Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (18 page)

Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

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

 

Page 88
strip were machine gun-carrying East German soldiers, who in the last year had killed forty-nine people trying to escape East Berlin.
After what was almost certainly a long moment's hesitation, both men made a sudden dash for freedom, tearing and stumbling their way through the jungle of barbed wire scattered across that deadman's zone. Kulbeik managed to reach the wall first. He leaped upon the wire and climbed. Fechter was right behind him. On the East German side of the deadman's zone, border guards unshouldered their rifles and screamed for the two men to halt. As Kulbeik pulled himself over the four strands of barbed wire at the wall's top the guards opened fire. Fechter, who was halfway up the wall, was hit in the back and stomach. He screamed in pain, but held on. Kulbeik reached down to try and help him up, and for a second the two struggled to get Fechter over the top.
Then Fechter fell back into the death strip. Unable to do anything to help him, Kulbeik jumped down into West Berlin and to freedom.
Fechter lay there at the wall's base, slowly bleeding to death. Though he was less than two feet from the American zone and in plain sight through the wires, there was nothing anyone could do. When several West Berliners started to climb the wire to help him the East German guards threw tear gas to drive them back. And American soldiers could only throw Fechter some bandages: they were forbidden to cross the wall into East German territory.
On the East German side, the guards were afraid to come out and get him. He had fallen so close to the wall that they feared attack from the growing West German crowd just on the other side of the wire barrier.
For almost an hour Fechter lay there, groaning in pain. After awhile his groans stopped.
Finally, with heavy reinforcements covering them, the East German guards came out and carried Fechter's body away the fiftieth person killed trying to breach the Berlin Wall. Within hours thousands gathered at the wall, and as they had four days earlier, they threw rocks and bottles at the East German guards.
21
Though Fechter's death made front page news in America, it failed entirely to distract the world from the just-completed Soviet space triumph.
22
Standing in Red Square before a huge crowd of citizens, Khrushchev and

 

Page 89
others repeatedly proclaimed communism's supremacy. As cosmonaut Nikolayev noted to the crowd, "The group flight in outer space is one more vivid proof of the superiority of socialism over capitalism."
23
Few could argue. The day before, D. Brainerd Holmes, director of NASA's manned space programs at the time, told the press that the launch of the next U.S. manned flight would likely be delayed. Furthermore, he admitted that it would be years before the U.S. could launch two astronauts into space at the same time, simply because the U.S. only had one launchpad.
24
Thirteen years had passed since the Berlin airlift. Five years had passed since the dawn of the space race. One year had passed since the construction of the Berlin Wall. Despite the efforts of many in the West, it seemed that cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev might very well be right.

 

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Chapter Five
"Welcome to the Moon's Sphere."
Eight am (C.S.T.),Monday Morning, December 23,1968. In the Apollo 8 capsule Jim Lovell was fast asleep, Frank Borman had just gotten up, and Bill Anders was at the controls. As he had on Sunday, Mike Collins started his shift with what he now called "the 23rd of December edition of the
Intersteller Times
," a quick summary of some of the more interesting news items of the last few hours.
He began by warning the astronauts that "there are only two more shopping days until Christmas," then described how twenty-three convicts had escaped from a New Orleans prison, how President Johnson had sent the astronauts his congratulations, how a big blizzard had hit the Midwest, and how the football playoffs were shaping up.
Borman asked, "How are the families doing, Mike?"
This was not the kind of question that Frank Borman would usually ask during a mission. And since his voice and Bill Anders's sounded were very much alike, thin altos compared to Lovell's rich bass, Collins assumed Anders had asked the question. "They are doing just great, Bill; just talked to Valerie a few minutes ago." He had called her from home, just before leaving for his shift.

 

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"That was Frank," Borman said.
"Oh, well, likewise with Susan," Collins recovered. "I have not talked to her since last night."
"Roger."
For Susan Borman, the battle was not so much over fighting the worry and fear, but preventing anyone from finding out how afraid she was. Her solution was to dull her mind. She would mix herself a drink and try and play hostess as neighbors and friends arrived with their encouragement and food.
Helping her were her two teenage sons. With the fearlessness of youth and the same boundless confidence of their father, both boys were heedless of the dangers. Separated from his daily grind and high-pressure concerns, they didn't understand the risk and were instead sure that everything would work out. This was simply his day job, and he enjoyed doing it.
Their mother, however, was always close by, and they could see how obsessed and worried she was about the flight, almost to the exclusion of food and sleep. In fact, she had eaten so little since launch that at one point Fred sat down with her and demanded that Susan eat something. She shook her head. Food was the last thing on her mind.
Undeterred, he put potato salad on a fork and thrust it at her. "Eat!" he insisted. When she still refused, he began to imitate how she would treat him when he would refuse food as a baby. "Open the hanger door, here comes the plane," he sang, aiming the fork at her mouth like a airplane. "RrrrRRRrrRRRRR,"he rumbled, simulating the sound of a propeller plane.
Susan laughed, and took a mouthful.
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Just as she had on Saturday night, Marilyn Lovell had difficulty sleeping Sunday. She had dozed, much like the astronauts, sleeping in short restless bursts. Periodically she would get up, go into the kitchen to listen to their voices on the squawk box while smoking another cigarette.
Dawn finally arrived, and as scheduled she went to her Monday morning beauty parlor appointment. Then she did some shopping at the local grocery store. At some point that morning she went to visit the Borman and Anders homes.

