Kluger, Jeffrey.
Apollo 8.
New York: Picador, 2017.
ISBN 978-1-250-18251-7.
As the tumultuous year 1968 drew to a close, NASA faced a
serious problem with the Apollo project. The Apollo missions
had been carefully planned to test the Saturn V booster
rocket and spacecraft (Command/Service Module [CSM] and Lunar
Module [LM]) in a series of increasingly ambitious missions,
first in low Earth orbit (where an immediate return to Earth
was possible in case of problems), then in an elliptical
Earth orbit which would exercise the on-board guidance and
navigation systems, followed by lunar orbit, and finally
proceeding to the first manned lunar landing. The Saturn V
had been tested in two unmanned “A” missions:
Apollo 4
in November 1967 and
Apollo 6
in April 1968.
Apollo 5
was a “B” mission, launched on a smaller Saturn 1B
booster in January 1968, to test an unmanned early model of
the Lunar Module in low Earth orbit, primarily to verify the
operation of its engines and separation of the descent and
ascent stages.
Apollo 7,
launched in October 1968 on a Saturn 1B, was the first manned
flight of the Command and Service modules and tested them
in low Earth orbit for almost 11 days in a “C”
mission.
Apollo 8 was planned to be the “D” mission,
in which the Saturn V, in its first manned flight, would
launch the Command/Service and Lunar modules into low
Earth orbit, where the crew, commanded by Gemini veteran
James McDivitt, would simulate the maneuvers of a lunar
landing mission closer to home. McDivitt's crew was trained
and ready to go in December 1968. Unfortunately, the lunar
module wasn't. The lunar module scheduled for Apollo 8, LM-3,
had been delivered to the Kennedy Space Center in June of
1968, but was, to put things mildly, a mess. Testing at the
Cape discovered more than a hundred serious defects, and by
August it was clear that there was no way LM-3 would be ready
for a flight in 1968. In fact, it would probably slip to February
or March 1969. This, in turn, would push the planned “E”
mission, for which the crew of commander Frank Borman,
command module pilot James Lovell, and lunar module pilot
William Anders were training, aimed at testing the
Command/Service and Lunar modules in an elliptical Earth
orbit venturing as far as 7400 km from the planet and originally
planned for March 1969, three months later, to June,
delaying all subsequent planned missions and placing the goal
of landing before the end of 1969 at risk.
But NASA were not just racing the clock—they were also
racing the Soviet Union. Unlike Apollo, the Soviet space
program was highly secretive and NASA had to go on whatever
scraps of information they could glean from Soviet publications,
the intelligence community, and independent tracking of Soviet
launches and spacecraft in flight. There were, in fact, two
Soviet manned lunar programmes running in parallel.
The first, internally called the
Soyuz 7K-L1
but dubbed “Zond” for public consumption,
used a modified version of the Soyuz spacecraft launched on
a Proton booster and was intended to carry two cosmonauts
on a fly-by mission around the Moon. The craft would fly out
to the Moon, use its gravity to swing around the far side,
and return to Earth. The Zond lacked the propulsion capability
to enter lunar orbit. Still, success would allow the Soviets to
claim the milestone of first manned mission to the Moon. In
September 1968
Zond 5
successfully followed this mission profile and safely returned
a crew cabin containing tortoises, mealworms, flies, and
plants to Earth after their loop around the Moon. A U.S.
Navy destroyer observed recovery of the re-entry capsule in
the Indian Ocean. Clearly, this was preparation for a
manned mission which might occur on any lunar launch window.
(The Soviet manned lunar landing project was actually far behind
Apollo, and would not launch its
N1 booster
on that first, disastrous, test flight until February 1969. But
NASA did not know this in 1968.) Every slip in the Apollo
program increased the probability of its being scooped so close
to the finish line by a successful Zond flyby mission.
These were the circumstances in August 1968 when what amounted
to a cabal of senior NASA managers including George Low, Chris
Kraft, Bob Gilruth, and later joined by Wernher von Braun and
chief astronaut Deke Slayton, began working on an alternative.
