Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (66 page)

Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

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

 

Page 279
Service module:
Attached to the command module, this cylindrical unit contained most of the spacecraft's tanks and control systems, including the S.P.S. engine. It was abandoned just prior to earth reentry and allowed to burn up in the earth's atmosphere.
I.M.U. (inertial measuring unit):
Part of the spacecraft's guidance and navigational system, this device used gimbals and gyroscopes to track the spacecraft's orientation relative to the earth and solar system. Each time the spacecraft's orientation shifted, the I.M.U. recorded the change and indicated this on the eight ball, a specially designed indicator on the instrument panel.
S4B:
This was the acronym for the Saturn 5's third stage rocket, used to put the spacecraft into earth orbit during launch, and then fired at T.L.I. to send Apollo 8 on its journey towards the moon.

 

Page 281
Bibliography
The bulk of my information comes from flight transcripts as well as personal interviews with the astronauts, their wives, and their children and friends. All unfootnoted quotes come from these sources.
For historical background as well as the technical flight details, a number of books deserve special mention. For background on the Cold War, Nikita Khrushchev's memoirs
Khrushchev Remembers, The Last Testament
, and
The Glasnost Tapes
were enormously helpful. Also helpful were Michael Bourdeaux's books on religious persecution in the Soviet Union,
Religious Ferment in Russia, Protestant Opposition to Soviet Religious Policy
and
Patriarch and Prophets: Persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church Today
. Norman Gelb's
The Berlin Wall: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and a Showdown in the Heart of Europe
and Pierre Galante's
The Berlin Wall
offered the most information on the tragic history of Berlin during the Cold War.
To get a general perspective of the 1960s and 1968 in particular I found Todd Gitlin's
The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
and Peter Collier and David Horowitz's
Destructive Generation, Second Thoughts about the Sixties
useful, especially because the writers were participants in the protests and came to opposite conclusions about their merits. For the Columbia student riots, Roger Kahn's
The Battle for Morningside Heights, Why Students Rebel
is the most objective and thorough description of the event and its participants. I also found the S.D.S.'s newsletter,
New Left Notes
, especially informative for clarifying its point of view.

 

Page 282
Only three books had previously described at length the flight of Apollo 8, and all three were crucial reference works: Andrew Chaikin's
A Man on the Moon
, Frank Borman's
Countdown
, and Jim Lovell's
Lost Moon
. Since Chaikin's book told the story of Apollo 8 mostly from Bill Anders's point of view, these books provided me with three different perspectives on the flight. Technical information was best found in David Baker's mammoth
The History of Manned Spaceflight. Apollo, the Race to the Moon
by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox tells the story of mission control, the people who made NASA work while still trapped on earth. Jim Oberg's classic work,
Red Star in Orbit
, provides a thorough, though somewhat outdated, view of the Soviet space program.
Above all, the wealth of information provided to me by the NASA History Office in Washington, D.C. cannot be underestimated. Without the help of archivists Mark Kahn and Colin Fries in particular, my job in writing this book would have been much more difficult. I also must thank Meg Hacker at the National Archives in Ft. Worth, Texas for providing me the transcripts for the Gemini 6 and 7 missions, and Robert N. Tice at the Goddard Spaceflight Center, without whose help I would never have been able to discover who took the first earthrise picture.
Interviews:
The astronauts and their families:
Alan Anders, 12/29/97; Bill Anders, 12/29/97, 2/13/98, 5/9/98; Valerie Anders, 12/30/97; Barbara Borman 1/22/98, 1/25/98; Ed Borman 1/23/98; Frank Borman, 12/4/97, 2/3/98, 3/30/98; Fred Borman, 1/22/98; Susan Borman, 12/4/97, 2/3/98, 5/10/98; Jay Lovell, 2/5/98; Jim Lovell, 12/1/97, 2/2/98, 5/5/98; Marilyn Lovell, 12/2/97, 12/17/97, 2/4/98.
Other Astronauts, Friends, and Co-workers:
Si Bourgin 10/21/97, 11/20/97, 1/20/98; Jerry Carr, 1/2/98; Mike Collins 1/3/98, 1/20/98; Jim Elkins, 12/12/97; Margaret Elkins, 12/12/97; Dick Gillen 1/25/98; Winnie Gillen 1/25/98; Barbara Gregory 1/17/98; Fred Gregory 12/22/97, 1/17/98,

 

Page 283
2/4/98; Adeline Hammack 1/21/98; Jerry Hammack 1/21/98; Dale Klein, 12/8/97; Joe Laitin 10/18/97, 10/19/97, 1/20/98; T.K. Mattingly 1/14/98; Leno Pedrotti 1/26/98; Julian Scheer, 10/23/97, 1/20/98, 1/21/98; Robert Springer, 12/8/97.
Other Sources:
Adelson, Alan.
SDS
. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972.
Aldrin, Buzz, and Malcom McConnell.
Men From Earth
. New York: Bantam Books, 1989.
Anderson, John.
Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Anderson, Virginia DeJohn. "Religion, the Common Thread of Motivation," in
Major Problems in American Colonial History
, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman. Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1993.
Armbrister, Trevor.
A Matter of Accountability, the True Story of the Pueblo Affair
. New York: Coward-McCann, 1970.
Aroneanu, Eugene, ed.
Inside the Concentration Camps, Eyewitness Accounts of the life in Hitler's Death Camps
. London: Praeger, 1996.
Aronowitz, Stanley.
The Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism
. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Atlas of the Unknown Face of the Moon
. Moscow: Academy of Sciences, U.S.S.R., 1960.
Ausland, John.
Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Berlin-Cuba Crisis, 19611964
. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1996.
Baker, David.
The History of Manned Space Flight
. New York: Crown Publishers, 1981.
Baker, Michael A., Bradley R. Brewer, Raymond DeBuse, Sally T. Hillsman, Murray Milner, and David V. Soeiro.
Police on Campus, the Mass Police Action at Columbia University, Spring, 1968
. New York: New York Civil Liberties Union, 1969.

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