Moon Shot

by Jay Barbree

  The robots circled and landed on the moon, dug into its surface, photographed potential astronaut landing sites, and proved conclusively the moon was a safe place to visit.

  There was more good news for NASA as 1967 drew to a close. Von Braun’s massive Saturn V rocket, thirty-six stories tall with power in the first stage alone greater than that of five hundred jet fighter planes, had a spectacularly successful debut in November, hurling into orbit an unmanned Apollo craft, a dummy lunar module, and other attached equipment weighing a phenomenal 280,036 pounds, more than the combined weight of all the more than 350 satellites launched previously by the United States.

  Many hurdles lay ahead, but the Apollo program had passed a major milestone, and NASA was feeling pretty good about itself.

  Rocco Petrone, the launch operations director who presided over the launch, said, “I feel that the Saturn V, working the way it did, spacecraft and all, got us back in the right swing, where the American public and Congress could say, ‘Yeah, those guys can do it.’”

  Von Braun was ecstatic. “I have always dreamed of a rocket which we could use to explore the solar system,” he said. “Now we have that rocket.”

  Two months later, another major piece of Apollo hardware, the lunar module, the craft that would ferry two men to the moon’s surface, was successfully tested in earth orbit.

  NASA was definitely on the way back, and Jim Webb, at age sixty-two, felt it was time to move on. A presidential election was coming up. Lyndon Johnson, besieged by many problems, had said he would not seek reelection, and Webb said he was stepping down to smooth the transition to a new administration. Thomas O. Paine, Webb’s recently named deputy, was appointed acting administrator and later was designated head of the agency by the new president, Richard M. Nixon.

  “Webb was the glue that held it all together,” Deke Slayton commented. “Without him we would have lost Project Apollo after the fire.”

  On October 11, 1968, a Saturn 1B rocket spewed bright orange flames as it lifted Apollo 7 into orbit. Halfway through the powered ascent on the first manned flight of Project Apollo, and the first manned liftoff for the Saturn 1B, Commander Wally Schirra radioed back, “She’s riding like a dream.”

  The crew of Schirra, Walt Cunningham, and Donn Eisele lofted into an elliptical orbit of 140 by 183 miles high. The first American flight with three astronauts was underway for a mission of eleven days during which, in the words of NASA’s Sam Phillips, “the ghost of Apollo 1 was effectively exorcised as the new Block II spacecraft and its millions of parts performed superbly.”

  The astronauts tested the spacecraft’s systems, conducted experiments, beamed the first extensive live television scenes from a manned orbiting vehicle to fascinated audiences around the world, and flew their ship longer than would be required for a trip to the moon and back.

  They were impressed with the size of the ship relative to the cramped cabins of the Mercury and Gemini, which had confined the astronauts to their seats. The Apollo 7 crew could unstrap themselves and move around the cabin. If they wanted privacy, they could float into a closet-size area beneath the seats, which on later flights would serve as sleeping quarters.

  The flight encountered only minor problems, and they were quickly resolved.

  The biggest problem Mission Control had was with the crew. All three had nasty colds and were orbiting their world with stuffy noses. As the mission neared its end, the astronauts were in something less than the best of tempers and they became irritable.

  The complaints started with the food and reached a peak on the ninth day when controllers decided to try some unplanned systems checks. The three astronauts reacted less than graciously, and read the riot act to the engineers for requesting these “Mickey Mouse tasks,” which they classed as “ill-prepared and hastily conceived.” Schirra shouted that the controller who had thought up one of the tests was an “idiot” and refused to accept any more changes.

  Tempers were at their worst when it came time to start home. Schirra told his crew that they would make the reentry without their pressure helmets on. He was concerned that because of the colds, any sudden overpressure could damage their eardrums and cause other problems. Deke Slayton got on the loop to try to persuade them to wear the helmets, but that didn’t cut any ice with Wally. He was in command of the spacecraft, and the pilot flying the machine always has the ultimate responsibility.

  The behavior of the Apollo 7 crew, particularly of Schirra, made a lot of people on the ground angry. Back on earth, Wally received a tongue-lashing from Deke Slayton about the behavior of his crew. Cunningham, who had been making his first flight and felt he had to go along with his commander during the mission, summed up his feelings when he wrote later that “the entire Apollo 7 crew was tarred and feathered through the actions of Wally Schirra.”

  But Wally was too busy to be concerned about the complaints. Before the flight he had announced he would be retiring from the astronaut corps, and he didn’t care what anyone thought. He and the others plunged into six days of intense debriefings to help prepare for the next flight—Apollo 8.

  To Wally, only results counted. He was the only astronaut who had flown in all three of America’s pioneering manned space programs—Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo—and even though their refusal to follow orders in orbit, together with Schirra’s retirement, meant none of the Apollo 7 crew would fly in space again, Wally knew that because of their performance in Apollo 7 the first lunar Christmas was just around the corner.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Apollo 8: First Around the Moon

  APOLLO 8 COMMANDER FRANK BORMAN was emerging from a deep sleep, and he resisted the wakefulness that tugged at him.

  Where am I?

