Genesis

by Robert Zimmerman

  Five-forty in the morning, Tuesday, Christmas Eve 1968. Though the astronauts had catnapped during the early evening hours Monday night, none had had a full night’s sleep since Sunday, and Anders hadn’t even had that.

  Now that they were in lunar orbit, however, there was no time for sleep. Even if everything went flawlessly, they would only be there for another eighteen hours, and they had much to accomplish in that short time.

  As the sun rose on the morning of Christmas Eve in Houston, Apollo 8 slipped behind the moon for the second time.

  * * *

  On earth, the three families sat tensely in their homes, awaiting the first lunar telecast scheduled for 6:30 AM. Though the men had made lunar orbit safely, this was now the period of greatest risk.

  After the spacecraft had entered lunar orbit Valerie Anders had tried to go back to sleep. Normally a sound sleeper, she lay in bed alone, listening to the squawk box. Once again the men’s voices, rather than lulling her to sleep, kept her awake. As dawn approached and her kids began to stir she gave it up and climbed out of bed.

  Marilyn Lovell had also tried to sleep, without success. She dozed in her bed, lulled by the drone of the squawk box jargon. By dawn, however, she was back in front of the television, awaiting that first telecast.

  Susan Borman never even tried to sleep. She knew she wouldn’t sleep until the men left lunar orbit. She sat in her kitchen, intently watching the television and listening to the squawk box.

  Hidden behind the moon, the astronauts hurried to set up their 16mm movie camera. With only five minutes before they moved into daylight, the flight plan said that the camera should be running automatically as they glided over the moon’s stark, colorless surface.

  As the sun came up, the three men focused on taking pictures. Anders, in charge of photography, kept moving back and forth between the few good windows, alternating from still to movie cameras, while also directing the other two men in what to photograph. The work was made somewhat difficult in that three of their five windows were practically unusable, covered with what Anders later described “as purplish smears, as if a service station attendant had attempted to clean a windshield using an oily rag.”181

  Anders’ photography was guided by some carefully detailed reconnaissance maps, produced from photos taken by a number of unmanned lunar orbiters, both American and Russian.* These charts not only told him what parts of the lunar surface he was flying over at every moment of the flight, they also indicated what camera shutter speeds and f-stops he should use.

  *While there had been no cooperation between the two space programs, the Soviets in 1960 had published an atlas of the moon’s far side based on photos taken by their Luna 3 probe. This data helped supplement the surveys taken by NASA lunar orbiters.

  While the moon’s major nearside landmarks were named, the far side’s features were mostly nameless. To make his job easier as well as honor a number of people, Bill had taken the explorer’s prerogative and put names to these newly discovered craters and mountains. Three craters he named Grissom, White, and Chaffee. Others he named Kraft, Slayton, Low, Von Braun, and Shepard. Some he named Mercury, Apollo, Texas, and Washington.

  Anders: “Looks like a sandpile my kids have been playing in for a long time. It's all beat up, no definition.

  Just a lot of bumps and holes.” The only color, a very slight bluish hue, comes entirely from sunlight.

  And shrewdly, he picked three distinct craters just on the edge of the farside’s horizon, just out of sight of earth, to name Borman, Lovell, and Anders. Though the earth could never see these features directly, from his position in orbit Bill would be able to relay a television picture of them back to earth.

  And soon it was time for that first lunar telecast. The flight plan called for a televised press conference the moment they came out from behind the moon. After several minutes’ effort to set up the television camera, the astronauts switched it on just as they regained contact with the earth. The picture showed a bright lunar surface silhouetted by the window frame.

  This was mostly Bill Anders’s show. For the next eleven minutes he shifted the TV camera between two windows, describing to the world the landmarks that were slowly drifting past. Lovell studied the maps to help him identify the less well-known features, while Borman said nothing as he steered, using the hand controls to keep the spacecraft’s nose pointed down so that the surface was visible in the windows.

  Ever so often Anders would add other details about the surface. “The color of the moon looks a very whitish gray like dirty beach sand, and with lots of footprints in it.”

  Once or twice Lovell added his own impression. “Don’t these new craters look like pickaxes striking concrete, leaving a lot of fine haze dust?”

  Mostly, however, Anders let the picture speak for itself. He wanted the people on earth to experience what it was like to orbit the moon.

  Valerie watched and was disappointed at how bleak and splattered the moon looked. No jagged edges, she thought.

  Marilyn Lovell watched with growing wonder. She looked at that bleak, beaten lunar surface and thought, It’s so vast; it’s so empty. There was no life there. Nothing at all.

  Susan couldn’t care less what the moon looked like. She just wanted Frank to succeed. Once again she closed her eyes and listened to their voices, trying to imagine herself in the capsule with him. She couldn’t comprehend it. Frank was as close to the moon as she was to Jim and Margaret Elkins in Houston. The distance and remoteness of it only fed her fear and pessimism.

  She got up and left the house, keeping a beauty parlor appointment she had made previously. She’d be damned if she would allow her fears to conquer her.

  Note the rilles inside and cutting across the largest crater.