They plotted in secret, beneath the radar and unbeknownst to
NASA administrator Jim Webb and his deputy for manned space
flight, George Mueller, who were both out of the country,
attending an international conference in Vienna. What they were
proposing was breathtaking in its ambition and risk. They
envisioned taking Frank Borman's crew, originally scheduled for
Apollo 9, and putting them into an accelerated training program
to launch on the Saturn V and Apollo spacecraft currently
scheduled for Apollo 8. They would launch without a Lunar
Module, and hence be unable to land on the Moon or test that
spacecraft. The original idea was to perform a Zond-like flyby,
but this was quickly revised to include going into orbit around
the Moon, just as a landing mission would do. This would allow
retiring the risk of many aspects of the full landing mission
much earlier in the program than originally scheduled, and would
also allow collection of precision data on the lunar
gravitational field and high resolution photography of candidate
landing sites to aid in planning subsequent missions. The lunar
orbital mission would accomplish all the goals of the originally
planned “E” mission and more, allowing that mission
to be cancelled and therefore not requiring an additional
booster and spacecraft.
But could it be done? There were a multitude of requirements,
all daunting. Borman's crew, training toward a launch in early
1969 on an Earth orbit mission, would have to complete training
for the first lunar mission in just sixteen weeks. The Saturn V
booster, which suffered multiple near-catastrophic engine
failures in its second flight on Apollo 6, would have to be
cleared for its first manned flight. Software for the on-board
guidance computer and for Mission Control would have to be
written, tested, debugged, and certified for a lunar mission
many months earlier than previously scheduled. A flight plan
for the lunar orbital mission would have to be written from
scratch and then tested and trained in simulations with Mission
Control and the astronauts in the loop. The decision to fly
Borman's crew instead of McDivitt's was to avoid wasting the
extensive training the latter crew had undergone in LM systems
and operations by assigning them to a mission without an LM.
McDivitt concurred with this choice: while it might be nice to
be among the first humans to see the far side of the Moon with
his own eyes, for a test pilot the highest responsibility and
honour is to command the first flight of a new vehicle (the LM),
and he would rather skip the Moon mission and fly later than
lose that opportunity. If the plan were approved, Apollo 8 would
become the lunar orbit mission and the Earth orbit test of
the LM would be re-designated Apollo 9 and fly whenever the LM
was ready.
While a successful lunar orbital mission on Apollo 8 would
demonstrate many aspects of a full lunar landing mission, it
would also involve formidable risks. The Saturn V, making only
its third flight, was coming off a very bad outing in Apollo 6
whose failures might have injured the crew, damaged the
spacecraft hardware, and precluded a successful mission to the
Moon. While fixes for each of these problems had been
implemented, they had never been tested in flight, and there was
always the possibility of new problems not previously seen.
The Apollo Command and Service modules, which would take them to
the Moon, had not yet flown a manned mission and would not until
Apollo 7, scheduled for October 1968. Even if Apollo 7 were a
complete success (which was considered a prerequisite for
proceeding), Apollo 8 would be only the second manned flight of
the Apollo spacecraft, and the crew would have to rely upon the
functioning of its power generation, propulsion, and life
support systems for a mission lasting six days. Unlike an Earth
orbit mission, if something goes wrong en route to or returning
from the Moon, you can't just come home immediately. The
Service Propulsion System on the Service Module would have to
work perfectly when leaving lunar orbit or the crew would be
marooned forever or crash on the Moon. It would only have
been tested previously in one manned mission and there was no
backup (although the single engine did incorporate substantial
redundancy in its design).
The spacecraft guidance, navigation, and control system and
its Apollo Guidance Computer hardware and software, upon which
the crew would have to rely to navigate to and from the Moon,
including the critical engine burns to enter and leave lunar
orbit while behind the Moon and out of touch with Mission
Control, had never been tested beyond Earth orbit.
