Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (5 page)

Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

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

 

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Borman
talked of his faith in what he, Frank, and all of NASA were doing. Though Apollo 8 was clearly the most dangerous space mission ever, he was convinced it was the right thing to do.
For a couple of hours after Kraft's visit Susan considered what he had told her.
Maybe there is a chance
, she thought.
Maybe they will get home alive
. Then her doubts reasserted themselves. By launch eve she had dismissed what Chris had said and was once again resigned to despair.
7
Aggravating her fears was the knowledge that she would be on public display, required to exude self-confidence and excitement not only for her husband but for the rest of the country. While she knew she could do it, it was a task and responsibility she found increasingly painful.
With the launch mere hours away, Susan lay in bed, unable to sleep. She waited for dawn and what she was convinced would be her husband's fiery launch into oblivion.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Frank also found sleep difficult that night. In his passionate and obsessive career his family had always come second to flying. Twelve years earlier, the Air Force had assigned him to teach at West Point, sending him first to the

 

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California Institute of Technology in Pasadena to study aeronautical engineering. Borman wanted to fly planes, however, and he figured that the only way he could get that teaching assignment changed was to accumulate a lot more flight time. That Thanksgiving, he had the choice of staying home with his wife and two young sons or flying a total stranger to Washington, D.C. He hopped in his plane and went to Washington. For Borman, time in the air was far more important than time on the ground with his family.
8
Nor was Susan resentful of this. She knew also that the success of their family depended on Frank flying as much as possible. Theirs was a lifetime partnership centered on the success of Frank's career.
To Frank, however, her unwavering support hadn't made the situation any easier. He loved his wife and children so deeply that if he thought of them while flying it distracted him, which in turn could be life-threatening. Hence, though he brought pictures of Susan and the boys with him into space, he refused to even glance at them, fearful of losing his focus.
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But Borman knew that his flying career could soar no higher, and weeks before he had told the space agency that Apollo 8 would be his last flight. In the future, he no longer wanted to do work that forced him to make believe his family did not exist.
Nonetheless, he still had to survive the flight of Apollo 8. As he lay there trying to sleep, he struggled to put his family from his mind, to focus his thoughts entirely on the needs of the mission.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
As the sky began to lighten in the predawn hours of Saturday, December 21st, thousands and thousands of spectators gathered on the beaches of the Indian River. Some were NASA workers wishing to see the launch of their creation. Others were visitors from every part of the United States drawn by the thrill of this most audacious adventure. Many had driven to the beach the night before to sleep in their cars, guaranteeing themselves a good view.
Marilyn Lovell and her children had been picked up by a NASA official before dawn and driven to an isolated sand dune, only three miles from the launchpad. There, canvas chairs and food had been set up, and Marilyn and her

 

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children Jeffrey, Susan, Jay, and Barbara, aged from two to fifteen settled down to wait, bundled against the cool North Florida weather.
10
Accompanying them was Adeline Hammack, Marilyn's neighbor in Houston and one of her closest friends. Adeline had come with her to Florida to help keep watch on the children during launch.
Marilyn looked with awe at the giant rocket, amazed that at that moment her husband was perched in the tiny capsule at its peak. She knew how excited and happy he was, finally doing what he had always wanted to do. Though she had some apprehension about the risks, she did as he did, putting these fears aside to savor the thrill of man's first journey to the moon. Unlike Sue Borman, Marilyn had a deep abiding faith that everything would work properly and Jim would come home.
Also on the sand dune sat Charles and Anne Lindbergh. Two days earlier they had visited the astronauts for a pleasant afternoon lunch. The astronauts, about to join the ranks of pioneers like Lindbergh, sat in delight as he described his flight across the ocean. Later he talked about the time he had met Robert Goddard, the inventor of the liquid fueled rocket and the father of American rocketry. Everyone laughed when Lindbergh described how Goddard thought he could have designed a rocket to reach the moon, though "unfortunately it might cost as much as a million dollars."
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The 1960s American space program, whose sole goal was to send a man to the moon, cost approximately twenty-five thousand times more.
Lindbergh himself was filled with wonder at what the astronauts were doing. At one point in the evening he calculated that in the first second of the Saturn 5's flight, it would burn "ten times more fuel than I did all the way to Paris."
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Several months later, Anne Lindbergh wrote about this short afternoon meeting with the astronauts. "Here in the midst of a scientific, mechanical, computerized beehive is the human element, the most exacting of all. There is nothing mechanical or robotlike about these men. Intelligent, courageous and able, they inspire faith in human capabilities and in this particular human exploit."
13
All told, approximately a quarter of a million people had gathered to see the launch of Apollo 8. Standing on the shorelines surrounding Cape

