Genesis

by Robert Zimmerman

  For five hours Lovell and Anders traded off as pilot. Neither said much. The spacecraft was on course, everything was working, and it was the middle of the night in Houston. It was time for some quiet.

  By 1 AM Borman found that not only couldn’t he sleep, but he was getting increasingly nauseous and queasy. Suddenly he was retching his guts out in the lower level of the command module. Floating balls of vomit drifted throughout the cabin. Anders watched in fascination as one particularly large blob, pulsating from spherical to ellipsoid as it glided past, gently splattered itself across Lovell’s chest. To avoid the sudden stench, Anders fastened an emergency oxygen mask over his mouth and nose.

  Meanwhile Borman was also having an attack of diarrhea, and Lovell and Anders found themselves scrambling about the cabin, trying to capture blobs of feces and vomit with paper towels. So much for the glamour of space flight.

  At first Borman was reluctant to bother the ground with the problem. He already felt better, and was convinced that his illness had been caused by the sleeping tablet he had taken. He took the controls so that Lovell and Anders could take their rest breaks. Both had been up for almost twenty-four hours.

  Now Anders found that he couldn’t sleep. Besides the unpleasant fact that tiny bits of vomit and feces would periodically drift by, he found it difficult to rest in zero gravity. As the flight’s rookie, he missed putting his head on a pillow, and every time he began to drift off he would jerk awake, spooked by the feeling that he was falling.

  Though Lovell slept better, having been in space twice before, he only got five hours of sleep. As he told Mike Collins that morning, “Oh, you know. The first night in space . . . it’s a little slow.”

  By 7 AM Sunday, the astronauts were all up. Lovell and Anders now finally convinced the commander that they should tell the ground about his stomach problems. To avoid announcing his diarrhea to the entire world, however, the astronauts recorded their report on the in-cabin tape recorder. These tapes were periodically dumped at high speed to the ground and could be reviewed by mission control in private.

  Still, they didn’t have any way of telling the ground that it was very important to listen to the tapes. All they could do was hint broadly that the tape contained some interesting material. Borman asked mission control if they had been reading the tape dumps. “How’s the voice quality been?” he asked. Anders suggested that mission control carefully evaluate the voice comments. “You might want to listen to it in real time to evaluate the voice,” he added twenty- five minutes later when he realized that no one on the ground had yet gotten the hint.

  Finally, Houston caught on. Flight Director Charlesworth decided to go to a back room and listen to the tapes. Then he called in Charles Berry, NASA’s medical director, to listen as well. They were immediately worried that Borman’s illness had been caused by the Van Allen radiation belts that Apollo 8 had passed through on Saturday. Though ground sensors indicated that the total radiation experienced by the spacecraft appeared to be less than that of a single chest X-ray, no one was exactly sure what effect the belts would have on humans. If all three astronauts began to have the same symptoms, it might become necessary to abort the trip to the moon and bring the astronauts back quickly.72

  Mission control actually had two different but identical control rooms. Because the third floor control room being used for Apollo 8 was packed with engineers, visitors, and reporters, all of whom could eavesdrop on the ground-to- capsule communications, Charlesworth, Berry, Mike Collins, and a handful of other individuals moved down to the unused and empty control room on the second floor. There Collins radioed the spacecraft on a private line, and he and Berry discussed the situation with Borman, who not only insisted that he felt fine, but that the other two men felt okay as well. Lovell and Anders had felt a little queasy when they had first gotten out of their spacesuits, but that had passed quickly.73

  Borman assumed that he either had had a case of the twenty-four hour flu, or that the Seconal tablet had upset his stomach. All agreed that the mission to the moon should go on.

  * * *

  That same morning, Susan Borman and her two sons, seventeen-year-old Fred and fifteen-year-old Ed, went to Sunday services at St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church.

