Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (13 page)

Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

Tags: #History, #United States, #20th Century, #test

 

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her two older boys, eleven-year-old Alan and ten-year-old Glen, couldn't resist talking with the reporters and getting their pictures taken.
As with every astronaut wife, she had been assigned a NASA press liaison to schedule press conferences. Soon after the spacecraft left earth orbit she went outside to answer questions, giving them what she called the standard "courageous astronaut wife" answers. Nonetheless, her own exuberance came out. "It was about the greatest thing I've ever seen," she told reporters.
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She spent the rest of the day in her home. By that Saturday evening Valerie had to get away. Her next door neighbors, astronaut Charlie Duke and his wife, Dorothy, were holding a Christmas eggnog party to celebrate the completion of their new house. Duke had been selected as an astronaut in 1966 and was now settling into the Houston community. Leaving her kids in the charge of her au pair, she snuck out her back door and slipped across the driveway into the Dukes. Once there she joined the party for an hour or so, drinking eggnog and chatting with Mike Collins and Jerry Carr about how well the flight was going.
Then she went home to put her kids to bed and go to sleep. As she lay in bed alone she listened to a special "squawk box" that NASA had installed in her bedroom. This box, placed in all the astronauts' homes, was linked directly to mission control, and allowed her to hear the ground-to-capsule communications.
Valerie had always been a good sleeper, and had thought the astronauts' voices would lull her to sleep. Instead, their talk fueled the high she had been on all day, and she lay there listening with endless interest.
Finally she turned the box off. In the silence of her bedroom she drifted quietly to sleep.
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In Florida, Marilyn Lovell had watched the launch with exhilaration. She held her youngest son Jeffrey, almost three, and tilted her head back as the Saturn V climbed into the air. As Jim had predicted, the rocket slid slightly to the side before it cleared the tower, then rose majestically on a pillar of

 

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smoke and fire. Then the sound wave hit her, and the noise was so loud it sounded like the staccato distortion on a overloaded sound speaker.
Because she had watched other live launches with Jim, including the Apollo 7 launch two months earlier, she was prepared for the experience. All she could think about as she watched that rocket rise was how happy her husband must feel, doing what he had always dreamed of doing.
Afterward, the NASA press officer took her to a nearby motel for a poolside press conference, a task she found far more nerve-racking than watching the launch. She was astonished when a reporter asked if Jim was going to name a mountain after her.
How on earth did they find out about that?
she thought to herself. She told the reporters to ask Jim about it when he got into lunar orbit. She and the kids then returned to their beachside cottage, where a crowd of friends and relatives had gathered with food and champagne.
By the end of the day she was exhausted. As she lay in bed, she could hear the gentle crash of the ocean waves on the beach. But she had no squawk box, and was out of touch with the one voice she wanted to hear most. Not surprisingly, Marilyn found it difficult to sleep that night.
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By Saturday night the three astronauts had been awake for almost nineteen hours. Frank Borman passed the controls to Bill Anders and went to bed. He slipped into the small space under the three couches and slide into a thin baglike hammock, designed to hold him in place as he slept.
After two hours of sleeplessness, however, he decided to let the ground know about his wish to take a sleeping pill. As was the custom, anytime the astronauts wanted to take any medicine or pills they first cleared it with the doctors on the ground.
The sleeping pill didn't help. Borman dozed, sleeping fitfully.
For five hours Lovell and Anders traded off as pilot. Neither said much. The spacecraft was on course, everything was working, and it was the middle of the night in Houston. It was time for some quiet.
By 1 AM Borman found that not only couldn't he sleep, but he was getting increasingly nauseous and queasy. Suddenly he was retching his guts

 

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out in the lower level of the command module. Floating balls of vomit drifted throughout the cabin. Anders watched in fascination as one particularly large blob, pulsating from spherical to ellipsoid as it glided past, gently splattered itself across Lovell's chest. To avoid the sudden stench, Anders fastened an emergency oxygen mask over his mouth and nose.
Meanwhile Borman was also having an attack of diarrhea, and Lovell and Anders found themselves scrambling about the cabin, trying to capture blobs of feces and vomit with paper towels. So much for the glamour of space flight.
At first Borman was reluctant to bother the ground with the problem. He already felt better, and was convinced that his illness had been caused by the sleeping tablet he had taken. He took the controls so that Lovell and Anders could take their rest breaks. Both had been up for almost twenty-four hours.
Now Anders found that he couldn't sleep. Besides the unpleasant fact that tiny bits of vomit and feces would periodically drift by, he found it difficult to rest in zero gravity. As the flight's rookie, he missed putting his head on a pillow, and every time he began to drift off he would jerk awake, spooked by the feeling that he was falling.
Though Lovell slept better, having been in space twice before, he only got five hours of sleep. As he told Mike Collins that morning, "Oh, you know. The first night in space . . . it's a little slow."
By 7 AM Sunday, the astronauts were all up. Lovell and Anders now finally convinced the commander that they should tell the ground about his stomach problems. To avoid announcing his diarrhea to the entire world, however, the astronauts recorded their report on the in-cabin tape recorder. These tapes were periodically dumped at high speed to the ground and could be reviewed by mission control in private.
Still, they didn't have any way of telling the ground that it was
very important
to listen to the tapes. All they could do was hint broadly that the tape contained some interesting material. Borman asked mission control if they had been reading the tape dumps. "How's the voice quality been?" he asked. Anders suggested that mission control carefully evaluate the voice comments. "You might want to listen to it in real time to evaluate the voice,"

