Rocket Men Page 19
Moments later, Lovell turned his camera to the still-glowing third stage. Hundreds of shimmering stars appeared to fill the sky, but the crew knew these to be fuel particles coming from the tanks or flakes of ice from the tank walls. In Hawaii, observers could see a speckled white fog in the sky as liquid hydrogen vented into the predawn dark.
At the speed Apollo 8 was traveling, more than 20,000 miles per hour, Earth appeared to shrink before Lovell’s eyes, growing smaller with each passing second in the way a tunnel entrance appears to shrink to a passenger looking out a car’s rear window.
“We see the Earth now, almost as a disk,” Borman radioed to Houston.
“We have a beautiful view of Florida now,” Lovell added. “We can see the Cape, just the point…and at the same time, we can see Africa. West Africa is beautiful. I can also see Gibraltar at the same time I’m looking at Florida.”
Even Borman, who’d warned Anders not to spend time sightseeing, couldn’t avert his gaze.
This must be what God sees, he thought.
Now it was time to move away from the third stage, which had the same 20,000-mile-per-hour velocity as Apollo 8 and was following the ship into space—a wayward cylinder as tall as a six-story building, and twenty-two feet longer than the remaining spacecraft the astronauts were riding. Unlike the Saturn V’s first two stages, which had fallen back to Earth by force of the planet’s gravity, the third stage, like the spacecraft, had too much momentum for such a fate and continued to move along with Apollo 8 toward the Moon. If all went according to plan, Apollo 8 would pass just ahead of the Moon, while the third stage would pass its trailing hemisphere, then slingshot into orbit around the Sun.
But not all was going according to plan. The crew of Apollo 8 had lost sight of the third stage. Yet Borman knew it to be just one or two hundred yards away, a mere whisker in infinite space. And that meant trouble.
If the crew couldn’t see the third stage, they couldn’t be certain they wouldn’t collide with it. For all the engineering miracles of the Apollo spacecraft, it hadn’t been designed to absorb a ramming by an entire stage of a Saturn V rocket. The loss of visual contact came as a surprise to Borman; the crew hadn’t trained for that. Anders could see that his commander believed an emergency to be unfolding.
Borman fired his thrusters and Apollo 8 gained one and a half feet per second in velocity—about one mile per hour. He could only hope the direction of the spacecraft’s movement was away from the third stage, but he couldn’t be sure because he still couldn’t see it. For several moments, the crew could only sit there and wait for a possible impact.
Then, as if by magic, the third stage drifted back into view, just a little farther away than before.
Already, Apollo 8’s evasive maneuver had altered its trajectory to the Moon. That could be corrected along the way, but the third stage still stayed with Apollo 8 like an old dog following its master. Borman estimated it to be just five hundred or a thousand feet away—much too close for comfort.
Borman could have fired his thrusters again, but in space, that had to be done in the correct direction, a difficult task to perform manually and by sight. If Borman added velocity in the wrong part of the spectrum of angles, he might only increase the spacecraft’s vertical separation from the third stage rather than get ahead of it. Or he might even move Apollo 8 back into the third stage’s path. That was one of the challenges of flying in formation in space; you had to know not just your own trajectory but that of the object you were trying to move toward or away from. And there was little about orbital mechanics that one could eyeball against a black background that stretched forever.
The spent stage moved even closer to the spacecraft.
From Houston, Collins recommended a separation maneuver.
“I don’t want to do that,” Borman answered. “I’ll lose sight of the S-IVB.”
“Frank, if you use zero, then make the [separation] if possible in the plus-X thrusters. That’s the direction of the burn we’d like,” Collins said.
“Well, can’t do that. I’ll thrust right square into that S-IVB,” Borman argued.
For the next several minutes, Collins and controllers in Houston wrestled to determine a separation maneuver that would move Apollo 8 safely away from the third stage without causing Borman to lose sight of the threat. Making matters more difficult, the third stage continued to vent propellant, creating a virtual snowstorm in the jet-black sky. Earth was nowhere to be seen through the spacecraft’s windows. Apollo 8 needed a landmark, some reference point against which to maneuver, but there was none in any direction.