  She hadn’t slept much herself, and since launch had attempted to numb her mind to the unfolding events. Soon after blastoff on Saturday she held a press conference on her front lawn with her sons, her husband’s parents, and the family dog Teddy. “I’ve always been known as a person who had something to say,” she told reporters. “Today I’m speechless.” To ease her tension she introduced Teddy to the reporters. “He was right with us all the way,” she joked.74

  Soon her home was like an open house. People bustled in and out, bringing food, chatting, listening to the squawk box or watching the television together. When Susan needed time alone she went into her bedroom and closed the door for an hour or so, trying to sleep.

  About 9:00 PM the house began to clear out and quiet down. Then Susan sat and nibbled on food, had a drink, smoked a cigarette, and listened to the babble between the ground and the astronauts. It relaxed her to hear them talk about routine matters, since this meant that the expected disaster had not yet struck.

  She wanted to go outside and look at the moon, but it was cloudy in Houston. While commentators on the television were talking about how people across the nation were gazing at the sky in wonder, she felt frustrated at her inability to see it.

  Very early Sunday morning she got a call from the NASA doctors, telling her about Frank’s sickness and asking her for her opinion. Did this happen often? How did he handle such illness? Did she think it would incapacitate him?

  Susan laughed and told them, “So what? What’s the big deal?” Of all her worries, Frank was not one of them. She knew, as she had always known when he was a test pilot, that he would never be the cause of any problem. Frank would always get it right, she thought. Her fear was that the equipment would fail.

  * * *

  Marilyn Lovell meanwhile had returned to Houston, flying back early Sunday morning with the kids.

  Almost immediately her home filled with neighbors, astronauts, and wives, all bringing food. She found it hilarious how many showed up at her door with trays of deviled eggs.

  At 2:00 PM Sunday afternoon the astronauts were scheduled to hold their first televised press conference in space, preempting Sunday football. By now their tiny spacecraft had climbed more than 138,000 miles into the sky, and though the earth’s gravity was steadily pulling at them, they were still moving at more than 3,000 miles per hour.

  The black and white camera was small for its day, about the size of a large hardcover book and weighing four and a half pounds. Very similar to the one used on the first manned Apollo mission three months earlier, these were in a sense the world’s first hand-held video cameras.

  Borman, who had adamantly fought to keep the mission as simple as possible, had tried to keep the camera off as well. He argued that the extra weight was unneeded and that the extra chore of televising press conferences would only distract the astronauts.

  Borman lost the argument. NASA very much wanted to give the people on earth a personal view of the first human flight to another world. The camera was included, and six separate space telecasts were scheduled, two on the way to the moon, two in lunar orbit, and two on the way home.

  The first conference began with Bill Anders as cameraman, shooting Frank Borman floating freely in the cabin. Anders then worked his way down to what the astronauts called the lower equipment bay, a small area below their feet where Jim Lovell was supposed to be doing navigational sightings. Instead, he was preparing himself a snack. “We gotcha!” Borman joked.

  “This is known as preparing lunch and doing P23 at the same time,” Lovell grinned. P23 referred to program 23, a computer routine Lovell used when he did navigational work. Rather than do this, he instead demonstrated to his earth audience how he injected water into a ba
g to make chocolate pudding.

  Next Anders took off the wide-angle lens and put on the telephoto lens so that he could show the earth-bound what their planet looked like from 138,000 miles away. Unfortunately, the telephoto lens wouldn’t work, and the normal lens only showed what Ken Mattingly called “a real bright blob on the screen.”

  “I certainly wish we could show you the earth,” Borman lamented. “It is a beautiful, beautiful view, with predominantly blue background and just huge covers of white clouds.”

  Failing at this, they turned the camera back inside, and with Borman acting as cameraman Bill Anders used his toothbrush to show how things floated in zero gravity. “He has been brushing regularly,” Borman noted.

  Bill Anders and toothbrush. The command module's instrument

  panel is on the left, the couches on the right. The floating cable is the

  power and transmission line for the video camera.

