Apollo: The Race to the Moon (51 page)

It was not quite 4:00 A.M. on December 24, 1968. In the viewing room, a hundred people were packed into a space meant for seventy-four. One of them was Robert Sherrod, a well-known journalist who had been covering the space program after a colorful career as a war and foreign correspondent that had begun before World War II. “I looked up at the big center screen beyond the banks of flight controllers’ consoles,” he wrote later. “Suddenly the familiar map of the earth vanished from the big plastic screen, and in its stead a map of the moon appeared. The effect was overwhelming. I can recall a few similar heart-stoppers in a lifetime of looking and listening—the view of Angkor Wat’s timeless, brooding temples by moonlight, hearing Giulietta Simionato leading the Anvil Chorus at the Met, seeing for the first time the coast of Asia from a bomber after more than three years and many blood-drenched battles across the wide Pacific. None of these equaled the shock of seeing that illuminated map on the screen.”

A lighted sign above the viewing room’s glass partition began flashing “Quiet Please.” Through the intercom, they could hear CapCom Gerry Carr say, “Apollo 8, you are riding the best bird we can find.” Jim Lovell replied, “Thanks a lot, troops. We’ll see you on the other side.”

Dick Koos, watching with a crowd of other SimSups through the window of the sim room, was as nervous as an expectant father. Up until then it had been fun. He had been brought in on the secret early so that he could plan the sims. If anybody had known they were preparing sims of lunar-orbit insertion, the word about C-prime would have gotten out, so they had worked without telling even their own supervisors. Then after Schirra’s flight, when the secret had come out into the open, there had been the big push. Again and again they had run sims of translunar insertion, lunar-orbit insertion, and trans-earth insertion. The fall had turned to winter and the days had gotten shorter. Once an entire week had gone by when Koos, driving to work before dawn, running sims all day, never so much as stepping outside the windowless Control Center, driving home after nightfall, had not seen the sun. Now, as Apollo 8 disappeared behind the moon and its radio signal fell silent, Dick Koos felt lightheaded. He wondered vaguely whether he was going to faint.

Jerry Bostick was Retro. As director of the Flight Dynamics Branch, Bostick wouldn’t ordinarily have been sitting at that position, since Retro was not the senior console in the Trench. But Chris Kraft had asked Bostick to do it. Retro handled abort modes, and if the spacecraft reappeared on the other side of the moon after anything except a nominal burn, Kraft wanted Bostick sitting at the Retro console. For Bostick, the moment when the spacecraft went behind the moon was depressing. Controllers had something of the mother hen in them, and now they were helpless. There weren’t any data to watch, nothing at all they could do to help the astronauts if something went wrong. Bostick didn’t reason all this through. He just felt a sense of loss.

Bostick was still brooding when he heard flight director Glynn Lunney say, “Okay everybody, this is a good time to take a break. Everybody back by 69:20.” Bostick’s first reaction was that, on the contrary, this was a hell of a strange time to be taking a break. But by that time Lunney already had his headset off and was walking down the middle aisle in the MOCR. He stopped and put his hand on Bostick’s shoulder. “How’s it going, Retro?” he asked, smiling at the notion of Bostick working the Retro console again, just like the old days. It finally came to Bostick that it was no good being a mother hen just then, that there wasn’t a damned thing to be done anyway. So he followed Lunney out the door and got in line for the restroom. There was no shortage of people to cover the consoles while the Black Team was gone—it seemed to Bostick as if every flight controller in F.O.D. had congregated in the MOCR for this moment.

No one lingered. Within a few minutes all the controllers were back, watching the digital clocks on the front wall to time the exact moment of the spacecraft’s reappearance around the edge of the moon. Bostick had set up two clocks: One counted down to the time when radio contact would resume if there had been no engine burn behind the moon and the spacecraft was on its way back to the earth on a free-return trajectory. The other was based on time-to-acquisition for a nominal burn that would put Eight into the planned lunar orbit.

The moment when the spacecraft would have reemerged if there had been no burn came and went, and then it became a waiting game. Some sort of burn had occurred, but what kind remained to be seen. Bostick had never seen the room so still. It was jammed with controllers, and yet there wasn’t a sound. Lunney stood behind his console, apparently unperturbed.

The numbers on TelCom’s console revealed that they had acquired the radio signal before the crew actually said anything. The timing was to within a second of the predicted time for acquisition after a nominal burn. To Bostick, the exactitude of it was “like a religious experience”—God, Bostick decided, had a lot on the ball. The silence in the MOCR was broken as the controllers resumed murmuring into their headsets and CapCom talked to the crew.