Finally Houston devised a burn maneuver it believed could move Apollo 8 to safety. Borman didn’t seem entirely comfortable with it, but he performed it using the spacecraft’s thrusters, then waited to see where it took his ship.
“How is that booster looking now?” Collins called. “Is it drifting away rapidly, or how does it look?”
“We’re well clear of the S-IVB now, Houston,” Borman said.
While the astronauts had been focused on navigating away from the discarded third stage, Apollo 8 had passed through the Van Allen belts, two massive, doughnut-shaped bands of intense radiation that encircle Earth. Named for James Van Allen, the American space scientist who discovered them in the late 1950s, the belts had long been thought to pose a danger—even a deadly one—to space travelers. For years, scientists and government agencies had tried to figure out a safe way through the belts; Van Allen himself suggested that detonating a nuclear bomb might clear the ionizing particles enough to allow spaceship passage. In the end, NASA determined that the Apollo spacecraft would be traveling so fast, and the astronauts would be so well shielded by the command module, that the risk of harmful radiation exposure would be minimal.
But no one knew for sure.
To test it, NASA had fitted each member of the Apollo 8 crew with a Personal Radiation Dosimeter, an ivory-colored device about the size and shape of a bar of soap that Anders had helped to design. It would measure the levels of radiation to which the astronauts had been exposed. (The device had a tiny five-digit analog meter to provide readings.) Now that Apollo 8 had passed through both belts (the first of which extended from about 600 to 3,500 miles above Earth, the second from about 9,300 to 14,000 miles above Earth), Collins wanted a radiation reading from the crew. Borman was eager to learn the results; he’d heard the dire warnings some scientists had made about passage through the belts. Anders, a nuclear engineer who had developed expertise in shielding against charged space particles, felt certain no damage had been done. It was he who radioed back to Mission Control with the results.
“Houston. Apollo 8 with a PRD reading.”
“Go ahead,” Collins responded.
Anders gave the verdict. After passing through both belts, none of the astronauts had received more than about one-tenth the radiation of an average chest X ray. The command module was even better than a lead bib in protecting human beings from high-energy particles.
The spacecraft was now about 22,000 miles from home. Out the window, Earth had grown even smaller. The entire planet now fit in Lovell’s center window.
“Good grief,” Collins radioed, “that must be quite a view.”
“Yes,” Anders said. “Tell the people in Tierra del Fuego to put on their raincoats, looks like a storm is out there.”
Apollo 8 was now five hours into its journey. In the two hours since it had left its parking orbit around Earth, its speed had decreased from more than 24,000 miles per hour to just 9,450 miles per hour as Earth’s gravity continued to act on the unpropelled spacecraft. That decrease in speed would continue until Apollo 8 was about five-sixths of the way to the Moon, when lunar gravity would dominate and begin pulling the spacecraft toward its surface, causing the speed to rise again as the astronauts fell toward their target.
But even at these decr
easing speeds, Earth continued to appear smaller every time the crew looked back. To Anders, it felt like watching the clock in fifth grade: If you stared, it didn’t seem to move, but if you looked away and then looked back a short time later, it had changed.
* * *
—
If Apollo 8 were allowed to fly freely now, without any midcourse corrections to its trajectory, it would coast for about three days, then smash into the Moon. Midcourse adjustments would be necessary, as many as four, if needed. But those would come later.
Around six and a half hours into the flight, the first shift change occurred at Mission Control, when the Maroon Team, led by Flight Director Milt Windler and CapCom Ken Mattingly, took over from the Green Team. They would run the flight for the next eight hours until their replacements, the Black Team, took over. After that, it would be back to the Green Team, and so on.