  He lay absolutely still, suspended in what seemed like nothingness. Was he floating in water? Submerged, arms and legs suspended? But he was breathing normally, so this couldn’t be water.

  He refused to open his eyes. Sounds came to him, trickling, murmuring, whispering.

  There, a hum, soft but persistent. Faster and faster he recognized specific sounds. He knew the wheezing, a bubbling mechanical brook from the clicking he heard.

  Slowly he opened his eyes and focused his vision on the glowing circles of red, green, yellow, pale white before him. Numbers, letters, circles, squares, buttons, controls, dials.

  I know where I am now. I’m two hundred thousand miles from home . . . .

  He grasped the edge of a long fabric strip and pulled free the Velcro that had kept his body from floating away from his spacecraft couch. He glanced at the two other astronauts in the cabin with him, both still asleep. He smiled. He liked the thought of a few moments to himself. He leaned to one side and eased back the curtain covering a flat viewing window.

  Awe and wonder swept through him. Apollo 8 was turning slowly so that the radiation heat from the nearest star, Earth’s sun would be distributed evenly around the external surface of the three-man spaceship. A bright sphere eased into view, the steely glint of Jupiter resplendent in reflected solar glow.

  Suddenly, the earth appeared before him. Not a vast horizon curving gently away from sight, but the whole globe, dominant with blue seas and white clouds, with bountiful rain forests and mountains rising above the surface. From here, as they eased toward the moon, the earth was perfectly round, machined by heavenly forces to a stunning sphere.

  Apollo rolled, and the home of man slid eerily, silently, out of sight.

  Tomorrow would be Christmas Eve. That Borman and his crew were here seemed impossible. They had left earth atop America’s largest rocket. The mightiest energy machine ever built to lift straight up and away from the deep gravitational well of the planet. A monster of steel and ice and fire atop which no man had ever before flown—and they were risking everything to fly to the moon.

  It was a gamble like few others known in history. The mighty rocket, the Saturn V, had flown only twice before. Unmanned. First successfully, second with some failures.

/>   The three astronauts within the cone-shaped, tiny world of Apollo 8 had the largest audience in television history. More than a half billion people watched television sets that carried sights they had never before seen and could hardly still believe.

  Live views of their homes from a spacecraft more than halfway to the moon. Frank Borman acted as tour guide, describing Earth’s features. “What you’re seeing is the Western Hemisphere,” he said in a voice so matter-of-fact he might have been pointing out the Grand Canyon to the passengers of an airliner. “In the center, just lower to the center, is South America, all the way down to Cape Horn. I can see Baja California and the southwestern part of the United States.”

  Alongside him, crewmate Jim Lovell joined in. “For colors, the waters are all sorts of royal blue. Clouds are bright white. The land areas are generally brownish to light brown in texture.” His audience two hundred thousand miles away appreciated the touch of the color artist—television from deep space was still in black-and-white.

  Then Lovell gave listeners something to think about. “What I keep imagining,” he said in a tone reflecting his own deep thoughts on the matter, “is if I’m some lonely traveler from another planet, what I’d think of Earth at this altitude . . . whether I’d think it would be inhabited or not.”

  The sudden somber mood broke when Mike Collins, CapCom in Houston’s Mission Control, broke the spell. “You don’t see anybody waving, do you?”

  The third man in the Apollo, Bill Anders, was content at the moment to stare in wonder at the distant, fragile world with an onionskin-thin layer of atmosphere, which gave life to teeming billions on that resplendent, terribly isolated globe.

  The transmission ended when Mission Control returned the astronauts to their duties aboard Apollo 8. Minutes later the spaceship slipped through an invisible veil between the planet and its satellite, the equigravisphere, the celestial twilight zone where the moon’s gravity now dominated the continued flight of Apollo. Until this moment Apollo had been “coasting uphill” against Earth’s gravitational pull, almost as if the planet wished the craft to remain within its grasp. Now less than forty thousand miles from the moon, that sphere’s gravitational attraction exceeded that of distant Earth.

  Once Apollo began to accelerate in response to the moon’s pull, the mission took another giant step toward fulfillment. They would pick up speed and swoop into an orbit around the moon.

  America watched and listened, rejoiced and celebrated a feat that promised to be one of mankind’s truly prodigious steps into the future.

  But not everyone shared the rejoicing. Many on Earth were asking: “Why are they going to the moon during Christmas? Why couldn’t they have flown the mission after the holidays?”

  The astronauts of Apollo 8 knew the answer.

  Zond.

  Years before, the Russians had sent a series of robot ships to the moon to take photographs of the lunar surface and to perform an extensive variety of experiments that would prepare the way for cosmonauts.

  America had its super booster in the Saturn V. Russia had its super booster in its massive N-1 rocket. But whereas Saturn V had progressed under Wernher von Braun, the Soviet super booster program had stalled.

  Test-flight delays had the N-1 chained to the ground, so the Russians regrouped and prepared several Soyuz spacecraft and a small fleet of tanker craft to be launched into earth orbit with their smaller R-7 rocket. Moscow urged its top rocket man, Sergei Korolev, to beat America to the moon. Korolev had launched the first satellite, and the Russians wanted the world to see the earth first through the eye of Russian television cameras and hear the excited voices of Russian cosmonauts singing from the tops of lunar mountains.

