NASA’s simulators were not the kind of dynamic, multiaxis machines that could come close to approximating such violence. If an engine had fallen off or exploded, if the rocket had been engulfed in flames, if any number of disasters had been unfolding, the crew wouldn’t have known about it, and they wouldn’t have been able to hear Mission Control tell them about it, either.

  Still, Borman kept his hand clear of the abort handle.

  To Anders, it seemed that the flight had already lasted an hour when he and his crewmates heard the first, faint transmission in their headphones, a call from the launch operations manager at the Cape that conveyed a simple but essential piece of information.

  “Tower clear.”

  The call had come thirteen seconds into the flight. At home, Borman’s seventeen-year-old son, Fred, watched on TV. He’d never known anyone as committed to his work as his father, a man he still saw as a fighter pilot at Edwards Air Force Base, a man who refused to crash in machines that crashed all the time. So Fred was calm today as the rocket climbed, just as he had been during Gemini 7, just as he had been every time there had been sirens and black smoke in the sky at Edwards. Just keep going, Dad, Fred thought. If you just keep doing that, everything’s going to be fine.