Genesis

by Robert Zimmerman

  She and her children had begun their day when their priest, Father Vermillion, led them in a short private mass in their living room, with eleven- year-old Alan and ten-year-old Glen acting as altar boys in their stocking feet.

  Father Vermillion ran the tiny Catholic chapel at Ellington Air Force Base to which the Anders family belonged. Because the Catholic community in Houston was so small, he had asked Valerie if her two oldest boys would serve as altar boys. From Valerie’s point of view, Father Vermillion had to be desperate to enlist her children. At his first service, Alan held the chalice upside down so that the hosts dropped out, one by one, leaving a trail behind him like Hansel and Gretel. “Father Vermillion was a real laid-back man,” Valerie remembered. “This just cracked him up.”

  Often he came by her home after Sunday services for lunch. Now, in the early dawn hours of launch day, he arrived as a friend, and gave the family communion. Valerie was glad he did so, particularly for the five young children. She knew they held deep unstated fears about what their father was doing, and felt that the priest’s prayers would provide them comfort, telling them that the concerns of a wider world stood with them.

  For her, the flight’s excitement alone helped her bury her fears. Because she believed in what her husband wanted to do, thought it right and worthwhile, she accepted the risks. Even when he told her that he only had a fifty-fifty chance of getting back alive, she refused to dwell on the possibility of his death in order to give him her fullest support.

  She now sat with neighbors, friends, and other astronauts and talked with zest about the technical details of the mission and what was happening at each second of the countdown. Like the hundreds of thousands at the Cape, she sat in her living room and stared with wonder and amazement at the towering rocket, breathing white fumes and poised for takeoff.

  It is difficult to understand today how truly gigantic the Saturn 5 was. Standing 363 feet high when fully assembled, this leviathan was twice as tall as today’s space shuttle. If laid horizontally in any American football stadium it wouldn’t have fit. The five engines at the base of its first stage generated more than seventy-five times the power of a 747 at takeoff.19 Imagine the base of a forty story skyscraper suddenly roaring into flames, lifting the building into the air and far into space.

  Valerie Anders watches the countdown with Greg, Glen (on floor), Gayle, and Eric. Credit: Anders

  In its first launch thirteen months earlier, the rocket’s vibrational force sent tremors through the ground to the public viewing area -- four miles away. The sound waves were so strong that television news anchor Walter Cronkite was forced to hold his television booth together with his bare hands to prevent the front plate glass window from falling on top of him.20

  It was now just seconds before 6:51 AM, and in the tiny capsule on top of that missile Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders tensed, waiting for the rumble of the rocket’s engines and the pressure against their backs as the Saturn 5 roared skyward.

  Alan Anders waits for lift-off. Credit: Anders

  Nine seconds before launch, as intended, the five F1 engines of the Saturn 5’s first stage ignited, sending gigantic clouds of smoke billowing sideways from the launch tower. For nine seconds clamps held the behemoth rocket in place, letting its engines build up thrust. Then, exactly as scheduled, the clamps let go, and the almost six million-pound Saturn 5 lifted free of the earth.

  As the rocket rose, rookie astronaut Anders was startled how violent and noisy the experience seemed, especially when compared to the simulators. He was jerked from side to side as the Saturn 5’s engines far below kept adjusting the direction of their thrust to keep the rocket vertically balanced.21 This in turn whipped the rocket’s tip, where the astronauts sat, back and forth like an antenna.

  To Lovell and Borman, however, the ride seemed almost comfortable compared to past experience. Lovell thought it was unbelievably noisy. Borman later wrote that “the ride was incredibly smooth; compared to Apollo 8, Gemini 7 [his previous space flight] had traveled over a few hundred potholes.”22

  The Saturn 5 rocket, fully assembled and moving at 0.8 miles per hour

  from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launchpad. For scale note man.

  For just over two minutes the five F1 engines of the first stage pounded them upward, quickly accelerating them to a speed of over 6,000 miles per hour and an altitude of forty miles. Then, as planned, these engines cut off, the first stage was blown free, and after a moment’s pause, the five J2 engines of the second stage kicked in. A moment later the rocket’s escape tower and capsule shroud blew off. If they wanted, the astronauts could now look out their windows.

  Not that they were really interested. When the first stage had cut off, all three men had been flung hard forward in their harnesses, then thrown backward violently when the second stage ignited. Anders thought he would fly straight into the instrument panel.23 Borman worried about the strain on the rocket boosters. Lovell was merely exhilarated.

  Marilyn Lovell, holding son Jeffrey, watches the Saturn 5 lift-off with daughters Susan,

  right, and Barbara, left. Son Jay is standing just off camera to the left.

  For six more minutes the second stage’s smaller engines hammered them into the sky. Without the weight of the first stage to hold it down, the Saturn 5 accelerated much more quickly, its speed rising to more than 15,000 miles per hour. Then, at an altitude of over one hundred miles these engines cut off, and the second stage blew away, joining the first in its long fall down to the Atlantic Ocean.