The mission would go to the Moon without a Lunar Module. If
a problem developed en route to the Moon which disabled the
Service Module (as would happen to Apollo 13 in April 1970),
there would be no LM to serve as a lifeboat and the crew would
be doomed.
When the high-ranking conspirators presented their audacious
plan to their bosses, the reaction was immediate. Manned
spaceflight chief Mueller immediately said, “Can't do
that! That's craziness!” His boss, administrator James
Webb, said “You try to change the entire direction of the
program while I'm out of the country?” Mutiny is a strong
word, but this seemed to verge upon it. Still, Webb and Mueller
agreed to meet with the lunar cabal in Houston on August 22.
After a contentious meeting, Webb agreed to proceed with the
plan and to present it to President Johnson, who was almost
certain to approve it, having great confidence in Webb's
management of NASA. The mission was on.
It was only then that Borman and his crewmembers Lovell and
Anders learned of their reassignment. While Anders was
disappointed at the prospect of being the Lunar Module Pilot
on a mission with no Lunar Module, the prospect of being on
the first flight to the Moon and entrusted with observation and
photography of lunar landing sites more than made up for it.
They plunged into an accelerated training program to get ready
for the mission.
NASA approached the mission with its usual “can-do”
approach and public confidence, but everybody involved was
acutely aware of the risks that were being taken. Susan
Borman, Frank's wife, privately asked Chris Kraft, director
of Flight Operations and part of the group who advocated
sending Apollo 8 to the Moon, with a reputation as a
plain-talking straight shooter, “I really want to
know what you think their chances are of coming home.”
Kraft responded, “You really mean that, don't you?”
“Yes,” she replied, “and you know I do.”
Kraft answered, “Okay. How's fifty-fifty?”
Those within the circle, including the crew, knew what they
were biting off.
The launch was scheduled for December 21, 1968. Everybody would
be working through Christmas, including the twelve ships and
thousands of sailors in the recovery fleet, but lunar launch
windows are set by the constraints of celestial mechanics,
not human holidays. In November, the Soviets had flown
Zond 6,
and it had demonstrated the
“double dip” re-entry trajectory required for
human lunar missions. There were two system failures which
killed the animal test subjects on board, but these were
covered up and the mission heralded as a great success. From
what NASA knew, it was entirely possible the next launch
would be with cosmonauts bound for the Moon.
Space launches were exceptional public events in the 1960s,
and the first flight of men to the Moon, just about a
hundred years after Jules Verne envisioned three men setting out
for the Moon from central Florida in a “cylindro-conical
projectile” in
De
la terre à la lune
(From the Earth
to the Moon), similarly engaging the world, the
launch of Apollo 8 attracted around a quarter of a million people
to watch the spectacle in person and hundreds of millions watching
on television both in North America and around the globe, thanks to
the newfangled technology of communication satellites. Let's tune
in to CBS television and relive this singular event with Walter
Cronkite.
Now we step inside Mission Control and listen in on the
Flight Director's audio loop during the launch, illustrated
with imagery and simulations.
The Saturn V performed almost flawlessly. During the second
stage burn mild
pogo
oscillations began but, rather than progressing to the
point where they almost tore the rocket apart as had
happened on the previous Saturn V launch, von Braun's team's
fixes kicked in and seconds later Borman reported,
“Pogo's damping out.” A few minutes later
Apollo 8 was in Earth orbit.
Jim Lovell had sixteen days of spaceflight experience
across two Gemini missions, one of them
Gemini 7
where he endured almost two weeks in orbit with
Frank Borman. Bill Anders was a rookie, on his first
space flight. Now weightless, all three were experiencing
a spacecraft nothing like the cramped Mercury and Gemini
capsules which you put on as much as boarded. The Apollo
command module had an interior volume of six cubic
metres (218 cubic feet, in the quaint way NASA reckons
things) which may not seem like much for a crew of three,
but in weightlessness, with every bit of space accessible
and usable, felt quite roomy. There were five real
windows, not the tiny portholes of Gemini, and plenty
of space to move from one to another.