 

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he added twenty-five minutes later when he realized that no one on the ground had yet gotten the hint.
Finally, Houston caught on. Flight Director Charlesworth decided to go to a back room and listen to the tapes. Then he called in Charles Berry, NASA's medical director, to listen as well. They were immediately worried that Borman's illness had been caused by the Van Allen radiation belts that Apollo 8 had passed through on Saturday. Though sensors indicated that the total radiation experienced by the spacecraft appeared to be less than that of a single chest X-ray, no one was exactly sure what effect the belts would have on humans. If all three astronauts began to have the same symptoms, it might become necessary to abort the trip to the moon and bring the astronauts back quickly.
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Mission control actually had two different but identical control rooms. Because the third floor control room being used for Apollo 8 was packed with engineers, visitors, and reporters, all of whom could eavesdrop on the ground-to-capsule communications, Charlesworth, Berry, Mike Collins, and a handful of other individuals moved down to the unused and empty control room on the second floor. There Collins radioed the spacecraft on a private line, and he and Berry discussed the situation with Borman, who not only insisted that he felt fine, but that the other two men felt okay as well. Lovell and Anders had felt a little queasy when they had first gotten out of their spacesuits, but that had passed quickly.
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Borman assumed that he either had had a case of the twenty-four hour flu, or that the Seconal tablet had upset his stomach. All agreed that the mission to the moon should go on.
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That same morning, Susan Borman and her two sons, seventeen-year-old Fred and fifteen-year-old Ed, went to Sunday services at St. Christopher's Episcopal Church.
She hadn't slept much herself, and since launch had attempted to numb her mind to the unfolding events. Soon after blastoff on Saturday she held a press

 

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conference on her front lawn with her sons, her husband's parents, and the family dog Teddy. "I've always been known as a person who had something to say," she told reporters. "Today I'm speechless." To ease her tension she introduced Teddy to the reporters. ''He was right with us all the way," she joked.
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Soon her home was like an open house. People bustled in and out, bringing food, chatting, listening to the squawk box or watching the television together. When Susan needed time alone she went into her bedroom and closed the door for an hour or so, trying to sleep.
About 9:00 PM the house began to clear out and quiet down. Then Susan sat and nibbled on food, had a drink, smoked a cigarette, and listened to the babble between the ground and the astronauts. It relaxed her to hear them talk about routine matters, since this meant that the expected disaster had not yet struck.
She wanted to go outside and look at the moon, but it was cloudy in Houston. While commentators on the television were talking about how people across the nation were gazing at the moon in wonder, she felt frustrated at her inability to see it.
Very early Sunday morning she got a call from the NASA doctors, telling her about Frank's sickness and asking her for her opinion. Did this happen often? How did he handle such illness? Did she think it would incapacitate him?
Susan laughed and told them, "So what? What's the big deal?" Of all her worries, Frank was not one of them. She knew, as she had always known when he was a test pilot, that he would never be the cause of any problem.
Frank would always get it right
, she thought. Her fear was that the equipment would fail.
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Marilyn Lovell meanwhile had returned to Houston, flying back early Sunday morning with the kids.
Almost immediately her home filled with neighbors, astronauts, and wives, all bringing food. She found it hilarious how many showed up at her door with trays of deviled eggs.

 

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At 2:00 PM Sunday afternoon the astronauts were scheduled to hold their first televised press conference in space, preempting Sunday football. By now their tiny spacecraft had climbed more than 138,000 miles into the sky, and though the earth's gravity was steadily pulling at them, they were still moving at more than 3,000 miles per hour.
The black and white camera was small for its day, about the size of a large hardcover book and weighing four and a half pounds. Very similar to the one used on the first manned Apollo mission three months earlier, these were in a sense the world's first hand-held video cameras.
Borman, who had adamantly fought to keep the mission as simple as possible, had tried to keep the camera off as well. He argued that the extra weight was unneeded and that the extra chore of televising press conferences would only distract the astronauts.
Borman lost the argument. NASA very much wanted to give the people on earth a personal view of the first human flight to another world. The camera was included, and six separate space telecasts were scheduled, two on the way to the moon, two in lunar orbit, and two on the way home.
The first conference began with Bill Anders as cameraman, shooting Frank Borman floating freely in the cabin. Anders then worked his way down to what the astronauts called the lower equipment bay, a small area below their feet where Jim Lovell was supposed to be doing navigational sightings. Instead, he was preparing himself a snack. "We gotcha!" Borman joked.
"This is known as preparing lunch and doing P23 at the same time," Lovell grinned. P23 referred to program 23, a computer routine Lovell used when he did navigational work. Rather than do this, he instead demonstrated to his earth audience how he injected water into a bag to make chocolate pudding.
Next Anders took off the wide-angle lens and put on the telephoto lens so that he could show the earth-bound what their planet looked like from 138,000 miles away. Unfortunately, the telephoto lens wouldn't work, and the normal lens only showed what Ken Mattingly called "a real bright blob on the screen."
"I certainly wish we could show you the earth," Borman lamented. "It is a beautiful, beautiful view, with predominantly blue background and just huge covers of white clouds."

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