  Now the third stage ignited. For about two and a half minutes it burned, driving the spacecraft ever higher and faster. Only eleven and a half minutes after liftoff the third stage cut off, and exactly as planned, Apollo 8 was in a 115- mile orbit, moving at 17,400 miles per hour.

  Other space missions would have now shed the third stage, becoming a space capsule just large enough to hold crew and supplies. In order to escape earth orbit, however, Apollo 8 needed its third stage. When refired, its fuel and engines would increase the spacecraft’s speed by another 7,000 miles per hour.

  The Saturn 5 less than two minutes after launch, taken at 35,000 feet by a telescopic camera mounted on the

  cargo door of a C-135 aircraft. Because the rocket was already more than thirty miles high and over six

  miles down range, the camera looked almost directly up to take the photograph. Therefore, hold the book

  over your head when you view the picture and the angle of the Saturn 5 will then make sense.

  In fact, that third stage could send the astronauts and their little space capsule as far as anyone wanted them to go. If NASA had wished it, those engines could have transported the Apollo capsule to any point in the solar system, from the moon to Pluto, and even beyond.

  This time, however, the spacemen were merely going to the moon. For now, that would suffice.

  * * *

  For the next two orbits, both ground stations and astronauts labored hard to confirm that all systems checked out. At mission control, astronaut Mike Collins sat at capsule communications (or capcom for short), relaying information to and from the capsule. Collins had originally been assigned to this mission, and had been training for it since 1966. Then, in 1968, he began noticing that his legs no longer worked quite right. He found that his left knee sometimes buckled under him for no reason. He experienced a strange tingling and numbness in his left calf. The leg felt hot and cold at the strangest times. Very quickly he realized that these sensations were spreading.

  Tests revealed a bonespur pressing against his spinal cord. Collins was immediately grounded, scrubbed from Apollo 8 and replaced by his backup Jim Lovell. And even though Collins’s July operation was a complete success and by December his back had healed, he was still stranded on the ground. To his intense frustration, Collins found himself designated as one of the three astronauts assigned to handle the ground-to-capsule communications.24 He sat there, both enthralled and envious of the me
n in orbit.

  Cliff Charlesworth, the mission’s prime flight director and the man whose job was to make all final decisions while on duty, stood nearby. Charlesworth, thirty-seven, was a quiet laconic Mississippian, known for his cool head and calm, deliberate manner. He now “called the roll,” mission control jargon for going down the line of consoles and asking each man if everything in his department was “Go,” or “No go.” One by one the men said “Go.” Charlesworth turned to Collins and told him to let the astronauts know.

  In a calm voice that contradicted the significance of his words, Collins announced that the astronauts now had permission to leave the earth. “Apollo 8, you are go for T.L.I.” T.L.I. stood for trans-lunar injection, the five minute rocket blast that would send them toward the moon, accelerating their spacecraft to a speed of over 24,000 miles an hour, 7,000 miles an hour faster than any human had ever traveled.

  Five seconds before ignition their primitive on-board computer (less powerful than the least sophisticated hand calculator available today) asked the astronauts one more time if they wished to abort. Jim Lovell calmly keyed in the command for the computer to proceed. At 9:41 AM the engines fired, burning more than 80 tons of fuel for five minutes and seventeen seconds. As their speed increased, Lovell called out Apollo 8’s increasing velocity in feet per second: “Coming up on 28,000 . . . . 30,000 . . . 34,000 . . . 35,000 . . .”

  Then the engines cut off, and they were flying away from the earth at 35,452 feet per second, or 24,171 miles an hour. If an ordinary jet airliner took off at that speed it would reach normal cruising altitude in one second.

  At mission control Mike Collins told them, “We have a whole room full of people that say you look good.” Chris Kraft couldn’t resist exclaiming into the radio, “You’re on your way -- you’re really on your way!”

  They were no longer in earth orbit. Apollo 8 had become the first manned vehicle to break the bonds of earth.

  * * *

  For the next half hour the three astronauts had little time to consider the magnitude of their journey. The third stage would automatically separate from the capsule in less than twenty-five minutes, and they had to be ready. Borman and Lovell urgently scanned the many dials on the instrument panel, reading off the numbers for Anders to check against the flight plan.

  Then, with what Frank Borman described as “a bone-jarring shock,”25 the third stage blew free. For ten minutes Borman struggled to maneuver the command module so that the astronauts could spot the stage in their windows. Finally, he swung the ship around and Jim Lovell said, “There she is. . .” only to have his voice trail off in awe.

  The third stage was clearly visible, barely five hundred feet behind them. Behind it, however, loomed the entire sphere of the earth. Their speed was so great that only forty minutes after leaving earth orbit, the planet had shrunk enough to be entirely visible within a single window.

  The astronauts' first view of the earth after T.L.I. The Florida peninsula and Cape Canaveral can be seen in the

  upper left. Directly below this the Bahamas are visible, surrounded by light blue water. Further down the

  Caribbean island chain can be identified.

  All three men stared in silence. Even as they watched, the earth visibly shrank, the black velvet of space growing around it. To Lovell, the experience felt like he was driving a car into a dark tunnel: looking back he could see the light at the opening dwindle to a small speck behind him.