  The plan was for Korolev and his team to send five unmanned tanker craft into earth orbit, each filled with rocket fuel. A group of cosmonauts would follow, gather the tankers like a flock of giant orbiting sheep, and herd them together into a single conglomerate—a lunar vessel of one manned spacecraft and the five fuel tanks. Simple and yet demanding, it would give the Russians a clear shot of beating the United States to a lunar landing.

  That was their dream, their rallying cry. They brought their new Soyuz spacecraft to its launch pad to rehearse the rendezvous in orbit, docking, and space walking maneuvers that would be required to get to the moon.

  Then Vladimir Komarov died in Soyuz 1, delaying Soviet plans.

  Korolev’s team regrouped again. They began modifying the Soyuz spacecraft so it could carry one or two cosmonauts on a single pass around the moon’s far side and a quick trip back to earth.

  This would not be a landing, but it would be the first manned flight to the vicinity of the moon, and the Soviets would then crow that they had indeed beaten the Americans to that treasured goal.

  They named the new, modified ship Zond, and in September 1968 they used a heavy-lift Proton rocket—smaller than the N-l but larger than the R-7—to send an unmanned Zond around the moon and back.

  Next they loaded a Zond with tortoises, flies, and worms, and in November sent it on a flight around the moon and brought the living creatures safely back to earth in what the CIA and other world intelligence agencies believed was the final dress rehearsal for the Soviets’ world-beating, manned circumlunar flight.

  But American intelligence was wrong. Russian officials wanted more tests, wanted more confidence in the reliability of the rocket and the spacecraft before committing a human being to such a risky undertaking. The cosmonauts fought to go.

  Moscow refused to budge until more proving flights could be made. The moon must wait. There was still time to claim the prize. The Americans could stumble.

  In mid-1968, intelligence agencies made NASA aware of the Zond Project and indicated if all went well the Soviets could dispatch a single cosmonaut on a circumlunar journey in December or January. The fact the Russians couldn’t land a man on the moon would not stop them from claiming they had reached that target first.

  The U.S. officials, hoping to fulfill the promise of John F. Kennedy, saw failure before them. Jim Webb, then the NASA administrator, told President Lyndon Johnson it was time for America to gamble, to consider putting astronauts on the next Saturn V rocket, the behemoth’s first manned flight, and send them all the way to the moon aboard Apollo 8.

  Some rocket experts at first scoffed at the plan, arguing that NASA was insane to commit human lives to such a flight so soon. On its last test flight, they pointed out, the Saturn V had suffered severe vibration problems, and three of its eleven engines had failed. The agency, they said, should stick to its orderly plan of using the Saturn V to send the Apollo command and lunar modules into earth orbit for tests, and then fly a lunar orbit mission, followed by a journey to land two men on the surface. There was still time to do all that and achieve the Kennedy goal before the end of 1969.

  Webb told the outgoing president that it was the consensus of NASA engineers that they had corrected the Saturn V vibration problems, and that there was no need for an additional unmanned test. The Apollo 8 was to have been a test of the command and lunar modules in earth orbit, but the lunar module was behind schedule, and would not be ready for testing in space for several months. A moon flight now could provide valuable knowledge about navigating to and around the moon, perhaps hasten a lunar landing.

  Johnson saw the possibility of American astronauts reaching the moon—at least orbiting it—before his watch was over. He gave Webb the green light to continue planning for such a momentous mission and told him that he would support whatever final decision NASA made.

  The idea for sending Apollo 8 to the moon had been hatched a few weeks earlier at a meeting in Houston. Deke Slayton had been among those there.

  “George Low was the spacecraft program manager, and one afternoon he was talking with Bob Gilruth and asked him what could be done about getting around that particular problem with the lunar module,” Slayton recalled. “They called in me and Chris Kraft to discuss it. Low asked if there were somet
hing we could do with the Apollo 8 command module. During a recent vacation, while sitting on the beach, George had thought about sending Apollo 8 on a circumlunar trip. He asked us if that would be possible.

  “Remember now, we had not yet flown Apollo 7, had not flown a manned command module, and the last time we had flown the Saturn V it had almost come unglued because of the vibration problem. Shit, we didn’t even have the software to fly Apollo in earth orbit, much less to the moon. It was still being developed.

  “Chris was very surprised at this bold suggestion,” Deke said. “He looked at Low and said, ‘Good God, George, I don’t see how we could do that.’ I was very excited about the possibility, but, like Chris, I was very skeptical.

  “George said he didn’t expect an answer right away, that we should think about it awhile,” Deke continued. “Chris called in his brains, and Alan and I talked the idea over with some of the astronauts. Al and some of the guys were really excited. After thinking about it for three days, we thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Chris suggested that as long as we’re going all the way to the moon, we might as well orbit it, not just pass by. We thought it was worth a shot.”

  There were naysayers, among them Jim Webb. But eventually all the key players became converts. But it all depended upon a successful flight by Wally Schirra’s Apollo 7 crew in October.