The computer counteracted his action, and he counteracted the computer’s counteraction. After a few seconds of battle Anders realized he didn’t have a stuck thruster and let the computer stabilize the spacecraft to what it thought was a vertical position on the ground in Florida prior to launch.
Unfortunately, this orientation was useless for getting them home, since they no longer knew which way was up. This in turn made it impossible to align the capsule’s heat shield properly when they reentered earth atmosphere, forty- one hours hence.
Not surprisingly, Frank Borman quickly awoke. While he and Anders sat and waited, Jim Lovell struggled to perform the manual realignment that Borman had hoped to avoid, resetting the inertial measuring unit so it knew exactly what attitude they were at that moment. Lovell looked out the window at the sun-washed sky and tried to identify a bright star in its constellation. Then he manually fired the thrusters to place this star in his sextant.
With a field of view of only 1.8 degrees, however, the sextant could not show him the entire constellation. Lovell could only guess that he had the right star in sight. After ten minutes, with Borman and Anders growing increasingly anxious, he managed finally to align Rigel and Sirius. After another fifteen minutes of tweaking, he was able to reset the computer so that it once again knew the craft’s orientation in space.
Borman asked Collins if there was “any danger that this might have screwed up any other part of memory that would be involved with entry?” Collins told him no, but that the ground would keep checking.
Jim “Shaky” Lovell looked at his two partners with a sheepish grin and said, “Don’t sweat it.”*
*Ironically, Lovell was forced to repeat this unplanned manual emergency procedure once again during Apollo 13. On that flight, an explosion forced them to once again turn off the I.M.U. to save power, and Lovell and Fred Haise had to make a rough realignment using the sun and the earth. As Lovell notes today, “My training [on Apollo 8] came in handy!” See Lovell, 283-284.
Borman went back to sleep. Anders took over the controls again. Collins asked if Bill wanted him to pipe up music from the tapes Anders had provided the ground. “Go ahead,” he said.
Suddenly he was listening to a choir singing “Joy to the World.” He floated there for two minutes, captivated by the music. The choir began its second song, “O Holy Night.” Anders was so mesmerized that he forgot to change antennas. As the spacecraft rotated in its “barbecue mode,” he needed to periodically flip a switch to maintain communications with the ground.
As the active antenna rotated behind the capsule, the choir’s voices began to distort and warble into incomprehensibility. Anders felt a prickly feeling at the back of his neck, not aware at first what was happening. It seemed to him as if everything were suddenly grinding to a halt, as if the powerful religious music of his world had no power over the vast universe he was now traversing.
Then he remembered the antenna and flipped the switch. The music came back clear and in its full glory. To Anders, however, he would never again hear that music without a prickly feeling at the back of his neck, and without wondering at the validity of the words.
More time passed. As Ken Mattingly noted to Borman late that evening, “We’re in a period of relaxed vigilance.”
Borman responded, “We’ll relax; you be vigilant.”
Mattingly laughed. “That’s a fair trade.”
* * *
On Thursday morning Jerry Carr opened the day with another daily news report, describing how, at the suggestion of Susan Borman, the families of the Apollo 8 astronauts had sent a prayer of thanksgiving to Pueblo Captain Lloyd Bucher and his wife. Carr also described how Bob Hope was once again entertaining the troops stationed in Vietnam, and how a so-called “gang” of high school teenagers in Ann Arbor, Michigan had gotten together secretly to cut through red tape and do good. Calling themselves the “Guerrillas for Good,” Carr described how the youths had painted a bridge covered with obscenities, cleaned up trash along a river bed, and boarded up a condemned house.
In the afternoon, the astronauts gave their final in-space telecast, aiming the camera out the window to give the people of earth another view of themselves. It was obvious the home planet was slowly growing larger. The South American continent as well as Florida and the Caribbean could be seen under the swirls of clouds.
Watching this show from the control room was Marilyn Lovell and her two oldest children, Barbara and Jay. Barbara had been bothered the day before with what they all described as a twenty-four hour virus, though she felt well enough to come to mission control and see her father in space. In less than twenty-four hours the spacecraft would slam into the atmosphere, and Marilyn was beginning to feel increasingly tense once again as splashdown approached. It was the last hurdle she had to face.
Lovell stared at the approaching earth and couldn’t help reflecting again on how tiny it seemed. “The earth looks pretty small right from here.”
Bill Anders added his own thoughts. “As I look down on the earth here from so far out in space, I think I must have the feeling that the travelers in the old sailing ships used to have, going on a long voyage from home. And now that we’re headed back, I have the feeling of being proud of the trip but still happy to be going home.”
The televised view of an approaching earth, December 26, 1968.
Anders pondered his home world. To him, this was the most significant thing he had discovered on this journey to another planet. While the goal had been to explore the moon, he had found that the earth was by far more interesting. He was once again struck by its fragility, its smallness, and its jewel- like preciousness.
Valerie Anders was home during this show. Seeing that steadily increasing earth and hearing Bill talk about coming home made her “feel really good.” While the astronauts were spending much of their day packing up for reentry, she had been doing the same, running errands about the house while listening to the squawk box.
