Moon Shot

by Jay Barbree

  During the discussions, Deke asked Jim McDivitt, who had been named the Apollo 8 commander, what he thought about the flight and whether he and his crew were willing to risk it.

  “Jim and his crew had been training hard for that first test of the command and lunar modules in earth orbit,” Deke said. “So he decided not to accept the proposed moon mission, preferring instead to keep training for the mission he was assigned. Jim reasoned that Apollo 7 would have to be perfect; otherwise, Apollo 8 would just be another earth orbit trip, without a lunar module.

  “So I turned to Frank Borman, whom Alan and I had assigned to command Apollo 9—scheduled as a very high earth orbit test of the two modules. The sonofabitch almost turned handsprings when I suggested his crew swap with the Apollo 8 crew and that there was a possibility they would go all the way to the moon. His answer was an overwhelming yes.”

  Because of the uncertainty of the Apollo 7 outcome, Alan Shepard had Borman and crewmates Jim Lovell and Bill Anders working overtime in the Apollo simulator.

  “They had to train for earth orbit, circumlunar and lunar orbit missions so they would be ready for whatever decision was made,” Shepard said. “They were one busy crew.”

  Alan himself thought the idea of sending Apollo 8 to the moon was “a masterful stroke, a stroke of genius.” He wished the mission were his. But because of his ear problem he could only dream.

  Following the tremendous success of Apollo 7, Deke said: “We had a rapid review of all of Apollo 8’s options. We debriefed Wally and his crew for six strenuous days. We reviewed the readiness of the Apollo 8 spacecraft and the Saturn V, of the deep space tracking network. The overwhelming consensus was we should go to the moon, not only go to the moon but orbit the moon.”

  On November 11, the new NASA administrator, Thomas Paine, approved the plan. He telephoned the decision to the White House, and Lyndon Johnson gave his blessing.

  It was the single greatest gamble in space flight then, and since.

  Time was important. Only a year remained before the end of the decade, and there was still the threat of a Soviet circumlunar flight. So, in spite of the approaching holidays, the first manned Saturn V, as large and as heavy as a U.S. Navy destroyer, heaved upward slowly, then faster and faster away from earth.

  The mighty rocket burned perfectly through its three stages and sent Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders winging away from their planet at 24,200 miles an hour on the morning of December 21, 1968. Jim Lovell sent a cryptic message back to Mission Control. “Tell Conrad he lost his record.”

  That was the height of 850 miles Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon had reached in their agile Gemini spacecraft. The new record would be on the order of 240,000 miles.

  Zond was left standing on the launch pad in the Soviet Union. Bitterness replaced the usual holiday round of vodka and cognac toasts.

  There was another message recorded this day when Lev Kamanin, top aide to Kremlin space officials and the son of the chief of cosmonaut training, wrote in his diary:

  For us this [day] is darkened with the realization of lost opportunities and with sadness that today the men flying to the moon are named Borman, Lovell, and Anders, and not Bykovsky, Popovich, or Leonov.

  No matter how well he had said it, Kamanin’s sentiment was not the end of Russian efforts to reach the moon. Despite failures with their big rockets, the cosmonauts would continue to try.

  But for the moment a marvelous product of science, technology, and engineering was on its way to the moon. The Block II Apollo command module created from the ashes of Apollo 1, crammed with instrumentation and equipment, moved swiftly toward lunar orbit.

  It was Christmas Eve, and Apollo 8 would soon reach a point where a final decision would be made about whether to maneuver the craft into lunar orbit.

  The three men in Apollo 8 did not know if they would be spending Christmas in lunar orbit, or retreating from that long-sought goal and returning to earth after one trip to the far side of the moon. In any event the flight would be a smashing success and would kick open the door to future manned exploration of our solar system, but everyone in NASA and the vast audience of the nation wanted Apollo 8 to go all the way.

  Mission Control needed to decide if the big engine in the service module at the base of Apollo 8 was to be fired or to remain quiescent. If all systems aboard Apollo looked good to those in Houston, then Borman and his crew would receive the green light to fire the rocket that would slow their ship down and slide it into lunar orbit.