Thirty minutes later, Apollo 8 prepared for another of its critical maneuvers. Until now, the spacecraft had flown with one of its sides exposed to the Sun and the other side facing away. But that arrangement couldn’t last much longer without damaging the ship by broiling one side and freezing the other. To solve the problem, NASA had developed a procedure called passive thermal control, in which the commander slowly rotated the ship on its long axis, making one full revolution every hour as the craft journeyed through space. In that way, temperatures would become evenly distributed as the spacecraft turned on its invisible rotisserie spit. The maneuver had earned the nickname “barbecue mode” at NASA, and as Borman tapped a thruster, Apollo 8 became the first to use it in space. So slow was the roll that the crew hardly sensed it.
Now, as they continued to streak toward the Moon, the astronauts prepared for emancipation. More than eight hours and 45,000 miles into their mission, the time had come for the men to slip out of their bulky space suits. They had been wearing them since long before launch in order to breathe pure oxygen. Doing so helped to purge nitrogen from their bodies, and that had been critical during launch. As expected, the cabin’s internal air pressure dropped rapidly as the spacecraft ascended. If the crew had not purged the nitrogen from their systems, the sudden drop in pressure could have caused the nitrogen to form bubbles in their tissues that could press on nerves, lungs, spine, even the brain—a painful and potentially deadly condition common to deep-water scuba divers who surface too quickly, and known as the bends. Once in space, the astronauts had been so busy with equipment checks and the translunar injection burn that they hadn’t had a chance to remove the suits. Until now.
The crew doffed their suits and stowed them in bags under their seats, where they would remain for the duration of the flight. Suddenly unbound, Anders was free to test his new superpower: weightlessness.
A breath of a touch, just enough to light an elevator button, propelled him to any destination inside the cabin. If there were twists and turns in his way, he simply bent or hunched or corkscrewed to conform to the openings, flowing through them like water. Using his fingertips for thrusters, Anders visited navigation instruments, storage areas, labyrinths of valves. His lightweight coveralls, made of fire-resistant Teflon beta cloth, were perfectly white except for a large American flag patch sewn onto the right shoulder, the Lovell-designed figure eight mission patch on his left shoulder, and a red and blue NASA patch on his right breast. They made for a perfect flying skin, cinched at the waist and tight enough to keep his body slender.
Like electricity moving through a circuit board, Anders made turns and changed directions with precision. Sometimes he looked like a giant strand of spaghetti being slurped through the cabin, yet he managed never to bang into anything or catch any of his coveralls’ pocket pouches on equipment. When he stopped moving, he put objects into twirling, spinning, tumbling motion—a penlight, his camera, even the chewing gum in his mouth all came to life in a floating symphony that Anders conducted. Soon he got into the act himself, doing a somersault, then another. As he got ready for a third, he thought, Whoa. What’s that hairy feeling coming up in my throat?
And he knew—if he flipped again, he would vomit.
Slowly he floated back to his seat, strapped himself in, and stared at the instrument panel, trying to orient himself in a world that had suddenly lost its up and down.
Although the ship still flew “backward,” blunt end toward the Moon, the crew constantly had new views out their windows, courtesy of barbecue mode. By now, Earth looked to be the size of a softball. Its beauty made Anders forget his roiling stomach. He could pick out the distinctive shape and deep blue waters of the Tongue of the Ocean in the Bahamas, and the iridescent turquoise of the shallow waters that framed it. He could see the horn of Africa in its sunbaked salmons and browns. But sometimes there were so many clouds it was hard to distinguish what was what. The nun who’d taught Anders’s first grade class had kept a globe on her desk, and it had the North Pole at the top. That’s how every globe Anders ever saw had looked, with the world positioned logically, north on top. And that’s how he sought to make order of things out the spacecraft window. Yet sometimes the views made no sense—things weren’t where they were supposed to be, shapes didn’t belong. And what was that giant white spot on the top of the planet? For several moments, Anders couldn’t place it. Then it hit him: Antarctica—the continent that was supposed to be at the bottom of the globe. Even now, he had to remind himself that there was no up or down in space, or even in the universe. It had always been a matter of perspective, and now he had to change his. Turning himself upside down, he now understood Antarctica, the hemispheres, and the shape of a world he’d seen only one way until now.
