“You mean Genesis?” Laitin snapped as he sharply flipped the book to the first page.
Then he looked at the words. “My God, Christine, here it is.”
Laitin sat down quickly and typed a memo to Bourgin. He pointed out that the astronauts should only read the verses if they seemed appropriate once in lunar orbit, and that the reading should be followed by silence, no trite comments from ground control. He added a short closing line for Borman to read, and sent Bourgin the memo. Then he completely forgot about it.
Bourgin immediately recognized that this was the right choice, especially in the context of the Cold War. “It gave the space race a certain moral and religious stature.” He took Laitin’s rough memo and retyped it as a letter. Because Borman, a man who wouldn’t tolerate any distractions, hadn’t wanted him to discuss the problem with anyone, he left Joe’s name out. “Borman had enough to worry about at the time.” After the mission Bourgin would tell him the whole story.
And like Laitin, Bourgin didn’t think the whole issue was that important. He promptly forgot about it.
* * *
Borman looked at Bourgin’s letter and instantly knew his problem was solved. Genesis was the perfect choice.
Lovell agreed. “You couldn’t ask for better. The words were the foundation of most of the world’s religions.”
Anders by now had changed his mind. He had talked to Valerie about the problem, and had realized that whatever they said shouldn’t merely celebrate the Christian holiday, but somehow be non-denominational as well. This seemed almost impossible, until Borman showed him Genesis.
Borman wasn’t required to tell anyone what they planned on doing. As Lovell remembers, “It was before anyone thought of supervising these things.” Borman did let a few NASA officials know about it, not to get approval but to make sure that the reading came off perfectly. Laitin’s suggestion that no one say anything trite at the end of the reading required a little coordination. All agreed that once the astronauts finished reading, the ground communications should make no casual remarks like “Boy was that great!” Instead, there would be a long pause, and then a very respectful comment from public affairs officer Paul Haney.
Borman took Bourgin’s letter, photocopied it onto fireproof paper, and inserted it into the flight manual. When Susan asked him what they had decided to do, he refused to tell her. All he would say was that he thought the choice was perfect.
11. PILGRIMS TO THE MOON
Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element.
—William Bradford, 1620, describing his arrival at Plymouth Rock224
Early evening in Houston. The sun has set. In the growing dusk the homes glittered with their bright Christmas decorations.
In front of one home a car pulled up and from it appeared a tall man dressed as Santa Claus. Jerry Hammack, a neighbor of the Lovells and in charge of the recovery operations at NASA, was making the rounds.
Many of the people who worked with him were Defense Department employees. Because the flight forced them to be away from their families during Christmas, he had decided he needed to do something to boost morale. He bought some presents, put on a Santa Claus costume, hoisted a large sack over his shoulder, and drove from house to house in an effort to bring good cheer to his co-workers and friends.
His last stop was the Lovell home. He especially wanted to cheer up Marilyn and her children. He rang the bell, and when Marilyn answered he entered with a “Ho-Ho-Ho.” At first, two-year-old Jeffrey didn’t know what to make of this big man with a white beard. He cringed in fear, so his mother held him in her arms so that Santa could give him a small gift. Then Jerry carried his sack into the living room, past the many friends gathered there (including his wife Adeline) and deposited boxes under the Christmas tree to be opened the next morning. He slipped out of sight for a moment to take off his costume, then joined the party. Soon the astronauts would be making their last telecast from lunar orbit, and no one wanted to miss it.
Similarly, in nearby El Lago, Valerie Anders, her children, and numerous friends were crowded around their two televisions. Ignoring the herd of reporters that surrounded her house, she and her friends had whiled away Christmas Eve day with idle chatter, listening to the astronauts as they circled the moon.
In Houston, Susan Borman, Fred, Ed, and Frank’s parents were just now finishing up a quiet dinner with the Elkins. Afterward, both families went into the living room, where Susan discovered a surprise Christmas gift under the Elkins’s tree. She tore the wrapping from the box and took out a dress that Frank had purchased for her just before leaving for Florida.
She held it up, baffled. The dress was at last six sizes too big. She began to laugh, and then found she had the giggles and couldn’t stop. Soon everyone was laughing. Frank Borman, the man who instantly knew exactly what to do in any deadly emergency, couldn’t buy a dress for his own wife.
* * *
The astronauts meanwhile were hidden behind the moon on their ninth revolution. Anders and Lovell were now awake, and all three men hurried to get ready for what they knew would be the most watched moment of the entire mission. Despite all the discussion before launch about what to say, only now did they realize that they hadn’t decided who would say what. After some hasty debate, Borman suggested that they first make a few comments each about their experience orbiting the moon. Then Anders would read the first four verses, Lovell the next four, and Borman would finish with the last four verses.