  At that moment, Borman thought “this must be what God sees.”26 Anders was surprised at how delicate and pretty the earth looked.

  After a minute of staring at the earth, Borman shook himself awake and decided someone should let the ground know. “We see the earth now, almost as a disk.”

  The earth progressively shrinks. The top left picture was taken mere minutes after the photograph on the previous page.

  Florida and the Bahamas can still be seen in the upper center of the globe, under the same cloud formations. Now,

  however, all of South America has come into view, with Chile and the continent's southerly regions pointing off the

  earth's left edge. Africa can be seen on the lower right. The top right picture was taken sometime late Saturday, and

  the bottom left picture sometime on Sunday. The bottom right picture was taken during the second television

  broadcast on Monday afternoon, and matches the televised view of the earth shown in chapter five.

  On the earth, Mike Collins had no idea how powerful that image looked to the astronauts. “Good show,” he said. “Get a picture of it.”

  Lovell attempted to describe what they saw, outlining how he could see Florida, Africa, Gibraltar, and even most of South America. In one glance he could see the entire Atlantic Ocean.

  Collins still hadn’t quite sensed what the astronauts were seeing. He asked Lovell what window he was using, and again urged them to take pictures.

  For thirty more seconds the three astronauts stared silently at the earth. Whatever their expectations for this journey, they had not anticipated this kind of vision. The earth’s atmosphere lent it a translucent quality, almost as if it were glowing. And even as they watched, they could see it shrink in the surrounding darkness. In the ten minutes since Jim Lovell had first spotted it, they had moved over 3,500 miles farther away.

  In less than three days, these men would reach lunar orbit. For a brief twenty hours they would circle the moon ten times, hold two press conferences, and generally try to relate to the awed world behind them their impressions of the first human exploration of another planet. And they would do this on Christmas Eve, the most significant spiritual holiday for almost a third of the world’s population.

  What would they say?

  Surprisingly, the three astronauts had already chosen the theme for their most important message. Borman had found the words, and the others had completely agreed. All three knew where they stood in the cultural and political war that had been ongoing since the end of World War II and had become especially violent in the last twelve months. All three wished to contribute their thoughts on the matter.

  Nonetheless, the incredible experience itself -- the vastness of space, the desolation of the moon, and the lovely blue-white lure of earth shrinking steadily behind them -- exerted its own inexorable command. Before these three men returned to earth, their experience and the words they spoke would have an influence on the world far beyond anything any of them had expected, or possibly even wanted.

  2. “ WE WILL BURY YOU! ”

  BORMAN

  The ovens were still there. So were the gas chambers, the fences, the towers, the bleak dormitories. The metal sign on the gate still said “Work will set you free” in German. In the center of the Dachau concentration camp the gallows still stood, silent witness to the death of hundreds of thousands.27

  The occupants, however, were no longer starving Jews condemned to mass slaughter. The year was 1949, and the refugees were from East Germany. Since the liberation of the concentration camp at the end of World War II, Dachau had been used first to shelter German prisoners of war and Soviet army deserters. In 1946, these deserters rioted. Ten actually killed themselves rather than be repatriated to the Soviet Union as per the Yalta accords.28 Since then the camp had housed tens of thousands of German refugees who were fleeing the Soviet zones of occupation.29

  Wandering through this oppressive place were a dozen West Point cadets, smartly dressed in uniform and led by Colonel Herman Bukema, head of the Academy’s social science department. Bukema was giving his young charges a month-long tour of postwar Europe. They had already visited Cologne, seeing a city so flattened by bombs that it resembled the well-known pictures of Hiroshima. Soon they would visit Berlin, then Austria, Rome, Greece, and a dozen other places. For their transportation and living quarters Bukema had arranged the use of one of Hitler’s private railroad cars.

  Among Bukema’s students was a twenty-one-year-old third year Cadet Corporal by the
name of Frank Borman. Borman, raised in Tucson, Arizona, had never imagined that such deprivation was possible. The young man stared with dismay at the refugees. Their clothes were ragged and thin, and they had a beaten, tired look about them. Whole families were crowded into the dormitories, using blankets to cordon off their meager living quarters.

  Nor were these the only horrors that he had seen. Beaten, occupied, and nothing more than shattered plunder for other nations to fight over, the citizens of Germany in the late 1940’s could barely find enough food to eat. Cities lay in rubble from Allied bombing, and the lack of food had been worsened by a severe drought in 1947. Compounding these problems was the ceaseless tug-of- war between the Soviet Union and the other allies for control of Berlin and the reconstruction of Germany.

  To this destitute land came Frank Borman, a blond, small-boned man whose friendly face belied his intense, dedicated and relentless mind. Born in Gary, Indiana in 1928, he had been a sickly child, with serious sinus problems. When their family doctor told his parents that their son had to leave of the industrial Midwest for his health, his father gave up his successful auto repair shop and, in the worst years of the depression, moved his family to Tucson, Arizona. Unable to make a profit with a new gas station, Edwin “Rusty” Borman was forced to take odd jobs changing tires at someone else’s garage, while Marjorie Borman rented out rooms in their home.