With all this roominess and mobility came potential hazards,
some verging on slapstick, but, in space, serious nonetheless.
NASA safety personnel had required the astronauts to wear life
vests over their space suits during the launch just in case the
Saturn V malfunctioned and they ended up in the ocean. While
moving around the cabin to get to the navigation station after
reaching orbit, Lovell, who like the others hadn't yet removed
his life vest, snagged its activation tab on a strut within the
cabin and it instantly inflated. Lovell looked ridiculous and
the situation comical, but it was no laughing matter. The life
vests were inflated with carbon dioxide which, if released in
the cabin, would pollute their breathing air and removal would
use up part of a CO₂ scrubber cartridge, of which they had
a limited supply on board. Lovell finally figured out what to
do. After being helped out of the vest, he took it down to the
urine dump station in the lower equipment bay and vented it into
a reservoir which could be dumped out into space. One problem
solved, but in space you never know what the next surprise might
be.
The astronauts wouldn't have much time to admire the
Earth through those big windows. Over Australia,
just short of three hours after launch, they would
re-light the engine on the third stage of the Saturn V
for the “trans-lunar injection” (TLI) burn
of 318 seconds, which would accelerate the spacecraft
to just slightly less than escape velocity, raising its
apogee so it would be captured by the Moon's gravity.
After housekeeping (presumably including the rest of
the crew taking off those pesky life jackets, since there
weren't any wet oceans where they were going) and
reconfiguring the spacecraft and its computer for the
maneuver, they got the call from Houston, “You
are go for TLI.” They were bound for the Moon.
The third stage, which had failed to re-light on its
last outing, worked as advertised this time, with a
flawless burn. Its job was done; from here on the
astronauts and spacecraft were on their own. The
booster had placed them on a
free-return
trajectory. If they did nothing (apart from minor
“trajectory correction maneuvers” easily
accomplished by the spacecraft's thrusters) they would
fly out to the Moon, swing around its far side, and use its
gravity to slingshot back to the Earth (as Lovell would
do two years later when he commanded Apollo 13, although
there the crew had to use the engine of the LM to get back
onto a free-return trajectory after the accident).
Apollo 8 rapidly climbed out of the Earth's gravity well,
trading speed for altitude, and before long the astronauts
beheld a spectacle no human eyes had glimpsed before:
an entire hemisphere of Earth at once, floating in the
inky black void. On board, there were other concerns:
Frank Borman was puking his guts out and having
difficulties with the other end of the tubing as well.
Borman had logged more than six thousand flight hours in
his career as a fighter and test pilot, most of it in
high-performance jet aircraft, and fourteen days in
space on Gemini 7 without any motion sickness. Many
people feel queasy when they experience weightlessness
the first time, but this was something entirely different
and new in the American space program. And it was very
worrisome. The astronauts discussed the problem on
private tapes they could downlink to Mission Control
without broadcasting to the public, and when NASA got
around to playing the tapes, the chief flight surgeon,
Dr. Charles Berry, became alarmed.
As he saw it, there were three possibilities: motion sickness, a
virus of some kind, or radiation sickness. On its way to the
Moon, Apollo 8 passed directly through the
Van
Allen radiation belts, spending two hours in this
high radiation environment, the first humans to do so. The
total radiation dose was estimated as roughly the same as
one would receive from a chest X-ray, but the composition of
the radiation was different and the exposure was over an extended
time, so nobody could be sure it was safe. The fact that
Lovell and Anders had experienced no symptoms argued against
the radiation explanation. Berry concluded that a virus was
the most probable cause and, based upon the mission rules
said, “I'm recommending that we consider canceling
the mission.” The risk of proceeding with the
commander unable to keep food down and possibly carrying a
virus which the other astronauts might contract was too
great in his opinion. This recommendation was passed up
to the crew. Borman, usually calm and collected even by
astronaut standards, exclaimed, “What?
That is pure, unadulterated horseshit.” The mission
would proceed, and within a day his stomach had settled.