While they debated who should read what when, they also began packing up. From here on out, all that mattered was that one press conference and getting the S.P.S. engine ready for its last and most important use. “Because now she’s going to take us home!” Borman exulted at one point. Away went most of the film cameras and all the paraphernalia that went with it. Also packed away was every loose item that might get flung about when the S.P.S. engine fired.
And they waited. Anders suggested that Lovell take out a map “so we can tell the folks what you’re looking at.” Then he asked Borman again what verses he should read, and took a look at the typed sheet attached to the flight plan so that he knew where to find it.
With Anders guiding him, Borman oriented the spacecraft so they could see the lunar horizon. As the earth slowly rose above that razor sharp line, both Borman and Anders yelled, “Here it comes!” Anders snapped away with his camera, and within seconds they had reestablished contact with earth.
At mission control the room was packed. In one side booth sat Julian Scheer, Public Affairs Officer for NASA. Having refused to give Borman any suggestions for the telecast he had no idea what the astronauts were going to say. Now he waited for what he had calmly told Borman would probably be the most-watched television show in the history of mankind.
Si Bourgin and his wife were at that moment waiting in the airport bar in Houston. He had come to Houston for the launch, but was now heading home to celebrate Christmas Day with his family. He noticed that while a number of people were crowded around the television, many remained only slightly interested, eating and chatting among themselves as they watched.
Joe and Christine Laitin were at home. Laitin had never asked Si if Borman had accepted his idea, and he hadn’t really thought about it much. He and his wife had finished dinner, and now were preparing for bed. He turned on the television so they could watch the lunar telecast before going to sleep.
Everywhere there was a television, people grew attentive, and the world stared as the camera on Apollo 8 finally turned on. Because the camera angle looked through the edge of the capsule’s window, the initial image was distorted by spherical aberration. Below a tiny white blob, which was probably the earth, ran a number of horizontal streaks, one on top of another.
Bo
rman spoke first. His crisp voice rang out clearly. “This is Apollo 8 coming to you live from the moon. . . We showed you first a view of earth as we’ve been watching it for the past sixteen hours.” He paused. “Now we’re switching so that we can show you the moon that we’ve been flying over at [seventy] miles altitude for the last sixteen hours.”
As Anders shifted the camera, it accidently switched off, leaving earth with nothing but a series of gray bars. Without a TV monitor or eyepiece, however, the astronauts had no way of knowing this.
Borman continued, “Bill Anders, Jim Lovell and myself have spent the day before Christmas up here doing experiments, taking pictures, and firing our spacecraft engine to maneuver around. What we’ll do now is follow the trail that we’ve been following all day and take you on through to a lunar sunset.”
Ironically, the lack of a picture at this moment seemed to magnify their words. “The moon is a different thing to each one of us,” Borman said. “I think that each one carried his own impression of what he’s seen today. I know my impression is that it’s a vast, lonely, forbidding-type existence, or expanse of nothing. It looks rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone and it certainly would not appear to be a very inviting place to live or work. Jim, what have you thought most about?”
Jim Lovell’s deeper voice hesitated slightly as he searched for the right words. “Well, Frank, my thoughts were very similar. The vast loneliness up here at the moon is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize what you have back there on earth. The earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space.”
“Bill, what do you think?” Borman asked.
Anders’s voice, though similar to Frank’s, had a softer, introspective quality to it. “I think the thing that impressed me the most was the lunar sunrises and sunsets. These in particular bring out the stark nature of the terrain.”
About this moment the astronauts paused, and Jerry Carr radioed that they didn’t have a picture. Lovell immediately spotted the problem and switched the camera back on.
As the image returned, it showed a bleak black-and-white lunar horizon line cutting across a rhombus-shaped window. To the viewers on earth, nothing could be seen but the lunar surface slowly drifting past, new craters creeping up over the horizon on the right as older craters disappeared off the window’s edge on the left.
Anders continued. “The horizon here is very, very stark, the sky is pitch black and the earth, or the moon rather, excuse me, is quite light, and the contrast between the sky and the moon is a vivid dark line.”
“Actually,” Lovell put in, “I think the best way to describe this area is a vastness of black and white -- absolutely no color.”
Anders added, “The sky up here is also a rather forbidding, foreboding expanse of blackness, with no stars visible when we’re flying over the ear--” he caught himself again. “Over the moon in daylight. You can see that the moon has been bombarded through the eons with numerous meteorites. Every square inch is pockmarked.”
Note the rille in the center of the picture.
Slowly the spacecraft drifted over the dead landscape. As he had earlier in the day, Anders did most of the talking, speaking softly and pausing often. Often he tried to describe the geological nature of what he saw. “There’s an interesting rille directly in front of the spacecraft now, running along the edge of a small mountain, rather sinuous shape, with right-angle turns.” A rille was a lunar surface feature, reminiscent of earth river valleys but deeper and much narrower, with vertical walls and no tributaries. Scientists believe that they were formed from flowing lava.
