Richard Lawrence - The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disaster

“Magnificent,” someone whispered. It might have been Borman; it might have been Lovell; it might have been Anders.

“Stupendous,” someone answered.

Gliding beneath them was a ravaged, fractured, tortured panorama that had been previously glimpsed by robot probes but never before by the human eye. Ranging out in all directions was an endless, lovely-ugly expanse of hundreds – no, thousands; no, tens of thousands – of craters, pits, and gouges that dated back hundreds – no, thousands; no, millions – of millennia. There were craters next to craters, craters overlapping craters, craters obliterating craters. There were craters the size of football fields, craters the size of large islands, craters the size of small nations.

Many of the ancient pits had been catalogued and named by astronomers who first analyzed the pictures sent back from probes, and after months of study these had become as familiar to the astronauts as earthly landmarks. There were the craters Daedalus and Icarus, Korolev and Gagarin, Pasteur and Einstein and Tsiolkovsky. Scattered about the terrain were also dozens of other craters that had never been seen by human or robot. The spellbound astronauts did what they could to take this all in, pressing their faces against their five tiny windows and, for the moment at least, forgetting altogether the flight plan or the mission or the hundreds of people in Houston waiting to hear their voices.

From over the advancing horizon, something wispy started to appear. It was subtly white and subtly blue and subtly brown, and it seemed to be cliimbing straght up from the drab terrain. The three astronauts knew at once what they were seeing, but Borman identified it anyway.

“Earthrise,” the commander said quietly.

“Get the cameras,” Lovell said quickly to Anders.

“Are you sure?” asked Anders, the mission’s photographer and cartographer. “Shouldn’t we wait for scheduled photography times?”

Lovell gazed at the shimmery planet floating up over the scarred, pocked moon; then looked at his junior crewmate.

“Get the cameras,” he repeated.

On Christmas Day Lovell had arranged to have a gift delivered to his wife while Apollo 8 was in lunar orbit. The gift card read “Merry Christmas from the Man in the Moon”.

The crew had broadcast from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. Lovell:

“What you’re seeing,” said Anders as he steadied the camera and braced his buoyant body against the bulkhead of the ship, “is a view of the Earth above the lunar horizon. We’re going to follow along for a while and then turn around and give you a view of the long, shadowed terrain.”

“We’ve been orbiting at sixty miles for the last sixteen hours,” Borman said while Anders pointed the lens downward at the surface, “conducting experiments, taking pictures, and firing our spacecraft engine to maneuver around. And over the hours, the moon has become a different thing for each one of us. My own impression is that it is a vast lonely, forbidding expanse of nothing that looks rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone. It certainly would not be a very inviting place to live or work.”

“Frank, my thoughts are similar,” Lovell said. “The loneliness up here is awe inspiring. It makes you realize just what you have back on Earth. The Earth from here is an oasis in the vastness of space.”

“The thing that impressed me the most,” Anders took over, “was the lunar sunrises and sunsets. The sky is pitch black, the moon is quite light, and the contrast between the two is a vivid line.”

“Actually,” Lovell added, “the best way to describe the whole area is an expanse of black and white. Absolutely no color.”

The flight plan called for the broadcast to last twenty-four minutes, during which time the ship would glide across the lunar equator from east to west, covering about 72 degrees of its 36 degree orbit. The astronauts were to take this time to explain and describe, point and instruct, and try to convey through words and grainy pictures what they were seeing.

On Christmas Eve they finished their broadcast by filming through the window and reading from a prepared script. Anders said:

“‘We are now approaching the lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send to you.

“In the beginning,” he began, “God created the Heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Anders read slowly for four lines, then passed the paper on to Lovell.

“And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.” Lovell read four lines of his own and handed the paper to Borman.

“And God said, let the waters under the Heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear.” Borman continued until he reached the end of the passage, concluding with, “And God saw that it was good.”

When the final line was done, Borman put down the paper. “And from the crew of Apollo 8,” his voice crackled down through 239,000 miles of space, “we close with good night, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you on the good Earth.”

After the broadcast it was time for the Trans Earth Injection burn. Lovell:

Just as Jerry Carr had done for the LOI burn, Mattingly read up the data and coordinates for the Trans Earth Injection, or TEI, burn. Once again, Lovell typed the figures into his computer, the astronauts strapped themselves into their couches, and Houston fidgeted in silence as the minutes ticked away to loss of signal. Unlike the LOI burn, the TEI burn would require the ship to be pointed forward, adding feet per second to its speed rather than subtracting them. Also unlike the LOI burn, during TEI there would be no free-return slingshot to send the ship home in the event that the engine failed to light. If the hydrazine, dimethylhydrazine, and nitrogen tetroxide did not mix and burn and discharge just so, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders would become permanent satellites of Earth’s lunar satellite, expiring from suffocation in about a week and then continuing to circle the moon, once every two hours, for hundreds – no, thousands; no, millions – of years.

The crew slipped into radio silence, and the controllers sat quietly and waited. Somewhere behind the lunar mass, the giant service propulsion engine either was or wasn’t firing, and Houston wouldn’t know one way or the other for forty minutes. Mission Control sat in silence for this two thirds of an hour, and as the last seconds ticked away, Ken Mattingly began trying to raise the ship. “Apollo 8, Houston,” he said. There was no response.

Eight seconds later: “Apollo 8, Houston.” No response. Forty-eight seconds later: “Apollo 8, Houston.”

Forty-eight seconds later: “Apollo 8, Houston.”

For one hundred more seconds the controllers sat in silence, and then, all at once: “Houston, Apollo 8,” they heard Lovell call exultantly into their headsets, his tone alone confirming that the engine had burned as intended. “Please be informed, there is a Santa Claus.”

“That’s affirmative,” Mattingly called back, audibly relieved. “You are the best ones to know.”

The spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific at 10:51 a.m. Houston time on December 27. It was before dawn in the prime recovery zone, about one thousand miles southwest of Hawaii, and the crew had to wait ninety minutes in the hot, bobbing craft before the sun rose and the rescue team could pick them up. The command module hit the water and then rotated upside down, into what NASA called the stable 2 position (stable 1 was right side up). Borman pressed a button inflating balloons at the top of the spacecraft cone, and the ship slowly righted itself. From the time the crew climbed out and stepped before the television cameras, it was clear that the national ovation that would greet them would surprise even publicity-savvy NASA. Borman, Lovell, and Anders became overnight heroes, receiving award after award at one testimonial dinner after another. They became Time magazine’s Men of the Year, addressed a joint session of Congress, rode in a New York City ticker-tape parade, met outgoing President Lyndon Johnson, met incoming President Richard Nixon.