On that same day, as the tens of thousands of West Berliners lined up to enter East Berlin, three East Germans arranged their own pass for leaving the Soviet zone. Since Peter Fechter had died trying to leap the wall in 1962, the methods of escape had become more creative. The East Germans had fortified the barrier significantly in the ensuing three years, adding a second inner wall, as well as trenches, watchtowers, and dog runs. To escape, refugees now built elaborate tunnels, some hundreds of feet long with lighting and tracks. Others designed secret compartments in their cars to conceal refugees. One East German stood on top of a building and threw a zipline across the wall and down to some West Berliners. Then he and his wife and nine-year-old son put on harnesses, hooked themselves to the cable, and slid down to freedom.131
In the four years since the wall’s construction, a thriving cottage industry of professional escape-organizers had developed. Some did it for idealistic reasons, accepting just enough money to pay their costs. Others turned this work into an exciting but lucrative livelihood, earning significant sums of money.132
Horst Schramm was one of the professionals. A West German seaman who spoke English with an American accent, he had made about $400,000 smuggling refugees out of East Berlin. In the strange diplomatic universe of Cold War Germany, West Germans were permitted to enter East Berlin, but West Berliners were forbidden access. As a West German, Schramm took advantage of these rules to enter the Soviet Zone and arrange a variety of escapes.
On December 19th he drove into East Germany in a German-made Ford. This car closely resembled the vehicles used by the American Army in Berlin.
Once in East Berlin he picked up his three customers. Two were a couple in their twenties who had paid him about $800 for planning their escape. The third was the wife of a doctor, who had paid him an additional $1,000.
The doctor’s wife climbed into the trunk of the car. The other woman was hidden in a secret compartment built into the car’s dashboard. The two men, however, did not hide. Instead, they put on American Army uniforms that Schramm had “purchased” illegally. Schramm then replaced the car’s license plates with a set of stolen American Army registration plates, and as a final touch, attached a tiny American flag to the front hood ornament.
The plan was simple. According to the original Four Power agreement signed by the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, officials from any of the four occupying nations had the freedom to travel anywhere within Berlin, and could not be questioned by any German police officer as they crossed Checkpoint Charlie. Disguised as Americans, Schramm expected that they would nonchalantly drive right through, unquestioned and more importantly, unsearched.
They reached the checkpoint. There the barricades were arranged to force a car to zigzag back and forth at less than ten miles an hour. As Schramm eased the car through, both men held up their forged identity cards and smiled at the East German guards. The guards in turn waved them through, having too much else to do that day. Thousands upon thousands of West Berliners were lined up for blocks, all waiting to get into East Berlin for a few hours.
The escape was easy. Unfortunately, the repercussions were not. When the story hit the newspapers, the U.S. Army, while “expressing sympathy” with the desire of the refugees to flee East Germany, condemned the unauthorized use of its uniforms and license plates. Within a week Schramm and the two U.S. soldiers who had sold him the uniforms were arrested.133 The two G.I.’s were court-martialed and sentenced to three and four months of hard labor.134 Schramm was fined $250 and sentenced to a six week suspended sentence.135
Three years earlier, soon after the wall was built, Schramm and his cohorts would probably have been seen as heroes. Now, the response in the U.S. to their arrest and sentencing was a collective yawn, with this and other Berlin Wall escape stories hardly noted in the American press. On Christmas Day a man was shot to death when he tried to crash his car through the wall. That same week, two American soldiers were sentenced to eight years’ hard labor by the East German government for their failed attempt to help an East German girl escape in September.136 Neither story received more than passing mention in the West.
Things had changed since Peter Fechter’s death in 1962. Then, even if the U.S. could do little to help, the national will had been strong and undiluted. “We stand for freedom,” Kennedy had proclaimed, and Congress had unequivocally backed that proclamation by agreeing to a bold space race. If the U.S. couldn’t tear down the Berlin Wall, or protect individual freedom in the Soviet Union, it could at least keep the Soviets from controlling outer space.
By 1965, that national will had changed, moving to other, more difficult conflicts. The problem of Berlin was no longer front page news. The space race had begun to lose its sheen and glamour. Fred Gregory, who loved flying and was so similar in mind and spirit to the astronauts, cared very little about their space program. Instead, he wanted to get to Vietnam.
The day that Frank Borman and Jim Lovell began their two week orbital mission, the New York Times reported that the Johnson Administration was planning in the next year to increase its troop strength in Vietnam from 170,000 to 400,000 men. In the last two months alone, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces had suffered more than 8,500 casualties.137
Only six days earlier approximately 25,000 people had gathered in Washington to protest that war. For two hours they demonstrated in front of the White House, then marched to the Washington Monument where they listened to speeches from, among others, former Socialist Party Presidential candidate Norman Thomas and baby care specialist Dr. Benjamin Spock. “We should turn Vietnam over to the Vietnamese people for them to decide their government as they see fit,” said Spock.138
Nor was this the only issue that people were protesting. Earlier in the year there were riots in black neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Chicago. The Los Angeles riots, in the neighborhood of Watts, lasted almost four days, claimed over thirty lives, and required more than 20,000 National Guardsman to quell.139
Even as Borman and Lovell circled the world several hundred times, the world had been turning under them. It was now turning in directions no one had predicted or understood.
