Rocket Men Read online

  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. She kissed Bill and told him she believed in NASA, in the mission, and in him.

  On Lovell’s arrival home, his wife, Marilyn, made a happy announcement: She’d scored several bargains on clothes for the family’s upcoming Christmas vacation in Acapulco. It was hard for her to believe it was happening; she couldn’t remember if they’d even attempted a vacation since he’d joined NASA six years earlier.

  Jim smiled as Marilyn held up her brightly colored beach buys, but she could see his mind wasn’t on Mexico. “Are you all right?” she asked. He motioned her into his study.

  “I can’t go on vacation,” he said.

  “I can’t believe it!” Marilyn replied. “I’ve already made all these plans for Acapulco!”

  “I’m going somewhere else. Somewhere special.”

  “Where are you going?”

  Jim grinned.

  “Would you believe, the Moon?”

  Looking into Jim’s eyes, Marilyn still saw him as the boy she’d met in high school, who talked about stars and planets, and as the first-year Naval Academy midshipman who’d asked her to type up his term paper that predicted men would someday ride rockets into space. She knew that this was what her husband had been seeking all his life.

  Lovell called his four children, ages two through fifteen, into the study and told them the news. He did own a lunar map, and he laid it out on his desk to show his kids where America wanted him to go.

  * * *

  —

  Now that Low and other top NASA managers had decided to shoot for the Moon, they needed to pick the best day to go. A primary objective was to replicate a landing mission to the fullest extent possible, in order to provide the agency with relevant experience for when it ran the real thing. That meant, among other things, figuring out the optimal alignment between Earth and Moon so that the flight required no more propellant than necessary, and so that there would be excellent lunar lighting to scout potential landing sites. Only a few days per month lined up like that, so NASA had to choose well.

  Management had access over the weekend to the agency’s seven giant mainframe computers, which calculated four possible launch windows. Optimal lift-off would be December 20 or 21, with a splashdown six days later in the Pacific Ocean. That gave Apollo 8 its best look at the Moon, and time to make several orbits, each of which would last about two hours. It also allowed for an early morning countdown at Cape Kennedy, which would give NASA plenty of daylight to rescue the crew if something went wrong during launch.

  That all sounded fine to Kraft until he realized what that meant: Apollo 8 would be in orbit around the Moon on Christmas. He knew NASA would be accused of selecting the date for effect, but all he could do then would be to tell the truth: The agency hadn’t chosen Christmas, nature had.

  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. No sense in sticking his neck out for a crazy mission he wouldn’t even be around to oversee.

  And yet, even as he continued screaming into his telephone, he did not say no. Instead, he said he’d think about it. And he promised to get back to the men the next day.

  * * *

  —

  As NASA awaited Webb’s verdict on Apollo 8, Soviet cosmonauts trained for their own December lunar mission. It was a treacherous business, and they were taking risks that were normally forbidden, but with the Moon in the balance these were not normal times.

  A day later, Webb found a secure phone line in Vienna and called his men in Washington. He still thought the new plan for Apollo 8 was saturated with risk and danger, and that it could ruin NASA, but he could not deny its potential. He gave Paine and Phillips the go-ahead to prepare for a December lunar launch, but warned that he would not sign off
on the plan unless and until Apollo 7 orbited Earth and completed its mission objecctives in the fall. That was all the green light these men needed. Even as they hung up they were dialing top NASA brass: The big guy had spoken. Eight was Go for the Moon.

  Now NASA needed a flight plan. Ordinarily, that took months to devise, but time was suddenly a luxury of a bygone era. Early in the afternoon on August 18, Borman met with Kraft and some of NASA’s top designers, planners, and engineers in Houston. Everyone had come to hammer out a blueprint for Apollo 8’s flight to the Moon. No one intended to leave until it was done.

  Borman looked around the office. To him, this was the ideal setup: no committees, no memos, no suits from Washington, just top-notch guys led by Kraft—cigar in mouth and as tough under pressure as a fighter pilot—who would make the final decisions on everything.

