Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (34 page)

Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

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

 

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The week before East Germany celebrated the seventh anniversary of the Berlin Wall, George Low, manager of the Apollo program, returned from a two-week vacation in the Caribbean. Much had happened in the space program since he had first considered sending an Apollo spacecraft to the moon four months earlier.
The original schedule for the Apollo program required that six different tasks be achieved successfully before a lunar landing was attempted.
"A" had been the unmanned test flights of the Saturn 5, already accomplished with mixed results.
"B" had been an unmanned orbital mission of the lunar module, accomplished successfully in January 1968.
"C" would be the first manned mission of the Apollo spacecraft in low earth orbit. Apollo 7 was scheduled for October, 1968.
"D" would be the first manned mission in low earth orbit of the lunar module. This was Apollo 8, scheduled for early December with Frank Borman, Mike Collins, and Bill Anders.
"E" would repeat Mission D, but take the command module and lunar module to high earth orbit, about 4,000 miles. Apollo 9 was scheduled to do this in the early spring.
"F" would take the command and lunar modules into lunar orbit and test them. Apollo 10 would accomplish this task.
"G" was given to the actual lunar landing.
The sequence was carefully designed to test each component in the safest possible manner. No flight beyond low earth orbit would take place until the lunar module was ready. This way, if either craft failed, the astronauts would still have another vehicle to act as their "lifeboat" during the long journey back to earth. (When Apollo 13 failed in 1970, this was exactly what happened. Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert would have died in less than two hours had they not had the lunar module as backup.)
Unfortunately, since April problems had developed with this schedule. Borman, Lovell (replacing Collins), and Anders were ready for their December flight. In fact, after years of sitting on the sidelines, Bill Anders was primed and ready to go as the world's first lunar module pilot. In addition to spending thousands of hours in lunar module simulators, he and Neil

 

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Armstrong had begun flying an ungainly, spiderlike aircraft called the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (L.L.R.V.). Called a "flying bedstead" by some, the L.L.R.V. could only be kept aloft by firing a number of small thrusters at its base. In the earth's heavier gravity and windy atmosphere, the L.L.R.V. was a difficult craft to steer. In the six months prior to 1968 two had crashed, with the pilots ejecting safely.
Bill, however, was always able to land the thing, and by August 1968 he considered himself ready. Unfortunately, as ready as Bill Anders was, the actual lunar module was not. Construction was behind schedule, and the earliest the man-rated module for Apollo 8 would be expected to fly was February 1969.
During his vacation George Low had soaked up the sun on the beach and thought about this problem. For the last seven years Low had led the charge to send a man to the moon. In 1961 he had headed the committee that first proposed making the central purpose behind the Apollo program a lunar landing.
4
He knew that time was of the essence. If NASA was going to meet Kennedy's deadline, they had to make every scheduled flight count. And there were other considerations. C.I.A. reports indicated that the Soviets were about ready to return to manned space flight, and that they could very well send men around the moon by year's end. In fact, the last unmanned test flight of the redesigned Soyuz spacecraft, named Cosmos 238, was set to launch before the end of the month.
Low knew that to send Apollo 8 up without a lunar module and merely repeat the Apollo 7 mission wouldn't accomplish anything. Nor did it make any sense to simply wait another two months for the lunar module (or LM, pronounced "lem") to be ready. Either case would probably delay a landing on the moon until 1970.
Low got an idea: Why not change Apollo 8's mission? Rather than wait for the unready LM, he would instead propose that Apollo 8, scheduled to blast off in December, would go to the moon.
When he returned from vacation on August 5th he immediately began canvassing people throughout the agency to see if his idea had any merit.
Wernher von Braun, builder of the Saturn 5, supported the proposal. As he noted, "Once you decide to man [a Saturn 5] it doesn't matter how far you go."
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Since April he and his engineers had worked day and night trying

 

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George Low in mission control.
to eliminate the problems experienced during the Apollo 6 flight, and now he felt they had.
The oscillations had been solved by adding ''shock absorbers" to the rocket.
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Discovering the cause of the rocket engine failures was more difficult, requiring thirty days of detective work. What they had found was that on the ground the engine's hydrogen fuel lines were strengthened by a thin frost layer of liquefied atmosphere, frozen to the surface of the pipe by the supercold fuel. In the vacuum of space, however, there was no atmosphere, and the unprotected fuel line would shake itself apart. Braun's engineers redesigned the lines with this in mind, and the problem was eliminated.
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The software people at mission control said that though they only had four months to write the programming for a lunar flight, they could do it.
The safety people saw no reason not to go to the moon. This was what the Apollo spacecraft had been designed to do in the first place.
When Deke Slayton asked Borman if he would be willing to take the Apollo 8 command module to the moon, he answered "Yes" instantly. Though

 

