Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

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

Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (24 page)

 

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Nor was this the only issue that people were protesting. Earlier in the year there were riots in black neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Chicago. The Los Angeles riots, in the neighborhood of Watts, lasted almost four days, claimed over thirty lives, and required more than 20,000 National Guardsman to quell.
36
Even as Borman and Lovell circled the world several hundred times, the world had been turning under them. It was now turning in directions no one had predicted or understood.

 

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Chapter Seven
"Hey, I Got the Moon!"
Alone. The three men were now more alone than any humans in history. They had spent the last three days watching the blue-white planet of their birth dwindle behind them. After the first two days of travel, Lovell wasn't sure if he was ebullient or anxious when he realized he could cover the entire planet with his thumb.
Now their spacecraft had passed behind the moon, cutting them off from contact with earth. In mere seconds their S.P.S. engine would ignite and place them in a stable, lunar orbit or so they hoped.
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Since ending their Monday press conference twelve-and-a-half hours earlier, the three astronauts had spent most of that afternoon resting and making last preparations for this moment.
Lovell did some additional navigational sightings, estimating numbers for several future mid-course corrections as well as the burn that would put them into lunar orbit. By now he was getting so good at using the computer

 

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and the sextant that he felt ''like a concert pianist" as his fingers played across the computer keyboard.
Anders continued monitoring the spacecraft's health. At one point he decided to use the on-board tape recorder to report some miscellaneous facts to the ground, narrating a list of minor problems onto the tape. "The food box doors are hard to close . . . Look's like we've gotten the handle bent in trying to close the door . . . The meals I've had have been quite tasty, though none of us have really gone overboard for the little bread cubes and cereal cubes . . . If they ever fly one of these TV cameras again, they [should] put some sort of sight on it . . . Tell Doc Frome that his toothpaste tastes pretty good. I don't know what kind of job it does on your teeth, but it's nice for settling your stomach after dinner."
Lovell then quipped in the background, "We used it for frosting on the fruitcake."
Anders continued his report, "Jim Lovell is . . . engaged in an activity which I shan't describe, so I think I'll cut this short and get my oxygen mask."
"But that could be improved also," Lovell added, referring to what NASA euphemistically called the "Waste Management System." The tape then ended with all three astronauts laughing like adolescent boys.
At about 7 PM they did their last mid-course correction. This time, rather than the S.P.S., they used the four clusters of attitude control jets on the sides of the spacecraft's service module. These smaller engines, each with a thrust of one hundred pounds (compared to the S.P.S.'s 20,500 pound thrust) fired for eleven seconds, putting the spacecraft to within a ten thousandth of a percentage point of the planned course. The astronauts would now slip behind the moon at 3:50 AM Tuesday morning, swinging past it at the desired distance of seventy miles. If all went according to plan, at 3:59 AM they would then fire the big S.P.S. engine for four minutes. This burn, called Lunar Orbital Insertion (or L.O.I. for short), would slow the spacecraft's speed from 5,300 to 3,700 miles an hour and put it in lunar orbit. If for some reason the astronauts decided not to fire the engines, they would whip around the moon and be flung back to earth, where they could land in the ocean as had all other American space flights.

 

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The Apollo 8 mission profile.
If the S.P.S. worked as planned, however, the astronauts would become the first human beings to not only escape the gravitation pull of the earth, but to join the environment of another world.
For the rest of that Monday evening the men mostly rested. Anders took a sleeping pill. From 10 PM to 1 AM almost nothing was said between the spacecraft and the ground. Long periods of silence were broken by short conversations. Twice Jerry Carr passed up some numbers, once to Lovell and once to Borman.
Yet none of the crewmen slept much. As Monday turned to Tuesday and Christmas Eve arrived on earth, these three space travelers were more than 220,000 miles away from home. With each second their speed was

 

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increasing, the moon pulling at them, drawing them in. As the clock struck midnight, their speed was over 3,000 miles per hour, and increasing steadily.
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As Marilyn Lovell awoke, she could hear the television faintly, its sound drifting in from the family room. Yet she heard no voices or the movement of people. Her bedroom clock said 2:00 AM in the morning. The spacecraft would be entering lunar orbit very soon, and she wondered what was happening.
Quietly she crept from her room, which was located on the lower level of her split-level home. She peeked into her childrens' rooms, finding that Jeffrey and Susan were fast asleep. Then she poked her head up the stairs to look into the family room. There the floor and chairs and sofas were covered with the sleeping bodies of her friends, the television droning on about how Apollo 8 was about to arrive at the moon.
Marilyn stared in wonder and humility at the generosity of her friends. They had put her two younger children to bed, then stayed on, waiting for her to wake up. She made a noise to let them know she was coming, and joined them in the family room.
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Valerie had slept, but unlike Marilyn she hadn't needed any urging. She was riding such a high about the space flight that the dangers seemed somehow unreal to her. "Maybe it was a form of self-hypnosis," she remembered years later.
Possibly more significantly, she had spent most of the evening getting her five very young children to bed, telling them stories and helping them say good night prayers. Each had many questions about what their father was doing, and she spent a good deal of time trying to explain it to them.
Then she went to sleep, and only awoke when a few friends arrived to be with her for L.O.I. She got up and together they gathered around the television to watch as her husband reached the moon.