 

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Susan Borman flanked by Fred on left and Ed on 
right, taken during the flight. 
Credit: Borman
Her kids, meanwhile, were doing what kids normally do. While fifteen-year-old Barbara went shopping with her high school friends and ten-year-old Susan spent time playing with friends in Timber Cove, thirteen-year-old Jay was having stomach problems. In order to get him to the doctors at NASA without the press noticing, she slipped him out the back door and hid him in the back seat of her next-door neighbor's car with a blanket over his head. At NASA the doctors told her that the boy was merely upset because of all the excitement.

 

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Meanwhile, two-year-old Jeffrey periodically opened the front door and held his own impromptu press conferences with the reporters stationed there. On his head he wore his own little astronaut helmet, which he proudly showed off to the press.
By midday the Lovell house once again began filling with people, most of whom were women who like Marilyn attended St. John's church. Father Raish also came by. At one point he suggested that they hold communion right there, since Marilyn hadn't been able to get to church that weekend.
"Father Raish was a very warm human being, and he sensed when he was needed," Marilyn remembered. In the six years since the family had moved to Houston, he had become a special person to her. Because of Jim's heavy work schedule she was often alone, and he frequently made it a point to stop by the house in the late afternoon. They would sit and chat. "I could bare my soul to him," she said years later.
The women immediately agreed to Father Raish's suggestion. Together they knelt around the family room coffee table, and he led them in prayer.
Valerie Anders had gotten up early Monday morning to dress and feed the kids. She found that her youngest ones, Eric, four, and Greg, six, had become more fussy and needy, while Gayle, eight, had started to suck her thumb again for the first time in months.
The mob of reporters were still on her lawn, trapping her in her home. Since the day was cold she opened her garage and put a large pot of coffee there for them.
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On the spacecraft things continued to go well. One minor problem, a chilly cabin temperature, had been solved during the night by turning on all the cabin fans (which the astronauts had shut down because one in particular was very noisy).
The astronauts were now over 188,000 miles from earth. Their radio signal, moving at the speed of light, took more than a full second to get home.

 

Page 95
And yet, even after two days of travel, they still had almost twenty more hours before they would reach the moon. The waiting continued.
Anders found himself both bored and edgy. After more than forty-eight hours in space, he had officially rested only six hours, the least of all three men, and had actually slept much less. Even taking a sleeping pill on Sunday afternoon had not helped. He found that the combined excitement and tension of his first space flight would not let him relax. Nor did it help that, as much as they tried to keep quiet, Lovell and Borman liked to talk.
Yet, when he wasn't trying to sleep he was startled by how surprisingly tedious space flight was. He sat, scanning the dials again and again for problems, constantly updating himself on the spacecraft's status. Everything was running perfectly. Periodically he did some basic maintenance chore, such as purging the fuel cell batteries to keep them running, or switching antennas as the spacecraft rotated.
And he stared out the window, finding that the only thing he had to look at was a steadily shrinking earth, drifting across his window once a minute as the spacecraft gently rotated. The moon he had not seen. With the spacecraft pointed tail-first at the moon, the windows never faced it. As he later said to mission control, "It's like being on the inside of a submarine."
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At 10:30 AM Valerie Anders decided to make a break from her home and visit mission control. Leaving the kids in the care of au pair Silvie, she was escorted by NASA press officials through the gauntlet of reporters to a NASA car and driven to the Manned Spacecraft Center.
Once there she went to the private lounge positioned behind communications. She waved to Mike Collins, and sat down to watch for a while. Nearby sat George Low, manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program. Low had taken over the program in January 1967 following the launchpad fire that had Killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. Less than eighteen months later, he became the man who pushed NASA to send Apollo 8 to the moon.
He and Valerie chatted. She quickly saw that, though he tried to hide it, seeing her made him very nervous. If something went wrong he would

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