Genesis

by Robert Zimmerman

  It was a job that Susan loved anyway. For years Frank’s remark stuck in her mind, a neat metaphor for the symmetry of their lives. With Frank flying the most powerful flying machine ever built, Susan used it to let him know that she was also doing her part.

  Frank, however, had forgotten the phrase. Not that it mattered. He knew, without anyone telling him, that Susan was there for him. On earth, she waited in her kitchen for her husband to disappear behind the moon. It didn’t bother her that Frank hadn’t understood. She preferred he stayed focused on what he needed to do.

  At thirty seconds before loss of signal, Jerry Carr said, “Safe journey guys.”

  Anders answered, “Thanks a lot, troops.”

  Lovell added, “We’ll see you on the other side.”

  The command module's instrument panel.

  Carr: “Apollo 8, ten seconds to go. You’re go all the way.”

  Borman: “Roger.”

  And then silence. At ten minutes to four in the wee morning hours of Christmas Eve 1968, their ship passed behind the moon, cutting off all radio communication with mission control in Houston as well as every other person on earth.

  * * *

  On the spacecraft, both Borman and Anders were astonished at how precisely the computers had predicted the loss of signal. Borman said, “That was great, wasn’t it? I wonder if they turned [the transmitter] off.”

  Anders laughed. “Chris [Kraft] probably said, ‘No matter what happens, turn it off.’ “

  It was T minus ten minutes before L.O.I. Borman and Anders began going down their checklist, Anders reading off a particular setting and Borman checking the instrument panel and confirming aloud that the setting was correct. There were several hundred switches on the instrument panel, and they all had to be right. The astronauts oriented the spacecraft. They checked, and double- checked, to make sure the ship’s manual controls were linked to the computer. They configured the spacecraft’s circuitry. They checked the spacecraft’s pitch, roll, and yaw.

  Lovell, after programming the computer, had little to do now but wait it out. He glued his eyes to the windows and stared at the black sky. Still no moon. He could see the stars -- the sky was littered with them. Because this flight was a scouting mission for the planned lunar landing several months hence, NASA had scheduled it so that the Sea of Tranquility, the prime landing site, was close to lunar sunrise, thereby accentuating the shadows and making it easier for astronauts to pick out details. This schedule, however, required Apollo 8 to plunge towards the moon on its night side, the spacecraft traveling through the moon’s shadow. Moreover, when they slipped behind the moon the earth with its earthshine was also cut off. They were now in the darkest lunar night, surrounded by an infinity of stars.

  At T minus eight minutes, Anders and Borman had finished the first part of their checklist. Now they had a few minutes to wait before beginning the final countdown to the S.P.S. burn.

  The men sat in silence. Anders gazed out his window at the sea of stars, still not having seen the moon. Suddenly a chill ran down his spine. Across that star-flung vault of heaven now crept an arched blackness, a growing void within which he could see no stars at all. The moon was approaching.

  After almost forty seconds of quiet, Lovell spoke up. “Well, the main thing to be is cool.”

  “Gosh, it is cool,” Borman answered.

  Lovell looked at the cabin thermometer. “It’s up to eighty [degrees] in the cockpit.”

  Anders tried to explain how they felt. “No, I think . . . just when my clothes touch me, it gets cold, huh?”

  At T minus six minutes, Borman said, “Okay, let’s go,” and he and Anders began going down their final checklist, setting the last switches and arming the engines.

  At T minus 2:20 Borman glanced out the window. According to their calculations, the sun would be rising on the lunar horizon any second. “Boy, I can’t see squat out there.”

  “You want us to turn off your lights to check it?” Anders suggested.

  Lovell cut in. “Hey, I got the moon!” With a bright flash the sun rose, casting long streaks of harsh light across the lunar surface below them.

  “Do you?” Anders asked.

  “Right below us,” Lovell said.

  “Is it below us?” Anders leaned towards his window. Though he had already seen the long bands of light cutting across the lunar surface, his mind hadn’t yet comprehended what these were. For a moment he thought -- though he knew this was impossible -- that they were streaks of oil running down the window.