While the astronauts continued to move through their checklists and monitor the spacecraft and its systems, they also had to tend to personal systems. Going to the bathroom was a challenge, largely because the command module had no dedicated facilities.
Urinating was a straightforward, if inelegant, process. It began with a kind of open-ended condom for which the astronauts had been fitted during training. (The devices came in small, medium, and large sizes, but astronauts assigned a more scientific nomenclature to the fittings: “extra-large,” “immense,” and “unbelievable.”) Once out of his suit, the crewman would slip on the condom, then belly up to a valve and attach the other end to a bypass valve that, once it was opened, vented out the side of the spacecraft. If the procedure was timed properly, the astronaut could open the valve while urinating and expel the waste into space. If it was not timed properly, he risked exposing his tender parts to vacuum forces. To prevent that, Anders opened the valve too slowly on his first attempt, blowing off the personal end of his condom and sending twinkling golden droplets dancing weightless through the cabin. His timing improved after that, he made sure of it.
Even when urine was expelled properly from the spacecraft, the crew couldn’t quite be done worrying about it. Just the tiny force necessary to vent the liquid—which turned to gleaming ice crystals in the sunlit cold of space—could have a profound effect on the spacecraft’s trajectory and would have to be accounted for as the ship continued its journey.
Defecation was even less glamorous. The astronaut started with a collection bag fitted with an adhesive collar. After stripping naked (usually in private at the other end of the command module), he pressed the collar around his hind end until it stuck, then expelled to the best of his ability. In space, clumps didn’t drop from the body. To help that along, NASA had built a narrow pouch into the bag for the astronaut’s finger, which he could use as a scooper to pull things free. Finally, a packet of blue germicide was deposited in the bag, then ruptured and kneaded together with the waste in order to neutralize odors and to kill bacteria that could, over time, generate gases that could cause the package to explode. This bathroom breaks could take as long as an hour. Cleaning was done with a small moist towelette like those handed out at barbecue restaurants.
Much as the crew might have liked to fir
e the sealed bag into space, they could not. Ejecting such a bulky item would require the cabin to be depressurized, possible but risky to the men and the flight. Also, NASA planned to examine the feces (as well as blood and urine) on the crew’s return to Earth, eager to study the effects of deep space flight on the human body.
Even as an engineer, Anders knew this fecal collection system would be difficult. Months before Apollo 8, he took home a kit to practice (one didn’t experiment on such a device in the simulators at work). He explained to Valerie that it had to be tested, at least on Earth, while lying down. To that end, he intended to try it in bed.
“Not in our bed!” Valerie said.
So Anders lay on the carpet and gave it his best.
The device did not work well for him.
A few days later, he asked the flight surgeon to recommend a low-residue diet he could eat in the days leading up to and during the flight. The less often he had to use the device on the mission, he figured, the better. So far, his plan was working. While Borman and Lovell struggled with the contraption, Anders sat in his seat, doing his work and looking out his window, uncalled by that part of nature, watching the universe go by.
* * *
—
More than nine hours had elapsed in the flight before the astronauts got their first glimpse of the Moon. It happened during one of Lovell’s looks through the spacecraft’s telescope and sextant, when he spotted a barely visible crescent surrounded by a light blue haze, “just about as light blue as we have it back on Earth,” Lovell radioed to Houston. Lovell knew that the appearance of color came from the way the Sun scattered light through his navigation instruments. Tiny as the Moon appeared through his telescope, it was more than his colleagues were getting, or were likely to get, given how the spacecraft (which had just five small windows) needed to be oriented during flight. The Moon was still sixty hours away, and any good views available to the crew might have to wait until they arrived.