  * * *

  With the show over, Borman and Anders prepared for the second orbital burn, scheduled for when they were behind the moon. This would lower the high point of their orbit from 194 miles to seventy, thereby circularizing it.

  Lovell took the mike and continued the description of the lunar surface, reporting: “The view at this altitude is tremendous. There is no trouble picking out features we learned on the map . . . I wish we had the TV still going.” In lunar orbit Lovell’s job was to study the lunar surface from the perspective of navigation. Could the navigational charts, created from Lunar Orbiter photos, be used to find one’s location on the lunar surface? Were the prime landing spots for future Apollo missions acceptable? Or were there any unidentified obstacles that might cause problems? And could an astronaut see those obstacles and pilot his way through them?

  Eroded mountain. Impact craters.

  He described such features as the Sea of Tranquility, the crater Taruntius, and the mountains that skirted both. “The mountain range has got more contrast, because of the sun angle,” he noted. Then he inexplicably said, “I can see the initial point right now, Mount Marilyn.”182

  Though Mike Collins on the ground responded, “Roger,” he had no idea what Lovell was talking about. His knowledge of the area around the Sea of Tranquility included no such mountain.

  Until Lovell had arrived that had been true. The ancient astronomers had never named Mt. Marilyn with their earthbound telescopes. NASA hadn’t given it a name when their unmanned probes had photographed it. And neither Borman nor Anders had noticed it when they had studied the maps prior to launch.

  Just as he had promised, Jim Lovell had brought his wife with him to the moon. Even if some bureaucrat in some scientific institution might not consider the name Mt. Marilyn official, it was now that mountain’s name to him.*

  *For what seem to be political and to this writer somewhat petty reasons, the scientific organization which has taken upon itself the task of officially naming astronomical objects, the International Astronomical Union (I.A.U.), rejected all of the names chosen by both Anders and Lovell. Instead, the I.A.U. named three small craters after the Apollo 8 astronauts in a part of the moon the astronauts never saw
.

  A map showing the location of both Bill Anders’s named craters as well as Lovell’s Mt. Marilyn is included in this book (after page 165) as my statement of disagreement with the I.A.U. It seems to me that the explorer, the person who risked his life to discover a new world (rather than some bureaucrat on earth) should always be given the prerogative of choosing the names.

  Regardless, it will be up to posterity to decide. I include the maps here for the record.

  Much like Anders, Lovell had chosen shrewdly. Placed on the edge of the Sea of Tranquillity just east of the Apollo 11 lunar landing site, Mt. Marilyn would be on all the maps used by Armstrong and Aldrin when they made their historic approach six months later. In fact, they would fly right over it as they came in for a landing.

  The astronauts slipped behind the moon for the third time. As they had on the first orbit, Anders and Borman worked their way down a long checklist, making sure everything was right for the engine burn, while Lovell programmed the computer. Thirty minutes later the S.P.S. engine fired for the third time, burning for twenty-one seconds and lowering their orbit. It would now take them an hour and forty minutes to circle the moon instead of two hours.

  This is the Lunar Orbiter photo that Jim Lovell gave to Marilyntwo nights before launch. Mt. Marilyn is

  the triangular-shaped mountain at the bottom of the photograph just to the right of center. It is located slightly

  north of the lunar equator. The crater Secchi is to the east, just out of frame. Tranquility Base, also near

  the equator, is about 150 miles to the west. See map , ‘The Moon as seen by Apollo 8’, in chapter seven.

  The pace was unrelenting. Even as the men finished this burn they immediately resumed their photography and reconnaissance of the barren lunar surface. And when they came out from behind the moon, Borman and Lovell once again went through the tedious but critical routine of taking down new numbers for the computer, while Anders reviewed the status of the fuel cells and life support systems with the ground.

  Just before 10 AM, Frank Borman decided it was time to do something slightly less technical. He asked if Rod Rose was around.

  Mike Collins told Borman that “Rod Rose is sitting up in the viewing room. He can hear what you say.”

  A month earlier, just before Borman had left for Florida, he attended Sunday church services at his local parish, St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in League City, Texas. As one of the church’s lay readers who routinely read aloud to the congregation during church services, Borman had planned to participate in the Christmas day services. When NASA made the sudden decision to send Apollo 8 to the moon, he found he had to explain why he couldn’t be there. “We kidded Frank about going to such lengths -- all the way to the moon -- to get out of . . . services,” said his reverend, James Buckner.183

  The conversation soon turned serious. Borman really wanted to participate in that Christmas Day service, but didn’t have any idea what he could do. Fellow parishioner Rod Rose, an engineer at mission control, offered a solution. He would put together a short prayer that Borman could read from orbit, tape Borman’s recitation, and then play the tape back at church. For Borman, the practical test pilot, this plan was perfect. Rose cobbled together a prayer from a number of verses in the Bible, and went over it with Borman until both were happy.

  Now, Borman waited until Lovell and Anders finished passing some new data to the ground. Then he began, a little self-consciously. “This is to Rod Rose and the people at St. Christopher’s, actually to people everywhere.” Borman took a breath. “Give us, O God, the vision which can see thy love in the world, in spite of human failure. Give us the faith to trust the goodness in spite of our ignorance and weakness. Give us the knowledge that we may continue to pray with understanding hearts, and show us what each one of us can do to set forth the coming of the day of universal peace. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Mike Collins echoed softly.