  “Yes, and it’s -- “

  “Oh my God!” Anders gasped as he fathomed what he saw. He was staring at a black-and-white surface of mountains and craters, suddenly so near.

  “What’s wrong?” said Borman, frightened that the man in charge of monitoring spacecraft systems had discovered a serious mechanical failure.

  “Look at that!” Anders said with wonder.

  Borman looked outside, saw the moon, and struggled with a desire to stare like the rookie. Then he thought of the impending engine burn and pulled Anders back. “Stand by . . .”

  Anders read off four more items on the checklist, with Borman confirming them. Then they all paused. T minus 1:50 seconds to L.O.I.

  Anders stared out the window again. “I see two . . . Look at that . . . Fantastic!”

  “Yes,” said Lovell.

  “See it?” Anders continued. “Fan--fantastic. But you know, I still have trouble telling the holes from the bumps.”

  Borman cut in. “All right, all right, come on.” There was only a little more than a minute to go. “You’re going to look at that for a long time.”

  “Twenty hours, is that it?” Anders said. He went back to his flight plan and began reading aloud the last commands. “Standing by for engine on enable.” To Lovell he said, “Proceed when you get it.” This was an instruction that Lovell needed to imput into the computer.

  Lovell: “Okay.”

  Anders: “Start your watch when you get ignition.” There were now less than four seconds to go. “Stand by for --”

  The S.P.S. engine fired automatically. Lovell called out, “Enabled!” and the three men were pressed back against their couches.

  A quarter of a million miles away, an entire world waited in breathless suspense. In Houston Jerry Carr sat at his console. He called, “Apollo 8, Houston, over,” waited fifteen seconds, and then called again, “Apollo 8, Houston, over.” Again and again he did this, despite pronounced mixed feelings, knowing that if he regained communications before 4:30 AM, something would be terribly wrong.

  In Moscow, the Soviet government newspaper, Izvestia, had described this moment by noting that “the slightest miscalculation might make the astronauts forever captives of the moon.”142 Having led the space race from day one, the Soviet Union was finally taking a back seat to an American achievement in space.

  The Moon as seen from Apollo 8: This map, the second half of which follows on the next page, shows the part of the lunar surface televised to earth on Christmas Eve. If you were to look at a full moon, the eastern half would correspond to 0 to 90 degrees longitude on this map. The unseen farside is east of 90 degrees longitude. The Apollo 11 landing site can be seen on the equator at 23.5 longitude just inside lunar dawn. Mt. Marilyn as well as the craters named by Bill Anders are shown in italics. The I.A.U. names, assigned two years after Apollo 8, are also shown in smaller type. Taken from NASA's Lunar Chart, 2nd edition (1979).

  The names chosen by Anders: Christopher Kraft had been the prime Flight Director during the Mercury and Gemini programs. For Apollo 8 he had moved up to Director of Flight Operations. George Mueller (pronounced "Miller") was head of NASA's Office of Manned Space Flight. Charles Bassett and Eliot See were two astronauts killed in a plane crash, February 28, 1966. Deke Slayton was one of the original seven astronauts, but because of an irregular heartbeat was grounded during the 1960s. Astronauts Fred Haise and Vance Brand were on the support crew for Apollo 8. Haise wo
uld fly on Apollo 13 in April 1970, and Slayton and Brand would fly on the Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous in July 1975.

  Susan Borman sat silently, alone at her kitchen table, hands clasped and head bowed, listening intently to her squawk box. Close by in the den her two teenage sons waited, watching the television with several friends, Frank’s parents, and Reverend James Buckner from their parish.143

  At Marilyn’s, about a dozen close friends, her two oldest children, and Father Raish sat quietly in the family room. Periodically someone would try to start a conversation, but the words would fade out after a sentence or two.

  Valerie Anders, however, was hardly awake. “I just didn’t think L.O.I. was that dangerous,” she remembered. She was also aware that in a few short hours her swarm of children would be getting up, and to be ready for the next day’s challenges she needed her sleep. Almost nonchalantly and with mild impatience, she waited with her friends for word that everything was all right so that she could go back to bed.

