Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (20 page)

Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

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

 

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Unexpectedly, Marilyn grasped the reality of her husband's situation. Jim would go into lunar orbit, something would fail, and she would never see him again. She sat down at the little bar between the kitchen and the family room, poured herself a drink, and broke down in tears. For several minutes all she could do was cry, the tension finally breaking in long sobbing gasps.
Not long after, there was a knock on the door. Marilyn wiped her face, took a breath, and went to answer it. There stood young Betsy Benware, the teenage daughter of Berry Benware, one of Marilyn's neighbors. She was holding a tray with a dinner her mother had cooked for Marilyn.
"Are you all right, Mrs. Lovell?" Betsy asked.
"Oh, yes," said Marilyn. She didn't want anyone to worry about her. She took the food appreciatively and sent the girl home.
Within minutes Betty Benware arrived at the Lovell home. She had already called some of their other friends, and soon the house was once again filled with people, gathered there to stay with Marilyn through the night and through the coming lunar visit.
They fed her, and then convinced her to try and get some rest. She went to her bedroom, lay down, and for the first time since the launch fell into a deep sleep. The crying fit had released much of her pent-up tension. She slept for almost seven hours.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
More than two hundred thousand miles away, Apollo 8 flew on, its speed increasing rapidly and irrevocably. It was falling towards the moon, and nothing in the universe could prevent it from getting there.

 

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Chapter Six
Hugging the Coast
Khrushchev
Cosmonaut Alexei A. Leonov grasped the hatch and opened it carefully. Outside, the jet black sky surrounded him like a velvet hood. Below rolled the glowing horizon of the world, speeding past at over 17,000 miles per hour.
With a grunt Leonov pulled himself through the hatch, pushing off from the Voskhod spacecraft to slowly drift fifteen feet away. He was floating more than one hundred twenty miles above the earth's surface, his only link to the space capsule a thin twenty-foot tether. "I didn't experience fear. There was only a sense of the infinite expanse and depth of the universe."
1
It was March 18, 1965, and Leonov had become the first human being to walk in space.
For ten minutes he pirouetted about, waving and smiling at Pavel Belyaev, his commander who was watching from inside Voskhod. Below him the Black Sea rolled by, followed by the Ural Mountains of Russia. Then Belyaev told him that with only forty-five minutes of oxygen left, it was time to come back inside.

 

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Only now Leonov had trouble squeezing himself back through the hatch. The camera that had filmed his adventure kept getting in his way, and his spacesuit had swelled when its internal air pressure pushed against the vacuum of space. For eight minutes he struggled, pushing and pushing again and again in a vain attempt to force his body through the hatch. Finally, with his oxygen supply quickly disappearing, he took a desperate chance and partly depressurized his spacesuit. The release reduced the size of the suit enough so that he could slide in, slamming the hatch behind him.
2
Once again the Soviets had struck first, beating the Americans in space. "The so-called system of free enterprise is turning out to be powerless in competition with socialism in such a complex and modern area as space research,"
3
proclaimed an article in Pravda. Not only did this first human spacewalk take place just five days before the first launch of the American Gemini space program, the Soviets proudly trumpeted the second success of what they called their new Voskhod spacecraft.
Khrushchev's daring, boisterous, and relentless style of leadership demanded these increasingly dangerous space stunts. For Khrushchev, the Soviet Union had to stay ahead, no matter what. Knowing that in December 1957 the first American satellite would launch, he had pushed for a launch of Sputnik 1 in October. Knowing that Alan Shepard's mission was scheduled for May 1961, he had Yuri Gagarin sent up in April. Knowing that the Americans planned to attempt a rendezvous in space, he had Nikolayev and Popovich launched on their group flight in August 1962.
In 1964 he demanded that his space engineers accomplish two more stunts to beat the Americans. They were to fly a three man space capsule, and have a cosmonaut leave the capsule to walk in space.
More than Leonov's spacewalk, the October 1964 three-man flight of Voskhod 1 epitomized the demands that Nikita Khrushchev put on the Soviet space program.
To do what their ruler demanded, the Soviet engineers took incredible risks. Using the same tiny Vostok capsule that had put Yuri Gagarin in space, they removed its ejector seats and escape tower. Then they eliminated spacesuits, and had the crew sit sideways to the control panel. Then they put this all on top of a brand new rocket that had been tested just once.
4

 