 

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Finally, after almost three days and 240,000 miles of travel, Apollo 8 had arrived in lunar space. The men were now so far from the earth that radio communications, traveling at the speed of light (186,280 miles per second), took two and a half seconds to go from the capsule to Houston and then back to the spacecraft. The ship's speed was over 5,000 miles an hour, and the distance to the moon had shrunk to mere miles. Yet, Borman told the ground, "As a matter of interest, we have as yet to see the moon." Their spacecraft's orientation tail pointing to the moon still prevented them from seeing it.
The unseen world that these three men now approached had tantalized humanity across thousands of generations. Civilizations had come and go, each watching the moon wax and wane as its perpetual lunar cycle clocked the passing of the seasons, each culture trying to understand the origin and substance of this glowing silver-white sphere in the sky. The Navajos believed that the First Man and First Woman made the sun and moon to brighten the world with light, and used a slab of quartz crystal to carve the disks, attaching them to the sky with lightning darts. The Greeks, while believing in the moon goddess Selene, also insisted that the moon must be a planet like the earth. "The moon appears to be terrestrial," said Plutarch, "for she is inhabited like the earth . . . and peopled with the greatest living creatures and the fairest plants." Many cultures told of a Man-in-the-Moon, and because new or green cheese resembled the moon, some legends even jibed that maybe that was what constituted the moon.
1
With the coming of the telescope, astronomers learned that the moon was truly another world, but airless and almost certainly without life. It had a diameter of 2,160 miles, making it about a quarter the size of earth. In the seventeenth century, astronomer Giovanni Riccioli studied the surface and named many of its most prominent craters and mountain ranges. He also named the large dark areas of the moon
mare
(pronounced MAR-ray), Latin for "sea" because he thought these regions were either oceans or dried seabeds.
Despite centuries of careful astronomical observations, however, no human being had ever seen the moon's far side. Because the moon's day (27.32

 

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earth days long) is exactly the same duration as its orbit, the satellite always presents the same face to the earth. The far side is forever turned away, though orbital wobbles make about sixty percent of the entire surface visible over time. The remaining forty percent had remained eternally veiled, a tantalizing mystery just beyond reach.
In the nineteenth century science fiction writers made fanciful guesses about what might be hidden on that unseen hemisphere. In his book
From the Earth to the Moon,
Jules Verne had a scientist propose that the moon was shaped in "the form of an egg, which we look at from the smaller end." Because most of the moon's mass was therefore hidden from our sight, this fictional astronomer proposed that the heavier gravitational field on the far side allowed the moon to retain air and water. On the far side, life existed, and there a lunar explorer could survive.
2
And while most later writers, unlike Verne, assumed that the hidden lunar surface resembled the near side, all hoped somehow that concealed in the moon's secrets were alien species and ancient civilizations.
Finally, in 1959, the Soviets sent Luna 3 on a fly-by mission past the moon, obtaining the first glimpse of the unseen hemisphere. Though the pictures were poorly resolved, computer enhancement revealed a mountainous rough surface with only two dark areas resembling the near side's mare regions. Then, in the mid-1960s, the Soviets and Americans launched a total of eight lunar orbiters, mapping the far side more thoroughly and unveiling a surface riddled with craters.
None of these photographs, however, could compare with what Borman, Lovell, and Anders would see when they slipped into lunar orbit only seventy miles above its surface. Not only would the astronauts see terrain previously unseen by humans, they would see it in three dimensions, adding a reality imperceptible to any robot ship photograph.
At 3:00 AM Jerry Carr took a breath and announced calmly, "Apollo 8, this is Houston. At 68:04 [hours into the flight] you are
go
for L.O.I."
Borman said, "Roger. Apollo 8 is
go
."
Carr answered, "You are riding the best bird we can find."
Borman: "Thank you. It's a good one."
What Borman and the other two astronauts didn't know was that for the last three days ground engineers had been trying to figure out why the

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