  Right now, however, the only thing anyone could hear was Jerry Carr’s patient voice.

  For four long minutes Apollo 8’s engines roared. All three men knew that if the rocket cut off too soon, they would be put into an erratic lunar orbit from which they might not have enough fuel to escape. And if the rocket burned too long, they would instead be killed as their craft crashed on the moon. Such a landing was not how the United States wished to win the space race.

  More likely and much more worrisome, however, was the possibility that their position was not as they had calculated it. They had traveled 240,000 miles, and should their path through space have been off the slightest fraction of a degree, they could be passing the moon at a distance either much closer or much farther than predicted. The rocket might then fire exactly as they had programmed it, and merely fling them against the lunar surface.

  Unfortunately, they wouldn’t know if this could happen, until it did. After two full minutes Lovell asked, “Jesus, four minutes?”

  Borman shook his head. “Two minutes.” He looked at Anders. “How’s it doing, Bill?”

  “Great shape. Pressures are holding. Helium’s coming down nicely. All other systems are go.”

  Note the black lunar horizon on the upper right.

  Because there was no atmosphere surrounding the spacecraft, the S.P.S. rocket made little sound. The astronauts could hear a hum, and feel a vibration through the spacecraft’s hull, but other than that there was silence.

  After three minutes Lovell said, “Longest four minutes of my life.”

  Finally, Anders began counting down the last few seconds. Though their computer was programmed to shut the rocket down on schedule, Borman pressed the cut-off switch, just to make sure. Once again the astronauts were weightless, and the craft was silent except for the sound of their breathing. A quick check of the computer showed that they were now in lunar orbit exactly as planned, an elliptical orbit 69 by 194 miles high. “Congratulations, gentleman,” said Anders. “You’re at double zero,” meaning they had hit their target precisely.

  Borman thought how far from home they were. “Well, now is no time for congratulations yet.”

  Lovell grinned. “No, we get stuck with that on the carrier.”

  Still, they were alone, cut off from earth for another twenty-five minutes. Anders and Lovell stared out the windows. Below them drifted a desolate, crater-pocked surface, absolutely without color. Craters piled on craters piled on craters. Worn mountain peaks rounded by eons of impacts. Anders laughed. “It looks like a big beach down there.”

  Borman, still focused on getting them home, asked for the flight plan.

  Lovell pulled it out, opened the book, and joked, “Holy cow, it’s completely blank here.”

  The men went back to work, scrambling to set up the cameras and snap as many pictures as possible. For twenty minutes little was said as they raced to photograph that stark moonscape. Should they be forced to leave lunar orbit on the next pass, these photographs would guarantee their flight had some results.

  * * *

  It was now 4:29 AM (C.S.T.) on earth. The men in Houston’s mission control waited, barely able to speak or breathe. In the homes of the astronauts everyone watched the television with apprehension. The only sound was Jerry Carr’s voice, repeating his prayer-like litany into the radio, calling for Apollo 8.

  Then, just as predicted, the control room reacquired signal from the spaceship, confirming the successful orbit insertion. Someone excitedly yelled, “We got it! We got it!” and then Jim Lovell’s voice responded, “Go ahead, Houston.” Amid the cheers and shouting that now filled mission control, Lovell dryly gave them a report on the engine burn. “Burn on time, burn time four minutes, six and a half seconds.”

  In the Anders home Valerie listened, heard they had gotten into lunar orbit, and then went back to bed. It was all very exciting, but her young family would need her well-rested when they woke in the morning.

  In the Lovell home there were cheers and screams of joy. Marilyn was honored that Jim’s voice was the first ever heard from lunar orbit.

  At the Bormans there were also cheers, mostly from the boys and from Frank’s parents. Susan closed her eyes and sighed. Now they were in lunar orbit. She tried not to think about what she knew would happen next.