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The flight was so risky that one of the ship's designers, Konstantin Feoktistov, insisted on flying himself. He said he couldn't ask others to go if he wasn't willing to go himself.
5
On October 12th, 1964, five months before Leonov's spacewalk and the first American two-man Mission, Voskhod 1 took off from Baikonur. For a little over one day designer Feoktistov, test pilot Vladimir Komarov, and doctor Boris Yegorov orbited the earth in their cramped quarters, once again proclaiming to the world that communism under Khrushchev could do it better. In fact, Khrushchev spoke with the cosmonauts while they were in orbit, wishing them health and telling them that their work would "glorify our homeland, our peoples, our party, and the idea of Marxism-Leninism [by] which our state stands and [by] which we achieve all the things we have."
6
When Voskhod landed on October 13th, however, the Soviet Union was no longer under Khrushchev's rule. In a sudden coup, a political faction led by Leonid Brezhnev had taken control of the government. Khrushchev's freewheeling style had finally done him in. Without mentioning his name, a Pravda editorial condemned Khrushchev's "hare-brained schemes, immature conclusions and hasty decisions and actions divorced from reality, bragging and phrase-mongering, commmandism, [and] unwillingness to take into account the achievements of science."
7
His continuous interference with the space program in order to achieve short-term propaganda victories had contributed significantly to his ouster.
8
Unbeknownst to NASA and the rest of the world, the new Soviet leadership had decided that, after Leonov's spacewalk five months hence, manned flights would stop for a few years in order to give the space program time to refocus. No longer would its missions be planned merely as solitary stunts to upstage the West. Now the Soviets were going to establish a carefully thought-out program for beating America to the moon.
Gemini
Imagine you and a co-worker sit in the front seat of a small compact car. You close the doors and proceed to live in that confined space non-stop for the

 

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next fourteen days. You cannot leave to go to the bathroom, to eat, or to shower. Imagine that you have radio headsets on and that every word you say is being recorded by an army of doctors. Imagine also that those doctors have attached sensors to numerous places on your body. They have many different questions to ask you, and you have no choice but to try to answer them.
Imagine as well that the car's air conditioning doesn't work very well, the car is sitting in the hot sun, and you have to wear a heavy, insulated jumpsuit. The temperature rises and there is nothing you can do.
And finally, imagine that though the car's engine is in gear and running and the car is in motion, the steering column is turned all the way to the right, and for the entire two weeks you continually go around in circles, watching the same scenery go by again and again and again, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
This is the experience that began for Frank Borman and Jim Lovell on December 4, 1965 at 1:30 PM (C.S.T.). At that moment they lay on their backs on top of a one-hundred-twenty-foot-tall raging behemoth. The Titan rocket on which their Gemini capsule sat had just ignited, and though it was only a third as tall as the Saturn 5, it was a significantly rougher ride. Spewing out 430,000 pounds of thrust, twice as much as a Boeing 747 at takeoff, the Titan felt like a bucking bull at a rodeo.
9
It was the first space flight for both men, and in as many ways as possible Gemini 7 illustrated the unpleasant and miserable side to human exploration. Their mission was to prove that a human being could survive fourteen days in space, and for two weeks they went around and around and around and around the earth, completing two hundred six orbits and seeing as many sunrises and sunsets.
For the first two days of Gemini 7, the rules required that Borman and Lovell stay in their spacesuits, which they found hot and uncomfortable. After that, if one astronaut was in shirtsleeves, the other had to be in his suit. The original plan called for them to switch places each day, with Jim Lovell in his longjohns on the third day, and Frank Borman out of the suit on the fourth, and so on.
10
As it turned out, Lovell asked if he could stay unsuited on the second night, and Commander Borman made the decision that since his crewmate was a larger man and had greater difficulty getting out of the

 

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Gemini 7 lifts off, December 4, 1965.
suit, he would stay suited and let Lovell remain in his underwear. "I didn't have the heart to follow the twenty-four hour exchange arrangement," Borman wrote later.
11
For the next four days Borman sweated in his suit, resisting mission control's repeated requests that he trade places with Lovell so that the doctors could get better data. Instead, Borman argued that there was no reason for either man to wear his suits, and that they should both be allowed to fly suitless.

 

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Because this was the first long duration flight in space, almost doubling the previous mission length, the medical experiments took precedent over the comfort of the astronauts. On the mission's sixth day, with the capsule's internal temperature now at 85 degrees, Flight Director Chris Kraft ordered Borman to switch places with Lovell. In his next rest period Borman slept for six straight hours, and woke up telling ground control that he ''felt like a million dollars!"
12
There were other unpleasant aspects of their mission. The astronauts urinated into condoms which were sealed in a plastic bag and then dumped overboard. On the fifth day the plastic bag broke in Borman's hands, and little globs of urine floated all over the capsule.
13
Both men found their noses stuffed and their skin flaking due to the one hundred percent oxygen atmosphere. In order to simplify the capsule's design, NASA engineers had eschewed recreating the earth's normal atmosphere of about three-quarters nitrogen and one quarter oxygen. Instead, the Gemini spacecraft used oxygen alone, at a pressure of 5.5 pounds per square inch. A mixed atmosphere required additional pumps, tanks, and valves, weighed more, and cost money and time to build. Two weeks of astronaut discomfort, however, cost nothing in time, labor, or weight.
The dehydrated food the astronauts ate was at best boring, and at worst horrible. "The worst items were the beef and egg bites," Borman recalled later. "Terribly dry and leaving a bad taste in the mouth and a coating on the tongue."
14
On the eighth day of the mission, NASA finally attempted to match the Soviet accomplishment of three years earlier: putting two manned spacecraft in orbit at the same time.
Gemini 6, manned by Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford, had originally been scheduled to launch in October. First NASA would launch an unmanned target craft. Then the Gemini capsule would follow it into space, chase it down, and link up. To prove such maneuvers possible was essential for any mission to the moon. Unfortunately, when the target rocket exploded six minutes into its flight, Schirra and Stafford were left without anything to rendezvous with, and so their flight was scrubbed.

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