Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

The Saturn 5 was said to be a different beast. Despite the fact that the rocket produced a staggering 7.5 million pounds of thrust – nearly nineteen times more than the Titan – the designers promised that this would be a far smoother booster. Peak gravity loads were said to climb no higher than four G’s, and at some points in the rocket’s powered flight, its gentle acceleration and its unusual trajectory dropped the gravity load slightly below one G. Among the astronauts, many of whom were approaching forty, the Saturn 5 had already earned the sobriquet “the old man’s rocket.” The promised smoothness of the Saturn’s ride, however, was until now just a promise, since no crew had as yet ridden it to space. Within the first minutes of the Apollo 8 mission, Borman, Lovell, and Andres quickly learned that the rumors about the painless rocket were all wonderfully true.

“The first stage was very smooth, and this one is smoother!” Borman exulted midway through the ascent, when the rocket’s giant F-1 engines had burned out and its smaller J-2 engines had taken over.

“Roger, smooth and smoother,” Capcom answered.

Less than ten minutes later, the gentle expendable booster completed its useful life, dropping its first two stages in the ocean and placing the astronauts in a stable orbit 102 miles above the Earth.

According to the mission rules for a lunar flight, a ship bound for the moon must spend its first three hours in space circling the Earth in an aptly named “parking orbit.” The crew uses this time to stow equipment, calibrate instruments, take navigational readings, and generally make sure their little ship is fit to leave home. Only when everything checks out are they permitted to relight the Saturn 5’s third stage engine and break the gravitational hold of Earth.

For Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, it would be a busy three hours, and as soon as the ship was safely in orbit they knew they’d have to get straight to work. Lovell was the first of the trio to unbuckle his seat restraints, and no sooner had he removed the belts and drifted forward than he was struck by a profound feeling of nausea. The astronauts who flew in the early days of the space program had long been warned about the possibility of space sickness in zero G, but in the tiny Mercury and Gemini capsules, where there was barely room to float up from your seat before bonking your head on the hatch, motion-related queasiness was was not a problem. In Apollo there was more space to move around, and Lovell discovered that this elbow room came at a gastric price.

“Whoa,” Lovell said, as much to himself as in warning to his crewmates. “You don’t want to move too fast.”

He eased his way gently forward, discovering – as centuries of remorseful drinkers with late-night bed spins had learned – that if he kept his eyes focused on one spot and moved very, very slowly, he could keep his churning innards under control. Easing his way about in this tentative way, Lovell began to negotiate the space directly around his seat, failing to notice that a small metal toggle protruding from the front of his spacesuit had snagged one of the metal struts of the couch. As he moved forward the toggle caught, and a loud pop and hiss echoed through the spacecraft. The astronaut looked down and noticed that his bright yellow life vest, worn as a precaution during liftoffs over water, was ballooning up to full size across his chest.

“Aw, hell,” Lovell muttered, dropping his head into his hand and pushing himself back into his seat.

“What happened?” a startled Anders asked, looking over from the right-hand couch.

“What does it look like,” Lovell said, more annoyed with himself than his junior pilot. “I think I snagged my vest on something.”

“Well, unsnag it,” Borman said. “We’ve got to get that thing deflated and stowed.”

“I know,” Lovell said, “but how?”

Borman realized Lovell had a point. The emergency life vests were inflated from little canisters of pressurized carbon dioxide that emptied their contents into the bladder of the vest. Since the canisters could not be refilled, deflating the vest required opening its exhaust valve and dumping CO 2into the surrounding air. Out in the ocean this was not a problem, of course, but in a cramped Apollo command module it could be a bit dicey. The cockpit was equipped with cartridges of granular lithium hydroxide that filtered CO 2out of the air, but the cartridges had a saturation point after which they could absorb no more. While there were replacement cartridges on board, it was hardly a good idea to challenge the first cartridge on the first day with a hot belch of carbon dioxide let loose in the small cabin. Borman and Anders looked at Lovell, and the three men shrugged helplessly.

“Apollo 8, Houston. Do you read?” the Capcom called, evidently concerned that he hadn’t heard from the crew for a long minute.

“Roger,” Borman answered. “We had a little incident here. Jim inadvertently popped one life vest, so we’ve got one full Mae West with us.”

“Roger,” the Capcom replied, seemingly without an answer to offer. “Understand.”

With their 180 minutes of Earth orbit ticking away and no time to waste on the trivial matter of a life vest, Lovell and Borman suddenly hit on an answer: the urine dump. In a storage area near the foot of the couches was a long hose connected to a tiny valve leading to the outside of the spacecraft. At the loose end of the hose was a cylindrical assembly. The entire apparatus was known in flying circles as a relief tube. An astronaut in need of the relief the system provided could position the cylinder just so, open the valve to the vacuum outside, and from the comfort of a multi-million-dollar spacecraft speeding along at up to 25,000 miles per hour, urinate into the celestial void.

Lovell had availed himself of the relief tube countless times before, but only for its intended purpose. Now he would have to improvise. Strugging out of his life vest, he wrestled it down to the urine port, and with some finessing managed to wedge its nozzle into the tube. It was a forced fit but a workable one. Lovell gave the high sign to Borman, Borman nodded back, and while the commander and the LEM pilot went through their pre-lunar checklist, Lovell coaxed his life vest back to its deflated state, patiently correcting the first blunder he had committed in nearly 430 hours in space.

Lovell explained Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI):

The maneuver, known as lunar orbit insertion, or LOI, was a straight-forward one, but it was fraught with risks. If the engine burned for too short a time, the ship would go into an unpredictable – perhaps uncontrollable – elliptical orbit that would take it high up above the moon when it was over one hemisphere and plunge it down again when it was over the other. If the engine burned too long, the ship would slow too much and drop not just down into lunar orbit but down onto the moon’s surface. Complicating matters, the engine burn would have to take place when the spacecraft was behind the moon, making communication between the ship and the ground impossible. Houston would have to come up with the best burn coordinates it could, feed the data up to the crew, and trust them to carry out the maneuver on their own. The ground controllers knew exactly when the spacecraft should appear from behind the massive lunar shadow if the burn went according to plan, and only if they reacquired Apollo 8’s signal at that time would they know that the LOI had worked as planned.

It was at the 2-day, 20-hour, and 4-minute mark in the flight – when the spacecraft was just a few thousand miles from the moon and more than 200,000 miles from home – that Capcom Jerry Carr radioed the news to the crew that they were cleared to roll the dice and attempt their LOI. On the East Coast it was just before four in the morning on Christmas Eve, in Houston it was nearly three, and in most homes in the Western Hemisphere even the fiercest lunar-philes were fast asleep.