 

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Kennedy, they stared with equal wonder and dread at that huge missile sitting more than three miles away.
A thousand miles away, in the tiny suburban development of El Lago, Susan Borman sat on the floor of her living room, nibbling on sweet rolls, staring tensely at the television image of the Saturn 5 rocket. On the couch behind her sat her two teenage sons along with the family dog, Teddy. Numb and fearful, expectant of disaster and death, she waited silently for the mission to start, hiding her thoughts from all around her.
In that same El Lago development watched Valerie Anders with her five children. On their lawn stood a four foot high American flag. Fifty lights formed the stars, and other lights defined the red and white stripes. It had been designed and built by their neighbors, all NASA fellow workers, who the night before had stood on her lawn to say the Pledge of Allegiance, sing Christmas carols and the "Star Spangled Banner," and wish Bill and Valerie good luck.
14
She and her children had begun their day when their priest, Father Vermillion, led them in a short private mass in their living room, with eleven-year-old Alan and ten-year-old Glen acting as altar boys in their stocking feet.
Father Vermillion ran the tiny Catholic chapel at Ellington Air Force Base to which the Anders family belonged. Because the Catholic community in Houston was so small, he had asked Valerie if her two oldest boys would serve as altar boys. From Valerie's point of view, Father Vermillion had to be desperate to enlist her children. At his first service, Alan held the chalice upside down so that the hosts dropped out, one by one, leaving a trail behind him like Hansel and Gretel. "Father Vermillion was a real laid-back man," Valerie remembered. "This just cracked him up."
Often he came by her home after Sunday services for lunch. Now, in the early dawn hours of launch day, he arrived as a friend, and gave the family communion. Valerie was glad he did so, particularly for the five young children. She knew they held deep unstated fears about what their father was doing, and felt that the priest's prayers would provide them comfort, telling them that the concerns of a wider world stood with them.
For her, the flight's excitement alone helped her bury her fears. Because she believed in what her husband wanted to do, thought it right and

 

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Valerie Anders watches the countdown with Greg, Glen 
(on floor), Gayle, and Eric. Credit: Anders
worthwhile, she accepted the risks. Even when he told her that he only had a fifty-fifty chance of getting back alive, she refused to dwell on the possibility of his death in order to give him her fullest support.
She now sat with neighbors, friends, and other astronauts and talked with zest about the technical details of the mission and what was happening at each second of the countdown. Like the hundreds of thousands at the Cape, she sat in her living room and stared with wonder and amazement at the towering rocket, breathing white fumes and poised for takeoff.
It is difficult to understand today how truly gigantic the Saturn 5 was. Standing 363 feet high when fully assembled, this leviathan was twice as tall as today's space shuttle. If laid horizontally in any American football stadium it wouldn't have fit. The five engines at the base of its first stage generated more than seventy-five times the power of a 747 at takeoff.
15
Imagine the base

 

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Alan Anders waits for lift-off. 
Credit: Anders
of a forty-story skyscraper suddenly roaring into flames, lifting the building into the air and far into space.
In its first launch thirteen months earlier, the rocket's vibrational force sent tremors through the ground to the public viewing area four miles away. The sound waves were so strong that television news anchor Walter Cronkite was forced to hold his television booth together with his bare hands to prevent the front plate glass window from falling on top of him.
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It was now just seconds before 6:51 AM, and in the tiny capsule on top of that missile Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders tensed, waiting for the rumble of the rocket's engines and the pressure against their backs as the Saturn 5 roared skyward.
Nine seconds before launch, as intended, the five F1 engines of the Saturn 5's first stage ignited, sending gigantic clouds of smoke billowing sideways from the launch tower. For nine seconds clamps held the behemoth rocket in place, letting its engines build up thrust. Then, exactly as scheduled, the clamps let go, and the almost six million-pound Saturn 5 lifted free of the earth.

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