7. “HEY, I GOT THE MOON!”
Alone. The three men were now more alone than any humans in the history of the human race. They had spent the last three days watching the blue-white planet of their birth dwindle behind them. After the first two days of travel, Lovell wasn’t sure if he was ebullient or anxious when he realized he could cover the entire planet with his thumb.
Now their spacecraft had passed behind the moon, cutting them off from contact with earth. In mere seconds their S.P.S. engine would ignite and place them in a stable, lunar orbit -- or so they hoped.
* * *
Since ending their Monday press conference twelve-and-a-half hours earlier, the three astronauts had spent most of that afternoon resting and making last preparations for this moment.
Lovell did some additional navigational sightings, estimating numbers for several future mid-course corrections as well as the burn that would put them into lunar orbit. By now he was getting so good at using the computer and the sextant that he felt “like a concert pianist” as his fingers played across the computer keyboard.
Anders continued monitoring the spacecraft’s health. At one point he decided to use the on-board tape recorder to report some miscellaneous facts to the ground, narrating a list of minor problems onto the tape. “The food box doors are hard to close . . . Look’s like we’ve gotten the handle bent in trying to close the door . . . The meals I’ve had have been quite tasty, though none of us have really gone overboard for the little bread cubes and cereal cubes . . . If they ever fly one of these TV cameras again, they [should] put some sort of sight on it . . . Tell Doc Frome that his toothpaste tastes pretty good. I don’t know what kind of job it does on your teeth, but it’s nice for settling your stomach after dinner.”
Lovell then quipped in the background, “We used
it for frosting on the fruitcake.”
Anders continued his report, “Jim Lovell is. . .engaged in an activity which I shan’t describe, so I think I’ll cut this short and get my oxygen mask.”
“But that could be improved also,” Lovell added, referring to what NASA euphemistically called the “Waste Management System.” The tape then ended with all three astronauts laughing like adolescent boys.
At about 7 PM they did their last mid-course correction. This time, rather than the S.P.S., they used the four clusters of attitude control jets on the sides of the spacecraft’s service module. These smaller engines, each with a thrust of one hundred pounds (compared to the S.P.S.’s 20,500 pound thrust) fired for eleven seconds, putting the spacecraft to within a ten thousandth of a percentage point of the planned course. The astronauts would now slip behind the moon at 3:50 AM Tuesday morning, swinging past it at the desired distance of seventy miles. If all went according to plan, at 3:59 AM they would then fire the big S.P.S. engine for four minutes. This burn, called Lunar Orbital Insertion (or L.O.I. for short), would slow the spacecraft’s speed from 5,300 to 3,700 miles an hour and put it in lunar orbit. If for some reason the astronauts decided not to fire the engines, they would whip around the moon and be flung back to earth, where they could land in the ocean as had all other American space flights.
The Apollo 8 mission profile
If the S.P.S. worked as planned, the astronauts would become the first human beings to not only escape the gravitation pull of the earth, but to join the environment of another world.
For the rest of that Monday evening the men mostly rested. Anders took a sleeping pill. From 10 PM to 1 AM almost nothing was said between the spacecraft and the ground. Long periods of silence were broken by short conversations. Twice Jerry Carr passed up some numbers, once to Lovell and once to Borman.
Yet none of the crewmen slept much. As Monday turned to Tuesday and Christmas Eve arrived on earth, these three space travelers were more than 220,000 miles away from home. With each second their speed was increasing, the moon pulling at them, drawing them in. As the clock struck midnight, their speed was over 3,000 miles per hour, and increasing steadily.
* * *
As Marilyn Lovell awoke, she could hear the television faintly, its sound drifting in from the family room. Yet she heard no voices or the movement of people. Her bedroom clock said 2:00 AM in the morning. The spacecraft would be entering lunar orbit very soon, and she wondered what was happening.
Quietly she crept from her room, which was located on the lower level of her split-level home. She peeked into her childrens’ rooms, finding that Jeffrey and Susan were fast asleep. Then she poked her head up the stairs to look into the family room. There the floor and chairs and sofas were covered with the sleeping bodies of her friends, the television droning on about how Apollo 8 was about to arrive at the moon.
Marilyn stared in wonder and humility at the generosity of her friends. They had put her two younger children to bed, then stayed on, waiting for her to wake up. She made a noise to let them know she was coming, and joined them in the family room.
* * *
Valerie had slept, but unlike Marilyn she hadn’t needed any urging. She was riding such a high about the space flight that the dangers seemed somehow unreal to her. “Maybe it was a form of self-hypnosis,” she remembered years later.
Possibly more significantly, she had spent most of the evening getting her five very young children to bed, telling them stories and helping them say good night prayers. Each had many questions about what their father was doing, and she spent a good deal of time trying to explain it to them.
Then she went to sleep, and only awoke when a few friends arrived to be with her for L.O.I. She got up and together they gathered around the television to watch as her husband reached the moon.