A 70mm still picture of the same approaching earth, December 26, 1968. The bright hazy glow in the
center of the blue ocean is a reflection of the sun off the ocean and atmosphere.
Soon after, during a press briefing on her front lawn, the reporters asked her what she was doing with her day. Unable to think of anything interesting to tell them, she began to kid them with a silly story about how she had spent the entire day trying to set her hair. “The beauty shop is closed,” she told them with a grin.233Ridiculous on its face, the story was even more absurd because her hair was naturally curly and she rarely had to do much with it. She thought they got the joke.
Unfortunately, one newsman didn’t get it, and the next day newspapers across America described how Valerie Anders had spent her entire day setting her hair.
Susan Borman also spent most of Thursday listening to the squawk box and cleaning the house. Faye Stafford had offered to come over to help Susan before and during splashdown. Though the boys had volunteered to go pick her up, they had disappeared early that morning in Fred’s car. Susan had no idea where they had gone, and eventually she sent someone else to get Faye.
When the boys finally turned up several hours later, Susan was startled to see fifteen-year-old Ed with a cast on his right thumb. “What happened to you?” she asked.
Ed shrugged. Late the night before, after his mother had gone to bed, he and Fred had gotten into a teenage fight in the bathroom. Ed had taken a swing at his older brother and hit him in the head. Instantly he felt something snap in his thumb.
Abruptly the fight ended, and the two boys became the best of friends. They couldn’t let their mother know what had happened. For the rest of the night Ed sat in a chair in his bedroom, nursing his hand and keeping quiet. Just before dawn he and his brother got into Fred’s car and drove to NASA where they had the hand X-rayed and a temporary cast put on.
Susan could only laugh. Knowing how distracted she was, they had simply taken care of the problem without her. How blessed could a mo
ther be? she thought.
Once back from the doctor, the boys immediately changed into their hunting clothes, grabbed their shotguns, and climbed into Fred’s car to go hunting again. Even with his right thumb in a cast Ed could still pull his gun’s trigger, and they both wanted to get away from the rabble of reporters and visitors that engulfed their house.
Once again Fred gunned the engine as they raced out of El Lago. Once again a bunch of reporters followed in their own cars. Once again the boys drove through NASA to ditch them.
This time, however, the trick didn’t work. Several journalists anticipated the boys and circled around NASA to pick them up as they came out the back entrance. When Fred pulled into their friend’s farm, so did a carload of journalists.
One pointed at Ed’s cast and suggested he fire a round for the camera. Ed, at fifteen a crack shot and an expert hunter, obliged, bagging a field lark at the same time. Then the two boys disappeared into the woods, leaving the reporters behind in the front yard.
* * *
Splashdown was scheduled for an hour before dawn, Pacific time, on Friday, December 27th. This would be the first time NASA had attempted a landing in the dark. When early flight planning had suggested keeping the astronauts in lunar orbit several more hours so that the spacecraft could splash down in daylight, Borman had fought this. “I didn’t want to spend any more time in lunar orbit than absolutely necessary. Any prolonging of the mission simply increased the chances of something going wrong.” When others argued that a night landing meant no one would be able to see problems at splashdown, he countered “What the hell does that matter? If [something] doesn’t work, we’re all dead and it won’t make any difference if nobody can see us.”234
Borman’s nonchalance, however, obscured the radical nature of Apollo 8’s return from the moon. Unlike every other space mission, they were not simply slowing down from earth orbit. Instead, they were falling from an altitude of almost 240,000 miles. At the moment they hit the earth’s atmosphere, their speed would be over 24,500 miles per hour -- a world speed record.
In order to lessen their speed, NASA was going to use a concept called the double skip trajectory. The craft was not aimed at the earth’s dead center, but at its atmospheric edge. Like a stone skipping over the water, the capsule would plow through the upper atmosphere, leap up above it once, than plow back down to fall towards the Pacific Ocean. If the angle of approach was too shallow, however, the spacecraft would bounce out of the atmosphere and fly past the earth, never to return. If the angle of approach was too steep, it would continue to plow downward, burning up in a fiery conflagration.
This approach had only been tried four times before, once by NASA on Apollo 4 and three times by the Soviets with their Zond spacecraft. The Zonds had done it while returning from lunar orbit, but only once had the Soviets managed to make the concept work. NASA’s last attempt at the double skip trajectory had been canceled during the unsuccessful Apollo 6 test flight.
Only minutes before hitting the atmosphere Borman blew the explosive bolts that held the service module to the command module. Though it had put them in lunar orbit and then sent them home, all three men were too busy to notice as it slowly drifted away.
Borman oriented the spacecraft so the rear heat shield faced downward. Out their windows now they could see only sky and the horizon line. And then, six minutes before hitting the atmosphere and just as predicted, the now-distant moon made one final short appearance in Bill Anders' window.
A few minutes later Borman handed the controls over to the computer. Only if things went wrong would he take over and fly the craft manually.
At the same time the astronauts could see a hazy glow building up outside their windows. The spacecraft had finally returned to earth and touched its life-giving atmosphere.