This was the first case of
space
adaptation syndrome to afflict an American astronaut.
(Apparently some Soviet cosmonauts had been affected, but
this was covered up to preserve their image as invincible
exemplars of the New Soviet Man.) It is now known to affect
around a third of people experiencing weightlessness in
environments large enough to move around, and spontaneously
clears up in two to four (miserable) days.
The two most dramatic and critical events in Apollo 8's
voyage would occur on the far side of the Moon, with
3500 km of rock between the spacecraft and the Earth
totally cutting off all communications. The crew
would be on their own, aided by the computer and guidance
system and calculations performed on the Earth and sent
up before passing behind the Moon. The first would be
lunar orbit insertion (LOI), scheduled for 69 hours and
8 minutes after launch. The big Service Propulsion System
(SPS) engine (it was so big—twice as large as required for
Apollo missions as flown—because it was designed to be
able to launch the entire Apollo spacecraft from the Moon
if a “direct ascent” mission mode had been
selected) would burn for exactly four minutes and seven
seconds to bend the spacecraft's trajectory around the
Moon into a closed orbit around that world.
If the SPS failed to fire for the LOI burn, it would be a
huge disappointment but survivable. Apollo 8 would simply
continue on its free-return trajectory, swing around the
Moon, and fall back to Earth where it would perform a
normal re-entry and splashdown. But if the engine fired
and cut off too soon, the spacecraft would be placed into
an orbit which would not return them to Earth, marooning
the crew in space to die when their supplies ran out. If it
burned just a little too long, the spacecraft's trajectory
would intersect the surface of the Moon—lithobraking
is no way to land on the Moon.
When the SPS engine shut down precisely on time and the
computer confirmed the velocity change of the burn and
orbital parameters, the three astronauts were elated, but
they were the only people in the solar system aware of
the success. Apollo 8 was still behind
the Moon, cut off from communications. The first clue
Mission Control would have of the success or failure of
the burn would be when Apollo 8's telemetry signal was
reacquired as it swung around the limb of the Moon. If
too early, it meant the burn had failed and the spacecraft
was coming back to Earth; that moment passed with no signal.
Now tension mounted as the clock ticked off the seconds to the time
expected for a successful burn. If that time came and went
with no word from Apollo 8, it would be a really bad day.
Just on time, the telemetry signal locked up and Jim
Lovell reported, “Go ahead, Houston, this is Apollo
8. Burn complete. Our orbit 160.9 by 60.5.”
(Lovell was using NASA's preferred measure of nautical
miles; in proper units it was 311 by 112 km. The orbit
would subsequently be circularised by another SPS burn to
112.7 by 114.7 km.) The Mission Control room erupted into
an un-NASA-like pandemonium of cheering.
Apollo 8 would orbit the Moon ten times, spending twenty
hours in a retrograde orbit with an inclination of 12
degrees to the lunar equator, which would allow it to
perform high-resolution photography of candidate sites
for early landing missions under lighting conditions
similar to those expected at the time of landing. In
addition, precision tracking of the spacecraft's trajectory
in lunar orbit would allow mapping of the Moon's gravitational
field, including the
“mascons”
which perturb the orbits of objects in low lunar
orbits and would be important for longer duration Apollo orbital
missions in the future.
During the mission, the crew were treated to amazing sights
and, in particular, the dramatic difference between the
near side, with its many flat “seas”, and the
rugged highlands of the far side. Coming around the Moon
they saw the spectacle of
earthrise
for the first time and, hastily grabbing a magazine of colour
film and setting aside the planned photography schedule, Bill
Anders snapped the photo of the Earth rising above the lunar
horizon which became one of the most iconic photographs of
the twentieth century. Here is a reconstruction of the moment
that photo was taken.
On the ninth and next-to-last orbit, the crew conducted a second
television transmission which was broadcast worldwide. It was
Christmas Eve on much of the Earth, and, coming at the end of
the chaotic, turbulent, and often tragic year of 1968, it was a
magical event, remembered fondly by almost everybody who
witnessed it and felt pride for what the human species had just
accomplished.