* * *
Finally, after almost three days and 240,000 miles of travel, Apollo 8 had arrived in lunar space. The men were now so far from the earth that radio communications, traveling at the speed of light (186,280 miles per second), took two and a half seconds to go from the capsule to Houston and then back to the spacecraft. The ship’s speed was over 5,000 miles an hour, and the distance to the moon had shrunk to mere miles. Yet, Borman told the ground, “As a matter of interest, we have as yet to see the moon.” Their spacecraft’s orientation still prevented them from seeing it.
The unseen world that these three men now approached had tantalized humanity across thousands of generations. Civilizations had come and go, each watching the moon wax and wane as its perpetual lunar cycle clocked the passing of the seasons, each culture trying to understand the origin and substance of this glowing silver-white sphere in the sky. The Navajos believed that the First Man and First Woman made the sun and moon to brighten the world with light, and used a slab of quartz crystal to carve the disks, attaching them to the sky with lightning darts. The Greeks, while believing in the moon goddess Selene, also insisted that the moon must be a planet like the earth. “The moon appears to be terrestrial,” said Plutarch, “for she is inhabited like the earth . . . and peopled with the greatest living creatures and the fairest plants.” Many cultures told of a Man-in-the-Moon, and because new or green cheese resembled the moon, some legends even jibed that maybe that was what constituted the moon.140
With the coming of the telescope, astronomers learned that the moon was truly another world, but airless and almost certainly without life. It had a diameter of 2,160 miles, making it about a quarter the size of earth. In the seventeenth-century astronomer Giovanni Riccioli studied the surface and named many of its most prominent craters and mountain ranges. He also named the large dark areas of the moon mare (pronounced MAR-ray), Latin for “sea” because he thought these regions were either oceans or dried seabeds.
Despite centuries of careful astronomical observations, however, no human being had ever seen the moon’s far side. Because the moon’s day (27.32 earth days long) is exactly the same duration as its orbit, the satellite always presents the same face to the earth. The far side is forever turned away, though orbital wobbles make about sixty percent of the entire surface visible over time. The remaining forty percent had remained eternally veiled, a tantalizing mystery just beyond reach.
In the nineteenth century science fiction writers made fanciful guesses about what might be hidden on that unseen hemisphere. In his book From the Earth to the Moon Jules Verne had a scientist propose that the moon was shaped in “the form of an egg, which we look at from the smaller end.” Because most of the moon’s mass was therefore hidden from our sight, this fictional astronomer proposed that the heavier gravitational field on the far side allowed the moon to retain air and water. On the far side, life existed, and there a lunar explorer could survive.141 And while most later writers, unlike Verne, assumed that the hidden lunar surface resembled the near side, all hoped somehow that concealed in the moon’s secrets were alien species and ancient civilizations.
Finally, in 1959, the Soviets sent Luna 3 on a fly-by mission past the moon, obtaining the first glimpse of the unseen hemisphere. Though the pictures were poorly resolved, computer enhancement revealed a mountainous rough surface with only two dark areas resembling the near side’s mare regions. Then, in the mid-1960s, the Soviets and Americans launched a total of eight lunar orbiters, mapping the far side more thoroughly and unveiling a surface riddled with craters.
None of these photographs, however, could compare with what Borman, Lovell, and Anders would see when they slipped into lunar orbit only seventy miles above its surface. Not only would the astronauts see terrain previously unseen by humans, they would see it in three dimensions, adding a reality imperceptible to any robot ship photograph.
At 3:00 AM Jerry Carr took a breath and announced calmly, “Apollo 8, this is Houston. At 68:04 [hours into the flight] you are go for L.O.I.”
Borman said, “Roger. Apollo 8 is go.”
Carr answered, “You are riding the best bird we can find.”
Borman: “Thank you. It’s a good one.”
What Borman and the other two astronauts didn’t know was that for the last three days ground engineers had been trying to figure out why the S.P.S. engine had not performed exactly as anticipated on Saturday’s mid-course correction. While the engine had worked, subsequent analysis showed that it had generated slightly less thrust than expected. After what the engineers later described as “intensive discussions,” they concluded that the lost thrust was due to helium bubbles trapped in the fuel lines. After the mid-course correction burn, the engineers felt that the lines were now bled clear and that the S.P.S. engine would work as designed during L.O.I. On this recommendation, the men in mission control took a deep breath and cleared Apollo 8 for lunar orbit.
Five minutes before the astronauts slipped behind the moon, Jerry Carr relayed a message from Susan Borman to Frank. Carr cryptically said, “Frank. The custard is in the oven at 350.”
Borman didn’t get it. “No comprendo,” he told Carr.
In the early days of their marriage, Frank and Susan had worked out what they each needed to do to make their partnership work. They both agreed that while Frank’s job would be to work and pay the bills, Susan would run the house and raise the kids. Frank summed up this agreement by saying that he “would fly the jets and she would cook the custard.”
Nor was he being flip or insulting. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t have succeeded without Susan. He needed her to make the family work, not only for himself but for his children.
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