  With one last close-up of Jim Lovell to “let everyone see he has already outdistanced us in the beard race,” the astronauts signed off. Though their first television show had lasted barely fifteen minutes, and had failed to show the earth to the people on the ground, it had served as a powerful teaser.

  Lovell’s last words before they turned off the camera were “Happy birthday, Mother!” He hadn’t forgotten that this was her 73rd birthday, and he knew she would be watching in Florida.

  Blanch Lovell was delighted. “I just can’t get over it,” she later told reporters. “When they had so many things to do in space that he would think of his mother on her birthday.”75

  “Happy Birthday, Mother!” says Jim Lovell in foreground, with

  Frank Borman behind him. The caps the astronauts are wearing

  were called “Snoopy hats” because they resembled the cartoon

  character's helmet when he pretended to be a World War I flying ace.

  In Houston, Marilyn smiled. She knew how glad it would make Blanch feel to hear Jim say this from space. He’s always thinking of his family, she thought.

  During the telecast Marilyn suddenly became conscious of something else as well: for the first time it dawned on her how far away Jim was going. They really are heading to another world, she thought.

  * * *

  Valerie Anders, watching from home, was entranced. The three men seemed to be having so much fun bouncing around in zero g. Valerie also could see that whatever had made Frank Borman ill couldn’t have been that serious. By now his nausea had become public knowledge, and much was being made in the press about the dangers of “space sickness.” As she told reporters a short while later at another front lawn press conference, “They wouldn’t be fixing chocolate pudding if they felt bad.”76

  Susan Borman also watched the broadcast, but to her the only thing of importance was to keep her guard up, to be ready to react properly when the expected failure occurred.

  * * *

  For the next nine hours the astronauts had very little to do other than some basic housekeeping chores. All three made several attempts to sleep, with mixed results. With Houston’s approval, Borman had decided to shorten the rest periods and make them more frequent. This would not only make the time seem to go faster, but it might improve their chances of sleep.

  Anders in particular found sleep difficult. He couldn’t help worrying about the spacecraft and its operation, both of which were his direct responsibility. Even as he lay there, supposedly sleeping, he watched the others, checking them to make sure they were pressing the right buttons and flipping the right switches. At one point he thought Lovell was reaching for the wrong switch, and startled him with a correction. Lovell had thought Anders fast asleep.

  Finally, however, Anders did doze off, if for no other reason than that the reality of space flight was beginning to settle in: simple boredom. They had a long way to go, and nothing but a lot of repetitive work to do until they got there.

  It is difficult to imagine the distances involved. They started their journey at a speed of over 24,000 miles per hour, fast enough to have taken Ferdinand Magellan around the globe in one hour instead of three years. Even so, the astronauts needed three full days to get to the moon. After forty hours, moving faster than any human in history, they still had thirty more hours of travel time left.

  In the meantime, all they could do was maintain the spacecraft’s systems and wait. And watch the earth steadily and relentlessly shrink behind them.

  By 11 PM Sunday night, their isolation from earth was truly beginning to have an impact. Earlier that day, Mike Collins had given the astronauts what would become his daily morning news summary, a little report of the world’s headlines, intended to keep the spacemen in touch with earth. Unfortunately, Frank Borman had missed that first news summary because he had been too sick to pay attention.

  Now, at 11 PM, with Lovell and Anders trying to sleep, Jerry Carr was at capcom. He decided to fill Borman in on what he had missed. Carr had been a Marine fighter pilot and had both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. When NASA had announced in 1964 it was looking for more astronauts, Carr had applied more out of a passing curiosity than any real expectation of acceptance. He was astonished when he was picked for the program in 1966. His initial astronaut training complete, he was assigned as support crew to Apollo 8.