You have probably heard this broadcast from the Moon, often with
the audio overlaid on imagery of the Moon from later missions,
with much higher resolution than was actually seen in that
broadcast. Here, in three parts, is what people, including this
scrivener, actually saw on their televisions that enchanted
night. The famous reading from Genesis is in the
third part. This description is eerily similar to that in Jules
Verne's 1870
Autour
de la lune.
After the end of the broadcast, it was time to prepare for the
next and absolutely crucial maneuver, also performed on the far
side of the Moon: trans-Earth injection, or TEI. This would
boost the spacecraft out of lunar orbit and send it back on a
trajectory to Earth. This time the SPS engine had to
work, and perfectly. If it failed to fire, the crew would be
trapped in orbit around the Moon with no hope of rescue. If it
cut off too soon or burned too long, or the spacecraft was
pointed in the wrong direction when it fired, Apollo 8 would
miss the Earth and orbit forever far from its home planet or
come in too steep and burn up when it hit the atmosphere. Once
again the tension rose to a high pitch in Mission Control as the
clock counted down to the two fateful times: this time they'd
hear from the spacecraft earlier if it was on its way home and
later or not at all if things had gone tragically awry. Exactly
when expected, the telemetry screens came to life and a second
later Jim Lovell called, “Houston, Apollo 8. Please be
informed there is a Santa Claus.”
Now it was just a matter of falling the 375,000 kilometres
from the Moon, hitting the precise re-entry corridor in the
Earth's atmosphere, executing the intricate “double dip”
re-entry trajectory, and splashing down near the aircraft carrier
which would retrieve the Command Module and crew. Earlier
unmanned tests gave confidence it would all work, but this
was the first time men would be trying it.
There was some unexpected and embarrassing excitement on the way
home. Mission Control had called up a new set of co-ordinates
for the “barbecue roll” which the spacecraft
executed to even out temperature. Lovell was asked to enter
“verb 3723, noun 501” into the computer. But, weary
and short on sleep, he fat-fingered the commands and entered
“verb 37, noun 01”. This told the computer the
spacecraft was back on the launch pad, pointing straight up, and
it immediately slewed to what it thought was that orientation.
Lovell quickly figured out what he'd done, “It was my
goof”, but by this time he'd “lost the
platform”: the stable reference the guidance system used
to determine in which direction the spacecraft was pointing in
space. He had to perform a manual alignment, taking sightings
on a number of stars, to recover the correct orientation of the
stable platform. This was completely unplanned but, as it
happens, in doing so Lovell acquired experience that would prove
valuable when he had to perform the same operation in much more
dire circumstances on Apollo 13 after an explosion disabled the
computer and guidance system in the Command Module. Here is the
author of the book, Jeffrey Kluger, discussing Jim Lovell's
goof.
The re-entry went completely as planned, flown entirely under
computer control, with the spacecraft splashing into the Pacific
Ocean just 6 km from the aircraft carrier Yorktown.
But because the splashdown occurred before dawn, it was decided
to wait until the sky brightened to recover the crew and
spacecraft. Forty-three minutes after splashdown, divers from
the Yorktown arrived at the scene, and forty-five
minutes after that the crew was back on the ship. Apollo 8 was
over, a total success. This milestone in the space race had
been won definitively by the U.S., and shortly thereafter the
Soviets abandoned their Zond circumlunar project, judging it an
anticlimax and admission of defeat to fly by the Moon after the
Americans had already successfully orbited it.
This is the official NASA contemporary documentary about Apollo
8.
Here is an evening with the Apollo 8 astronauts recorded
at the National Air and Space Museum on 2008-11-13 to
commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the flight.
This is a reunion of the Apollo 8 astronauts on 2009-04-23.
As of this writing, all of the crew of Apollo 8 are alive, and,
in a business where divorce was common, remain married to the
women they wed as young military officers.