The televised view.
Borman added a few more of his own thoughts. “I hope that all of you back on earth can see what we mean when we say it’s a rather foreboding horizon. A rather stark and unappetizing looking place.”
In mission control Julian Scheer noticed how, even as the astronauts spoke, the activity around him did not cease. “The room had a kind of hum,” he remembered years later. Men still hunched over their consoles, studying the spacecraft’s telemetry to make sure everything was working. Others moved through the room, passing information to and from each other. And all worked quietly and incessantly to keep this delicate spacecraft and its three passengers alive for just a few more days.
Now the spacecraft was moving toward lunar sunset, and the shadows were getting longer and more pronounced. Bill Anders opened the flight plan to the proper place. He glanced at the photocopy of Bourgin’s letter. He began their closing comments. “We are now approaching lunar sunset and for all the people back on earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.”
Anders paused. Out the window the lifeless lunar surface drifted past. Nothing else moved. A long straight rille ran north-to-south along the sunset line. On one side was the bright harshness of lunar day; on the other was the utter darkness of lunar night.
At mission control the normal background hum of activity ceased. All movement stopped. All attention was on the TV and on Bill Anders’s voice.
Anders began reading the first verse softly. “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
In the Anderses’ home complete silence fell. Valerie felt a thrill: Bill was reading the Bible from the moon!
“And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.”
At the airport bar in Houston, Si Bourgin noticed how the room had suddenly become very quiet. Even the bartender had stopped his work. All eyes were on that grainy black-and-white image on the television screen.
Bill Anders took a breath and read his last line. “And God saw the light, that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness.”
In Washington, Joe and Christine Laitin lay in bed, awestruck. Joe looked at his wife in disbelief. “That’s the script I wrote!”
Christine looked back at him with a laugh, “You wrote?”
Now Bill Anders passed the flight plan to Jim Lovell, who began reading slowly. “And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.”
In the Lovell household no one moved. Marilyn had had no idea the men would do something like this, and she was humbled. They must be in God’s hands, she thought.
Lovell continued. His deep voice contrasted sharply with Anders’s Western twang, and he struggled to make clear the strange wording of seventeenth-century English poetry. “And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’ And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so.”
The shadows on the lunar surface had moved across the center of the image. Dark streaks cut across the white, into which nothing could be seen. With deep feeling, Lovell continued. “And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.”
He passed the flight plan to Frank Borman, whose terse voice resonated keenly. “And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so.” Borman paused, glancing for a second at the steadily approaching lunar night.
At the Elkins house Susan Borman began to cry. What a thing to do, she thought. How perfect a choice.
Borman continued, “And God called the dry land earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he seas; and God saw that it was good.”
Borman paused again. Outside the capsule window the shadows had become very long and wide. Lunar sunset was mere seconds away. He took a final breath. “And from the crew of Apollo 8,” he said with utter conviction, “We close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you -- all of you on the good earth.”
At that moment Anders cut the television signal to earth, and television
screens around the world suddenly turned to static.
In Washington, the phone at the Laitins’ suddenly rang. It was Si Bourgin, calling from an airport pay phone. “Wasn’t that great?” he said to Joe excitedly.
* * *
Not long afterward, Marilyn Lovell and her children went for a nighttime walk, strolling through the darkness to admire the beautiful Christmas decorations that graced the homes of their neighbors. That year all the families of Timber Cove had decided to line their lawns with luminaries -- small paper bags weighted down with sand and lit by bright candles.
While her children oohed and aahed at the pretty blinking lights, Marilyn could only think that at this moment these luminaries and Christmas lights had been blessed by the words of her husband and their father, spoken from a tiny capsule a quarter of a million miles from home.
These three men had stood on the fringes of human experience, tracing a warm line into the dark and cold emptiness of endless space, and had tried to bring more than mere life to that emptiness.
Their words were not original. They read words that had been written in the dim past by, as some believed, God Almighty.
Those words, however, expressed for these three men a heartfelt belief that the universe was more than mere energy and matter. Not only did a spirit lurk behind the veil of the terrifying black dark that surrounded them, it impelled them to live their lives a certain way, in a certain manner.
Their decision to read from the Bible also expressed, albeit indirectly, their passionate love of freedom. No one told them what to read, and in fact most of the officials at NASA and in the government were completely surprised by their message. And that was how it should be. Borman, Lovell, and Anders were free men, expressing their beliefs freely. While their government might have financed the journey, it could not tell them what to think or say once they got there. If these free men wished to pray aloud to the world’s population as they circled the moon, so be it.
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