  “Okay, so we’re going to the Moon in December,” Kraft said. “Now, let’s figure out how we might do that.”

  Everyone started with the same basic questions: How long should the journey last? How many orbits should we make around the Moon? How high above the lunar surface should we fly? What do we most want to accomplish? What should the crew be doing? When do we want to come home?

  The planners took on the subject of lunar orbits first, and their desire was simple: They wanted the maximum number the mission could sustain. Borman’s reply was equally simple: Forget it. The meeting was five minutes old and already the players were stuck.

  Borman understood their position. Every orbit gave NASA more opportunity to gain experience for a future lunar landing. But they had to understand his first priority, which was the safety of his crew. He, Lovell, and Anders would be flying an unproven spacecraft on a mission riskier than any NASA had ever attempted. To him, each additional orbit was another chance for something to go wrong. As far as Borman was concerned, flying once around the Moon would be a historic accomplishment—and more than enough to beat out the Russians.

  Borman’s position didn’t please Kraft’s men, who thought it wasteful to take all the risk of flying to the Moon only to leave early once they got there. Kraft jumped in to calm the planners down.

  “What’s the absolute minimum you can take?” he asked them.

  The men thought about it and came back with an answer: twelve. Since each orbit would last about two hours, that gave the crew twenty-four hours around the Moon.

  “Ten is better,” Borman shot back.

  But the men shook their heads. If Apollo 8 flew only ten orbits, it would splash down in the Pacific Ocean before dawn. That meant if the parachutes malfunctioned, no one could see what was happening.

  “What the hell does that matter?” Borman said. “If the chute works, great. If it doesn’t, we’re all dead and it won’t make any difference if anyone can see us.”

  No one could argue with that.

  Kraft asked if his men could accept ten orbits. They nodded. Kraft liked it. Ten was a rational, empirical number. And like that, it was ten orbits.

  The question then became at what altitude to orbit. Kraft and his men wanted Apollo 8 to fly just 69 miles above the lunar surface, the same altitude at which the command and service modules would operate during a future landing mission. That required almost unimaginable precision, equivalent in scale to throwing a dart at a peach from a distance of 28 feet—and grazing the very top of the fuzz without touching the fruit’s skin. If that weren’t daunting enough, the Moon would be barreling through space at nearly 2,300 miles per hour. Toss a peach in the air at 28 feet and now hit the top of the fuzz with a dart. That’s what these trajectory experts were proposing to do. And soon everyone agreed to do it.

  As the men continued to talk, the details of the flight took shape.

  Launch would occur in early morning from the Kennedy Space Center on December 21, when the new Moon would be just a sliver in the sky. Borman and crew would orbit Earth for a short time to check out the health of the rocket and spacecraft. If all looked good, they would attempt to relight the Saturn V’s third-stage engine—no sure thing, as it had failed on the test flight in April. If it did work, the engine would push Apollo 8 to a speed of 24,200 miles per hour, enough to break free of Earth’s gravitational pull. To date, no human had ventured more than 853 miles away from Mother Earth. Borman, Lovell, and Anders would blast past that in a few minutes. Even then, they would still have to cover nearly 240,000 miles to reach the Moon, about fifty-eight times the distance Columbus had sailed to find his own new world.

  The Earth–Moon crossing would last about sixty-six hours. The astronauts would spend much of that time doing navigation sightings, making live television broadcasts, and checking systems. The spacecraft would fly on a precise round-trip pathway, aimed close enough to the Moon’s surface to ensure that if anything went wrong along the way, the Moon itself would make the rescue, catching the ship with its gravity and slingshotting it back to Earth, all courtesy of the laws of physics, with no man-made propulsion required.

  As Apollo 8 neared its target, the Moon would be moving at more than 2,000 miles per hour, with the spacecraft rapidly accelerating, both approaching nearly the same spot in space. If NASA’s figures were accurate, the ship would slide just ahead of the Moon’s leading hemisphere, then use lunar gravity to curl behind the lunar far side.