  There were other considerations, each of which was absolutely critical not only to the mission plans but also to the lives of the three men. To slip the Apollo 8 into the desired orbit, its engine had to fire at full thrust for precisely 247 seconds. Following shutdown, the astronauts would use their altitude-control thrusters to point the nose of their ship in the direction of flight. If the engine burn faltered or failed early, the astronauts would soar past the moon on a flight path that would not return them to earth. If the engine burned too long, the spacecraft would not achieve its desired orbit and would speed downward to smash into the moon.

  Despite all the circuitry and igniters and redundancy built into the systems, rocket engines sometimes do not fire. If the big engine failed to ignite altogether, Apollo 8 would be perfectly safe. It would swing around the far side of the moon, curving in its sharp orbit as if it were a celestial boomerang and, without expending an ounce of fuel the astronauts would be on their way home. This was NASA’s best of all insurance policies and a fact of centrifugal flight that clearly brought feelings of comfort to the astronauts and their families, and everyone else as well. This was the “Free Return Trajectory” inserted into the mission profile computer.

  In Mission Control, every monitoring panel was “in the green.” Apollo 8 was right on the money for its planned trajectory, and all spacecraft systems, monitored by radio signals constantly sending reports back to Houston, also glowed green.

  Borman, Lovell, and Anders prepared for any contingency. Apollo 8 was about to disappear behind the mountain—fly above the side of the moon facing away from Earth, and signals between Earth and spacecraft would be blocked for more than twenty minutes.

  CapCom Jerry Carr received the nod to send the message everyone had crossed fingers to hear. “Ten seconds to go,” he signaled Apollo 8. His message, traveling at the speed of light, needed one and a third seconds to reach the spacecraft. “You are GO all the way.”

  Jim Lovell’s voice, incredibly calm, came through headsets and speakers in Houston, “We’ll see you on the other side.” With those words Apollo 8 vanished.

  Behind the mass of the moon it was as if Apollo 8 and its three men did not exist. There was no way to communicate with the spacecraft. No telemetry signals could be received. The mission had gone quiet.

  At the precise moment dictated by its flight plan, the big engine fired in a soundless crash. For 247 seconds the engine blazed, a time period Lovell described as the “longest four minutes I’ve ever spent.”

  It was a splendid and epochal moment. Sixty-nine hours and fifteen minutes after throwing off its shackles from the launch pad, Apollo 8 locked into lunar orbit.

  No one on earth knew that this had happened. This was a time of cliff-hanging suspense, a time to count the minutes and seconds that must pass before Apollo 8 emerged from the lunar back side to where it could send the desperately hoped-for signal of success. Jerry Carr kept up a persistent call of “Apollo 8 . . . Apollo 8 . . . Apollo 8 . . . ”

  After what seemed an eternity of intense clock-watching, headsets and speakers crackled. Smooth and calm as always came the voice of Jim Lovell:

  “Go ahead, Houston.”

  Those three words—coming just at the instant they should have— sent Mission Control into a bedlam of cheering, whistling, shouting, and applause. Electronic signals flashed their message on the big viewing board. The Apollo 8 was in an orbit 60 by 168.5 miles above the moon. Later, on the third loop around the
moon, the craft’s main engine fired again and dropped the ship into the desired, nearly circular orbit of 60.7 by 59.7 miles.

  But at the moment a thrilled global audience was waiting for the real story from space. It had nothing to do with numbers, velocity, or the technical details of the spacecraft, or its parameters of celestial balance around the moon. The interest of those on earth lay in one predominant direction:

  What did it look like?

  “Essentially gray, no color,” reported lunar tour guide Jim Lovell, the first man ever to hold that job. He described the surface as “like plaster of Paris or a sort of grayish beach sand.” In the first of two telecasts from lunar orbit, the astronauts relayed vivid pictures of a wild and wondrous landscape pitted with massive craters. “It looks like a vast, lonely, forbidding place, an expanse of nothing . . . clouds of pumice stone,” Borman said. Lovell saw the distant Earth as “a grand oasis in the big vastness of space.” Anders added, “You can see the moon has been bombarded through the eons with numerous meteorites. Every square inch is pockmarked.” Of the backside, Anders said most of it was too rugged for a manned landing. “It looks like a sand pile my kids have been playing in for a long time.”