Now, however, that atmosphere was deadly. The heat of reentry would exceed 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
The spacecraft began to grind through the air. The deceleration caused the astronauts to feel something they had not felt in six days: gravity. Because they were flying tail first, it made them all feel like they were lying in their couches upside down.
“Hang on!” cried Borman, as the spacecraft shuddered earthward. “They’re building up!” called Lovell.
“Call out the g’s,” Borman said. In the excitement of reentry, Lovell had forgotten that it was his job to announce the g forces as they increased.
“We're one g,” he now said calmly. This was equivalent to the force of gravity on the surface of the earth.
And then suddenly the pressure increased. “Five!” Lovell shouted.
Twenty more seconds passed. “Six!” he yelled. The astronauts now weighed about a half ton each.
And then the pressure dropped as fast as it had started. The spacecraft was now skipping back out of the earth’s atmosphere. For another minute they rose, the g forces dropped, and then they began falling once more. “Three,” Lovell called out as the g forces built up again.
For five minutes the cone-shaped spacecraft roared through the earth’s atmosphere, flying over more than 1,500 miles of earth terrain. Inside the capsule everything was lit by the soft intense light emitted by the glowing heat shield below them and the bow shock of ionized gas that surrounded them. As expected, their radio communications were now blacked out. To Borman it was being “in a neon tube.”235 Anders could see chunks of the melting heat shield fly past his window. He wondered if too much was breaking off, and if soon he would begin to feel heat against his back.
Three minutes later they dropped below 100,000 feet elevation, and the glow around the spacecraft dissipated enough for them to regain contact with mission control.
At 30,000 feet the computer blew the parachute cover off with a bang, followed immediately with another bang as it released the drogue chutes, small parachutes for stabilizing the craft and cutting its initial high speed in preparation for the main chutes. Seconds later an air vent opened and there was a loud blast of air as the cabin pressure equalized with the earth’s atmosphere.
At 10,000 feet a third bang signaled the release of the main chutes, but in the darkness none of the astronauts could see whether this had actually happened. Like a pilot flying blind and totally dependent on his instruments, Borman noted that according to his display they were now dropping at about twenty-five miles an hour. “We're going down very slow,” he told the rescue helicopter pilot.
Now came their last task. NASA had learned that the Apollo Command module was somewhat top heavy in water, and would tend to float upside down. Furthermore, the parachutes tended to pull the craft sideways, helping to flip it.
In order to prevent this, Borman would cut the parachutes free immediately after splashdown, and then press a switch that would inflate three large balloons stored in the capsule’s nose, keeping the craft right side up.
Unfortunately, the darkness made it impossible for the astronauts to judge when they would hit the water, and the impact was so strong that Borman was staggered. On top of this, he was suddenly dunked by a surge of water, “from where we had no idea.”236 Consequently he released the chutes too late, and the spacecraft was pulled upside down.
As they hung there in their harnesses (with trash that they had stored under their seats raining down upon them), Borman hit the switch to inflate the balloons. After a few minutes the spacecraft flipped upright with a violent bounce.
Now they had to sit and wait for dawn. The Navy had already located them, but could not drop any swimmers into the water until daylight due to sharks. As they sat there Borman found himself quickly getting seasick. As he threw up, his crewmates, both Naval Academy graduates, couldn’t resist making fun of the “West Point ground-pounder.” The commander was no longer in charge, and his two crewmen took full advantage of his miserable condition to tell him about it. As Borman later admitted good-naturedly, his crew “performed admirably after we were on the water, [while] the commander was taking a vacation.”
After a
bout half an hour the sky had brightened enough for divers to hit the water and attach a flotation collar to the capsule. As everyone waited for the hatch to open, someone in a rescue helicopter radioed a question to these three first-time lunar explorers: “Hey, Apollo 8, is the moon made of green cheese?”
“No,” Bill Anders said instantly. “It’s made of American cheese.”
13. THAT WAS THEN
THE SQUARES
Frank Borman stood on a small wooden platform overlooking a gray, eight-foot-high concrete wall. Beyond the wall he could see an open dirt strip filled with rolls of barbed wire and patrolled by machine gun-toting soldiers. Beyond them were gray abandoned buildings, their windows cemented shut.
Scattered along the near side of the wall were plaques. Each commemorated the place where a refugee had died trying to cross the death strip. By now there were over hundred such plaques. One was for Peter Fechter.
The date was February 11, 1969. Twenty years after he had flown into Berlin on a sack of coal, Frank Borman had finally returned to Europe. No longer an unknown cadet attending West Point, he now brought his wife and family with him. And he came as a famous American hero who had helped take the human race to the stars.
In the six weeks since splashdown a lot had happened to Borman, Lovell, and Anders. Within an hour of landing they had been airlifted by helicopter to the U.S.S. Yorktown, where they stepped onto the deck to the cheers of hundreds of Navy sailors. For Borman, the personal satisfaction and exultation reached its peak at this moment. “I wish I could describe the feeling of euphoria I felt,” he said thirty years later. “It was the greatest feeling in the world.”
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