  Once the spacecraft went behind the Moon, all communication with Mission Control would be blocked. At that point, if all looked good, Borman would fire the Service Propulsion System, or SPS, engine, which would slow the ship enough to be captured by the Moon’s gravity and enter lunar orbit. There was no backup to the SPS. If it didn’t fire, Apollo 8 would whip around the Moon and return to Earth. The real problem would come if the engine fired incorrectly: too short or too weak, and the spacecraft would fly off into eternal space; too long or too strong, and it would crash into the Moon in less than an hour.

  If it all worked, however, Apollo 8 would enter an irregular orbit, about 69 miles above the lunar surface on the far side and about 200 miles over the near side. For two revolutions (about four hours), the crew would prepare their cameras and observe landmarks. Then they would get ready to fire the SPS engine again, this time to circularize their orbit at a constant 69 miles above the lunar surface. It would then be Christmas Eve morning back in America.

  Once in a circular orbit, the crew would do the bulk of its work. For eight revolutions over the next sixteen hours, they would scout candidate landing sites for future missions, take photographs, analyze lighting conditions, and study the effects of gravitational anomalies on the spacecraft’s orbit. All the while, Mission Control would be tracking the spacecraft by radio and communicating with the astronauts, except when Apollo 8 was over the far side of the Moon.

  And there would be two more television broadcasts. As Borman did the math, he could see that these would come on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

  During the final two revolutions, the astronauts would get ready to fire the SPS engine again, this time to gain enough speed to get the spacecraft out of lunar orbit and on its way back to Earth. As before, the firing would be done over the far side of the Moon, out of contact with Houston and the rest of the world. It was another critical maneuver: If it misfired, the ship could crash into the Moon or fly off into the void. If it failed to fire, Apollo 8 would become a possession of the Moon. Forever.

  But if all went according to plan, the spacecraft would escape lunar orbit and begin its fifty-seven-hour journey home. In the flight’s last minutes, the service module containing the engine would be jettisoned, leaving the astronauts in the cone-shaped command module they would ride the rest of the way to Earth. A short time later, the capsule would begin reentry into Earth’s atmosphere at near 25,000 miles per hour. No human had ever attempted such a thing, and it had to be virtually perfect or Borman and his crew wouldn’t survive.

  Angle of attack was everything. Apollo 8 needed
to enter a corridor that spanned just two degrees. That was equivalent to finding exactly the right ridge on a coin that had 180 ridges grooved into it. (By comparison, a United States quarter dollar has 119 ridges.) If the spacecraft came in too shallow, it would skip off the atmosphere like a stone on water, going into a large elliptical trajectory around Earth without enough oxygen or electricity on board to get back for another attempt at reentry. If it came in too steeply, it would grind so hard against the atmosphere that the resulting heat and deceleration would burn up and tear apart the capsule. But if it came in just right, the atmosphere would slow the capsule down enough to allow it to survive reentry into the atmosphere and plunge toward Earth. Two degrees—anything on either side of that and the crew was dead.

  If Apollo 8 survived reentry and if its heat shield succeeded in preventing its incineration in temperatures that would reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit—half that of the surface of the Sun—the triple canopy of parachutes would deploy and the capsule would splash down in the Pacific Ocean about forty-five minutes before first light. The astronauts would stay inside until a Navy recovery crew reached them. By that time, Apollo 8’s historic voyage would have ended, after a little more than six days.

  Borman looked at the other men in the room. Each wore the same expression: We know this is impossible, but we still think it can work. He appreciated their commitment and expertise, but he thought they’d planned too much for the crew to do—every hour seemed loaded with tasks, duties, obligations, checks.

  “Forget the TV cameras,” Borman said. “It’s a distraction.”

  “No way,” Kraft said. “This is history, Frank. This belongs to the American people.”

  “We’re here to do a job,” Borman said.