  Besides giving Borman the football scores, however, Carr also noted that the only real news (outside of the Apollo 8 mission) was that the crew of the Pueblo had finally been released. Eleven months earlier, the U.S.S. Pueblo and its eighty-two crew members had been seized by North Korean gunboats. The ship, a reconnaissance vessel doing surveillance in international waters, had been boarded and one man killed. The rest of the crew was taken to a prison camp in North Korea.77

  The crew had been tortured and forced to issue false public confessions. Now, in order to obtain the release of the men, the U.S. negotiator had agreed to sign a document admitting to U.S. espionage in North Korean waters, even though the negotiator called the document a lie even as he stood there signing it. “Apparently the North Koreans believe there is propaganda value even in a worthless document,” said Secretary of State Dean Rusk.78

  Carr described to Borman how the Pueblo crew was released. “It took about thirty minutes for all eighty-two men to come across the Bridge of No Return, that’s the one separating North and South Korea. . . They brought the body of the crewman that was killed also.”

  Then Carr gave Borman some football scores, and soon the conversation drifted to the weather. “It’s beginning to feel like winter again,” Carr noted.

  “Good time for Christmas,” Borman mused. “Good weather for Christmas.”

  Carr felt a need to talk some more. “Frank, we had a little eggnog over at Charlie Duke’s tonight. Val Anders dropped by. She’s looking fine. Tell Bill she’s doing real fine.”

  “Fine.” There was a long thirty second pause, and then Borman spoke up. “How do you like shift work, Jerry?”

  “It’s great, Frank. You’ve got the Black Watch watching you tonight.” The Black Team was the official name for Carr’s shift, because they were scheduled to work mostly late night hours.

  “Yes, that’s what I figured.” There was another long pause, this time lasting more than two minutes. Borman sat and stared at his tiny home planet, far, far away. The conversation with Jerry Carr had made him think of Susan and his family. He struggled to think of other things.

  He thought of the Pueblo. Borman felt, as did many military men, that the Pueblo’s captain had surrendered too easily the previous year. Anders, for example, remembered how in China his badly wounded father and his crew had refused to capitulate, fighting until the Panay was sunk.

  Borman thought of the Pueblo crew’s imprisonment, torture, and release, and how those men would now be able to celebrate Christmas with their families. He stared out the window. He could almost feel the vast black emptiness of space that surrounded the earth. The vastness seemed to press down on h
im like a terrible weight. He exhaled. “Boy, Jerry. That earth is sure looking small.”

  Carr could only agree. “Roger. I guess it’ll get smaller too.”

  Sunday, December 22nd, 1968 was coming to an end.

  4. “ WE STAND FOR FREEDOM.”

  BERLIN

  At about 1 am on the night of August 13th, 1961, the streets of the Soviet zone of Berlin were filled with the roar of vehicles. Hundreds of East German trucks, escorted by Soviet tanks, were on the move, converging on the perimeter of the American, British, and French zones of West Berlin.

  At the same time, all subway trains attempting to cross the border between East and West Berlin were stopped, their passengers forced to disembark and find other ways home. Even the trains that only cut through East Berlin on their way from one part of West Berlin to another were emptied of passengers before being allowed to proceed. Announcements from loudspeakers blared that subway “traffic will be interrupted until further notice.”79

  At the Brandenburg Gate, just inside the Soviet zone, the six large floodlights that illuminated the plaza from the Soviet side abruptly went dark, and in the dim streetlight a single truck sped between the gate’s pillars to deposit a dozen machine gun-armed East German soldiers. Behind them came additional soldiers, carrying barricades, soon followed by an almost unending line of military trucks. From these the soldiers unloaded heavy eight-foot high concrete posts and rolls of barbed wire and wire fencing.

  Bulldozers and heavy construction equipment appeared. Silently ignoring the insults hurled at them by the small crowd that had gathered on the West Berlin side, the soldiers began drilling holes in the ground. Soon they eased the concrete posts into place and attached the wire fencing to them. Behind this wire wall they then unrolled the bushels of barbed wire, creating a second, more deadly obstruction. As they worked, the line of military trucks kept rumbling into the plaza, with more soldiers quickly unloading more concrete posts and wire.