  Now Borman sheepishly added, “I was supposed to lay-read tonight, but I couldn’t quite make it.”

  “Roger,” said Collins. “I think they understand.”

  Susan, already back from the beauty parlor, heard the prayer and felt only relief that one more possible disaster had passed. She had become so pessimistic that even so simple a thing as Frank reading a prayer aloud seemed a miracle.

  In the spacecraft the work went on. As soon as Borman finished reading his prayer, Collins asked him when they had last chlorinated their water. The astronauts’ drinking water was produced as a byproduct of the generation of electricity by their fuel-cells. This water was transferred into a tank, and periodically the crew manually injected chlorine into it to keep the water free from bacteria. Borman confirmed that they had done so ninety minutes earlier. “Jim spilled a little, and it smelled like a bucket of chlorine in here.”

  Ten minutes later they slipped behind the moon for the fourth time. It was now midmorning, Tuesday. Except for those short naps twelve hours earlier, they had all been awake since early Monday morning.

  But it wasn’t yet time to sleep. Now Anders’s photography became the prime mission focus. Though Borman’s word was law when it came to running the overall mission, Anders usually supervised the taking of photographs. If someone else wanted to take a picture, they generally cleared it with him first to make sure it fit into the mission’s objectives. Mostly, however, they left the photography to him.

  As Anders worked he logged his subject by announcing what he was doing out loud, recording the information on the onboard tape recorder. “Okay, definitely frame 114, target of opportunity, extremely fresh impact crater. Time 75:39:30.” For forty minutes, the other two men kept quiet, letting Anders do his job. Borman would continually adjust the spacecraft’s attitude so that its nose always pointed downward, thereby keeping the lunar surface visible in the least obstructed windows.

  Just before they came out from behind the moon, Anders finally stopped. Borman needed to roll the spacecraft so that Lovell could do a navigational sighting, and he and Lovell had been waiting patiently for Anders to finish. With only seconds before they reacquired earth signal Anders gave the okay, and Borman started the roll.

  To do this Borman gazed out his window, using the moon’s horizon as a reference point. Suddenly he noticed a blue-and-white fuzzy arch edging from behind the moon’s sharp horizon line of dreary gray. This growing round patch was the only color in a black-and-white universe. “Oh my God!” Borman cried out. “Look at that picture over there! Here’s the earth coming up!” He stared at the earthrise in wonder. “Wow, is that pretty.”

  Lovell gaped. “Oh man, that’s great!”

  Suddenly, they all realized that they had to get a picture. Of all the objectives NASA had set before launch, no one had thought of photographing the earth from lunar orbit. Borman grabbed the nearby floating camera that Anders had been using and snapped a picture, only to have Bill joke, “Hey don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.”

  They all laughed. Borman handed the camera to Anders and looked out the window again. “Gee,” Borman sighed. The earth was so beautiful, and so far away.

  Anders also wanted to get a picture but the camera Borman had given him was loaded with black-and-white film. “Hand me that roll of color quick,” he said to Lovell, who was closest to the correct storage locker. For a few moments there was panic as Lovell scrambled to get the film and Anders struggled to load it. Then they jostled for position at the window.

  Anders: “Let me get it out this window. It’s a lot clearer.” Lovell: “Bill, I got it framed -- it’s very clear right here.”

  Outside, the half-full earth had now risen several degrees “above” the moon’s horizon. It glistened with a blue-white gleam against that jet-black sky, the moon’s dead surface a stark contrast.

  As Anders framed the shot Lovell hung over his shoulder, almost taking the camera from him in his desire to make sure the picture was taken. Borman had to tell him to calm down.

  Lovell wa
s entranced. “Oh, that’s a beautiful shot.” He asked Anders to take a number of pictures, varying the exposure.

  Anders nodded. “I did. I took two of them.” “You sure we got it now?”

  “Yes.” He looked at Lovell dryly. “It’ll come up again, I think.”

  The three men stared at their home planet as it drifted slowly into the sky. They had just witnessed the first earthrise ever seen by any human being.*

  *For years there has been confusion over who took the earthrise picture that was seen on millions of stamps and magazine covers soon after the astronauts’ return. Borman always claimed that he took it, and anyone who knew Frank Borman (including Bill Anders and Jim Lovell) knew he wouldn’t make this claim unless he believed it to be true. Yet, the transcripts clearly show that Bill Anders took the color picture familiar to us all. For years, no one could quite understand why Borman appeared to be trying to claim credit for something he hadn’t done -- an action completely uncharacteristic of him.

  The solution to the mystery is that more than one picture was taken. Borman took the first earthrise shot ever taken, but his black-and-white photograph on a different roll of film has been ignored all these years because Anders’s later but prettier color shot of the same earthrise was available.

  Because Anders so much wanted to get credit for his photograph, Lovell has spent a great deal of time needling his good friend about it in public. For example, Lovell simply refuses to state in public who took the picture, despite knowing that Anders took it. When I asked him why he does this, he grinned and said, “It keeps us young and happy.”