  Lovell spoke eloquently. “The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on earth.”

  Christmas Eve was like none other in the long history of celebrating that occasion. While millions of people brought families together in homes throughout the planet, the three men orbiting the moon continued taking sharp motion pictures and hundreds of clear color photographs that would later enable them to share with those on earth their fabulous adventure.

  Then Bill Anders spoke, not just to CapCom, to all the world listening to his words from so far away. “For all the people on earth,” he said, his emotions unmasked, “the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you.” A brief pause, and then Anders stunned his audience as he began reading from the verses of the book of Genesis:

  “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth . . . ” As Anders concluded the fourth verse, Lovell read the next four. Borman concluded by beginning his reading of the ninth verse, and then sent to the world a special Christmas message:

  “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good earth.”

  Later, Borman would add a passage that would be repeated by the men who would venture to the moon, words spoken with stark emotion, sometimes with tears. As Apollo raced around the cratered world below, Borman watched the earth “rising” above the lunar horizon. “This is the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life.”

  Suddenly the concept of manned spaceflight clearly would never again be the same. The moon with its view of the distant, soft blue marble of life had become host to poets in spacesuits.

  There was more work to do. The crew searched for and snapped hundreds of photographs of five landing sites under consideration for future Apollo missions, when men would descend to and walk and ride about that battered surface.

  Then, all too soon, it had to end. Early in the morning of Christmas Day, Apollo 8 curled around the moon on its tenth and final orbit, again out of radio contact for the critical firing that would either start them on their journey home or leave them stranded in lunar orbit. At the scheduled moment Borman, Lovell, and Anders felt the flaring engine bell hurl forth a long stream of flame, emitting a wide plume of glowing plasma gas behind the engine.

  On the 304th second the engine shut down, right on the mark.

  The seconds dragged by maddeningly slowly for those who were members of a worldwide radio and television audience, as well as for those biting their nails in Mission Control. It was like a bad dream in which the dreamer is in quicksand, fighting for every step.

  Finally, they heard Lovell’s voice:

  “Please be informed there is a Santa Claus. The burn was good.”

  It was better than that. After twenty glorious hours in lunar orbit, Apollo 8 was on the way home with unerring precision, “right down the corridor,” the mathematical tunnel down which it had to continue to fly so it would reach a point four hundred thousand feet above the earth, at an exact angle, altitude, and speed to begin reentry with a rush greater than any man had ever known.

  Fifty-eight hours after leaving the moon, Earth used its gravity to drag Apollo 8 back into the atmosphere at twenty-five thousand miles an hour. The fastest spacecraft ever then began a brief life as a man-made meteor. Temperatures soared to what could be found on the surface of a star. Plunging downward with their backs to their line of flight, the astronauts knew their existence now depended upon how well their ship had been built.

  No one saw Apollo 8 hurtling through Earth’s layers of protecting atmosphere. Only fire could be seen, intense, blinding white flame with an outer red sheath, a streamer of fire 125 miles long!

  Apollo 8 traded off its tremendous speed for heat. The more fire flowing from the heat shield, the slower flew the spaceship. Then they were through the inferno of reentry. Two miles above the Pacific Ocean, just before dawn, in sight of—appropriately—Christmas Island, three large parachutes streamed away from the ship, opened partially for deceleration, then blossoming wide and full.

  Splashdown, recovery, and return to thundering ovations. The world cheered, knew it never again would view the earth without an awareness of its beauty and fragility.

  Three citizens of the planet had just completed what the New York Times described as a “fantastic odyssey.”