  * * *

  For the next hour and twenty minutes, until they disappeared again behind the moon, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders excitedly reported their view to a breathless earth. While Anders moved from window to window, snapping pictures, Lovell did most of the talking, trying to describe what he saw. “The moon is essentially gray, no color,” he said. “Looks like plaster of paris or sort of a grayish beach sand.”144

  Borman, meticulous test pilot that he was, said little. He worried more about the state of his spacecraft than what the moon looked like at seventy miles elevation. After keeping quiet for about a half hour, he finally spoke up. “While these other guys are looking at the moon, I want to make sure we have a good S.P.S. How about giving me that report when you can?”

  This brought some happy laughter in the control room. Everyone knew how seriously Borman took his job, and somehow, in the excitement of the moment, it seemed funny that they could still depend on him to get it right. Jerry Carr answered, “Sure will, Frank.”

  Borman added, “We want a go for every rev[olution], please. Otherwise we’ll burn in T.E.I. one at your direction.” T.E.I. stood for Trans-Earth Injection, the rocket burn that would take them out of lunar orbit and back to earth. Borman’s statement meant that if he didn’t get an okay to remain in lunar orbit, he would assume they wanted him to come home immediately.

  Borman was gently but firmly telling everyone on the ground to get back to work. He wanted to focus everyone’s minds on the needs of the mission. If the planned rocket burn should fail twenty hours hence, they would live out the few remaining hours of their lives as prisoners of the moon.

  And, if it was within his power, Borman did not intend to let that happen. He knew how close death lurked.

  8. “SETTLE THIS BY NIGHT FALL.”

  APOLLO 1

  The Apollo capsule was a charred and ashen ruin. The smoke was gone, and the air was clear, but the command module held unmistakable signs of violent and sudden death. Parts of the control panel, blackened with soot, had actually buckled from the heat. Bits of burned insulation peeled from the walls and melted wires dangled everywhere. To one side hung the scorched inner hatch, its edge still fused to the capsule’s wall.

  Frank Borman, along with the nine other members of the launchpad fire review board, peered into the space capsule and saw instead a horrible oven. Twenty-four hours earlier, on January 27th, 1967, three fellow astronauts had died here.

  Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee had been participating in a simulated launch countdown. Their planned flight, the first launch of NASA’s new Apollo spacecraft, was only four weeks away. The men had put on their space suits and rode the gantry elevator to the top o
f the Saturn rocket. There they climbed into their Apollo command module and were sealed inside, just as if this were an actual launch. For five hours they rehearsed the countdown sequence with the launch team, dealing with the small problems expected from a new spacecraft.

  At 6:31 PM, the count was stalled at T minus ten minutes while both astronauts and engineers wrestled with a continuing communication problem. Suddenly one of the astronauts commented that he smelled fire, and then Roger Chaffee cried out, “We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!”145

  Within thirty seconds the flames engulfed the spacecraft, rupturing its hull and sending acrid smoke billowing above the launchpad. The heat was so intense that it fused the astronauts’ suits to the capsule’s plastic interior. It would take almost two hours to cut the men’s bodies free and remove them.

  Frank and Susan Borman and the boys had left Houston that weekend, going to the country lake house of Jim and Margaret Elkins to celebrate the tenth birthday of the Elkins’ daughter. It was a place where the Bormans could have some time off, where no one could find them.

  Yet, NASA did find them. A sheriff knocked on the door and told Frank that he was needed immediately. Borman called the Manned Spacecraft Center and Deke Slayton, head of the astronaut office at NASA, gave him the bad news. Within minutes he and Susan were driving back to El Lago.

  As they raced south in the dark Texas night, the open fields around them and the high sky above them, they talked about the accident. Frank couldn’t help thinking aloud, “If Ed [White] couldn’t get that hatch off, no one could.” Suddenly a terrible seed of doubt was planted in Susan’s mind: Frank, as indestructible and sharp as he was, could just as easily have died in that accident. Then they arrived at the home of Pat White, where the astronaut’s wife had already received the horrible news from Bill Anders.