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Borman had been willing to repeat his Gemini 7 experience for the good of the program, he really did not want to spend another ten days cooped up in a space capsule, even if its interior space had grown from that of a compact car to that of mini-van. Going to the moon seemed infinitely more interesting.
Susan didn't tell Frank her concerns. NASA only had four months to plan this, the most ambitious space flight in history. They would be putting men on the Saturn 5 for the first time. They would be leaving earth orbit for the first time. And they would be flying the Apollo capsule for only the second time.
Bill Anders's only regret was that he would not be able to test fly the lunar module, for which he had been training for the last eighteen months.
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He was now a lunar module pilot without a lunar module.
He told Valerie about the mission change, explaining that if he went he probably only had a fifty percent chance of coming back alive. With five small children and not a lot of money, the risks to his family were intimidating. And life insurance couldn't make up for the loss of a father.
They both recognized how significant an achievement a successful flight to the moon would be. And they both knew how difficult it would be for Bill to back out. He had to go, not merely because it was expected of him but because it was what he had been working for since the day he had joined the Air Force. Without her support his job would become much more difficult. Valerie disregarded her fears and backed him all the way. "Isn't this what you want to do?" she told him.
For her support Bill Anders is still immensely grateful. "She gave of herself for her husband, family, nation with clear knowledge of the potential risks to
her
. She risked more and got less than I did. She's the hero."
Lovell, exhilarated by the news, immediately sketched out what was to become the mission's patch, a number eight (signifying both infinity and the mission number) with the earth in one loop and the moon in the other.
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He came home and slyly told Marilyn that he wouldn't be able to go with her and the kids on an Acapulco Christmas vacation they had been planning for months. A hotel owner there routinely donated a suite to astronauts and their families following any flight into space.
Marilyn looked at him with annoyance. This was to have been their first family vacation in years. "Just where do you think you're going to be?"

 

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"Oh, I don't know," he said sheepishly. "Maybe the moon."
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She was at first speechless. Then she saw the sparkle in Jim's eyes as he described what he and the other astronauts hoped to do, the long glide out from the earth, the arrival on Christmas Eve, and the plan to orbit the moon for twenty hours. It was Jim's childhood dream come to life. Like Susan and Valerie, she put aside her apprehension and doubts to stand with her husband.
Everyone was in line. All were in agreement that a mission to orbit the moon could be accomplished. Now they only had to convince James Webb, NASA's administrator, that the plan was feasible. When Thomas Paine, deputy administrator under Webb, broke the idea to him on August 15th, his reaction was one of shock and horror. "Are you out of your mind?"
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he shouted. Sam Phillips, Director of the Apollo Program, who with Paine had passed on the news, noted that "if a person's shock could be transmitted over the telephone, I'd probably have been shot in the head."
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Though James Webb had been head of NASA for almost eight years, had shepherded the agency through its beginnings, and was certainly not afraid to send men to the moon, this mission was more risk than he wanted to take. Outvoted by everyone else in NASA, he decided it was time to let others run the show. Webb had already considered stepping down, and had even disucssed it with President Johnson. Both understood that for political reasons the space agency would probably be better served if a new administrator was in place before the next President took office in January.
On September 16th Webb met with President Johnson, and brought the subject of his resignation up again. This time he was shocked when Johnson immediately accepted, prompting Webb to make the announcement that very day.
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On October 7th, just four days before the launch of the first manned Apollo mission, James E. Webb stepped down, and Thomas Paine took over. Webb went on to serve twelve years on the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institute, helping to guide this government institution as well as he had NASA.
Before his resignation, however, Webb allowed the planning for a possible Apollo 8 lunar mission to go forward, albeit in secret. On August 19th Borman and Kraft, along with a number of key flight planners, hammered out the tentative flight plan. Because of orbital mechanics and the

 

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need to arrive at the moon under certain lighting conditions, the launch would have to take place within a window of six days, beginning on Saturday December 21st. Once arriving in lunar orbit the astronauts would circle the moon ten times, then leave orbit on December 25th to return to earth on December 27th. They designated the flight as "C-Prime," since it only differed from the Apollo 7 "C" mission in that instead of circling the earth, Apollo 8 would circle the moon.
Later that same day, Sam Phillips announced that Apollo 8 might do more than fly in low earth orbit, that NASA was even considering a circumlunar mission. Besides this vague statement he said nothing. He knew, as did everyone else in NASA, that the Apollo 7 orbital mission in October had to be perfect before they could commit Apollo 8 to the moon.
Revolution
The next day, August 20th, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. As they had in 1953 in East Germany, and in 1956 in Hungary, the Soviet Union had decided the policies of one of its neighboring states were unacceptable.
Eight months earlier Alexander Dubcek had become the leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and had immediately moved to establish freedom of speech and to open his country's borders to the non-communist countries of Europe. Throughout that "Prague Spring," Czechoslovakian society bloomed. New independent parties formed. Large public demonstrations took place. By June a National Assembly felt confident enough to sanction these actions publicly. They declared censorship illegal, passed laws to protect the legal rights of the individual, and agreed to consider the right of opposition groups to form and petition.
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By August, the Soviets had had enough. Beginning just after midnight on August 20th, 650,000 troops and 6,000 tanks from East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union poured across the borders. By 7:30 AM on August 21st Soviet troops were firing on demonstrators in the streets of Prague, and tanks had surrounded the headquarters of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party. Within hours Dubcek and six other leaders were arrested

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