  The road to the moon had been opened.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Getting There, Getting Back

  LOOK AT THIS SONOFABITCH!” The CIA satellite photograph specialist scanned images of the Soviet Union’s Baikonur Cosmodrome. “Look at this thing,” he told his colleague as they studied the computer-enhanced picture of a huge rocket. “It’s bigger than our Saturn V, and the damned thing sure is a lot more powerful. You have those data reports ready?”

  “Right here,” came the reply. Everything began to dovetail into a clearer understanding of what was under accelerated drive deep inside the steppes of central Asia. The photographs showed a rocket standing taller than a football field is long—as high as a thirty-seven-story building. Information gathered by intelligence agents added to the growing detail. The official title for the powerful monster was N-1, and it had one specific job. Get cosmonauts to the moon. Get them on its surface. Get them there and back before American astronauts.

  It was early 1969. Much of the Russian space program was shredding. Boosters rushed to flight readiness had proven to be unreliable and exploded on launch stands or in the air. The high-powered Zond program had been abandoned in the wake of Apollo 8. No need anymore for such a flight. Landing on the moon was the only mission that would count.

  “You know what this means?” the CIA analyst told his colleague. “They’re going for the brass ring. If this mother works, they might still beat us to the surface of the moon.”

  His colleague nodded, “Especially if we fail suddenly.”

  “Well, that’s NASA’s job. Not ours. Let’s get these photos over to them.” He added: “We’ll keep our recon going over that launch site. If they get that monster flying, they won’t be sleeping much at NASA.”

  The now familiar countdown procedure came to life at Baikonur for the first N-1 unmanned test launch. Delays came and went, expected with so powerful and complex a booster. The moment of launch ground inexorably toward the long-awaited cry of Ignition!

  At 12:18 P.M. Moscow time on February 21, 1969, engineers, technicians, controllers, and cosmonauts watched in awe as thirty powerful engines lit off. A Niagara of dazzling flame spewed down the curving flame trenches, sent fire whipping across steel and concrete.

  The largest rocket ever built blasted free of its launch pad, heaving upward on ten million pounds of thrust. If this flight proved successful, the Russians were
prepared to speed up their program to land at least one man, possibly two, on the lunar surface before the Americans could set sail.

  N-1 hurled back a torrent of flame. Just as it cleared its support tower, engines number 12 and 14 “went dark”—their fuel shut off by an internal computer that sensed something wrong. Still N-1 accelerated, pushing into the area of maximum aerodynamic pressure. Right on schedule the twenty-eight remaining engines throttled back to reduce the shock waves of Max-Q. Then the booster was through the “shock barrier.” At sixty-six seconds from liftoff the engines throttled back up to full power.

  Instead of a smooth transition back to maximum energy, the engines kicked to full bore with tremendous vibration. The huge rocket shuddered and rattled so violently a liquid oxygen line came apart. Super cold liquid oxygen poured downward within the clustered rockets.

  Fires grew. Engines overheated. Computer safeties failed.

  Oxidized by the liquid oxygen, the fires spread faster and faster. Engines exploded. Turbo-pumps tore themselves to blazing wreckage in the death knell of the world’s mightiest rocket.

  High above the erupting flames and explosion, the escape tower attached to the unmanned spacecraft intended to circle the moon snatched it away from the fireball filling the sky.

  A terrible eye of red flames appeared in the heavens, expanded in an instant to a flowering rose, and tore N-l into tumbling, burning junk.

  The wreckage fell thirty miles from the launch pad. In the stratosphere, where N-l had met its enemy of aerodynamic pressure, flame still billowed and writhed, lofting upward in a mushroom cloud with a killer stalk and the final gasp of a dying colossus.

  In launch control, there was no need to say what was obvious to all.

  It would now take a miracle to keep Soviet Russia in the race to be the first to place men on the lunar surface.

  Of all the people on the NASA team with a sense of unshakable confidence in the future, few could match the drive of Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard. From day one of the long journey from Project Mercury to the planned lunar landings, they had never faltered in their support of all members of the NASA teams. Through successes and disasters, through triumphs and tragedies, through their own extremely disappointing groundings, they had only one goal. And there was no turning back.