On Christmas Eve, in lunar orbit, Frank Borman read a prayer for the congregation at St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church back in Houston. Later, on their television broadcast, the three crew members took turns reading from Genesis. It came as a surprise to the controllers in the MOCR, as it did to the millions watching on television, and it was just as overpowering to the controllers as to the rest of the world, this magnificent poetry about the creation of the earth, read by the first men to see the earth whole. Frank Borman, the commander of Apollo 8, had the last verses: “And God said, Let the waters under the Heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear, and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters He called Seas, and God saw that it was good.” Borman paused, then concluded: “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with goodnight, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.”

Rod Loe, sitting at his EECOM console, working this last special flight as a controller just as Arnie Aldrich had promised he could, found his eyes welling over with tears. He bent over his flight log, embarrassed, hoping that no one would notice.

Religion and the Christmas season were on many people’s minds during the flight. In its preflight coverage, Time magazine drew a comparison between the journey of Apollo 8 and the stations of the cross. There were five key phases for the flight: launch to orbit, trans lunar injection, lunar-orbit insertion, trans-earth injection, and entry. During the first three, there had been a way to abort and go home. It was the fourth, T.E.I., trans-earth injection, that had worried people since August. This was the moment that some said had caused Webb to leave NASA. It was quite simple: The S.P.S. engine had to work, bringing the crew out of lunar orbit, or else the crew would circle the moon, with a nice, clear radio link back to earth, for about nine days until their oxygen was exhausted and they died.

For people watching around the world, this was the moment of the most awful fascination with the flight of Apollo 8. The possibility of the astronauts being marooned preyed on everyone’s mind, including the minds of people close to the situation. A few days before the flight, a senior official in Mueller’s office, still uneasy about the decision to go into lunar orbit, was heard to ask, “Just how do we tell Susan Borman that Frank is stranded in orbit around the moon?” The new NASA Administrator, Tom Paine, a no-nonsense type, heard of this remark after the flight and responded, “I guess I would have sat down, held her hand, and said ‘Susan, Frank is stranded in orbit around the moon.’” But it was still the stuff of nightmares, and the S.P.S. engine had accordingly been the object of morbid scrutiny by the media. Diagrams of the engine were shown in popular magazines. Reporters breathlessly described the meticulous checkout that the engine was receiving. This, they emphasized, was the one system that had no redundancy. There was only one S.P.S. engine, no backup. If the S.P.S. failed when a spacecraft was in earth orbit, the crew could use the small jets in the reaction and control system to slow the spacecraft enough to de-orbit. In lunar orbit, the same small jets did not have nearly enough power to speed the spacecraft out of lunar gravity into an earth-bound trajectory.

Within NASA, confidence in the S.P.S. was high. “This is not to say that we didn’t recognize there was a degree of risk in doing C-prime,” said Rod Rose, one of Kraft’s deputies. “In fact, I guess one of our basic homilies that we drilled into everybody at every conceivable opportunity was, ‘Look, fellows, when you light up the S-IVB for the second time [for T.L.I.], you’re going to be three days away from home, and don’t anybody ever forget it.’ You’ve got to have that much more confidence in your systems.” Especially, they had to have a lot of faith that the S.P.S. would fire when the time came to head back. But they had reason for faith: “We had three eminently successful flights as far as the S.P.S. was concerned. We had burned the thing under all manner of conditions, some of which it was never really designed to do.”

Marty Cioffoletti, the Rockwell engineer who had helped disassemble spacecraft 012 after the fire, was by this time conducting the checkout of the S.P.S. at the Cape. He thought that the obsession with the S.P.S. as a one-shot, nonredundant system was a lot of hype. “When they say ‘no redundancy,’ that’s a misnomer,” he said later. “There was only one engine bell, of course, and only one combustion chamber, but all the avionics that fed the signals to that engine and all the mechanical components that had to work, like the little valves that had to be pressurized to open the ball valves, and so forth, were at least single-fault tolerant and usually two-fault tolerant… . There were a heck of a lot of ways to start that engine.” And of course they had indeed checked it out carefully before the flight, but nothing they didn’t do for any other mission.

All this was still correct as of Christmas Eve, 1968. And yet it ultimately didn’t make any difference to the way many of the people in Apollo felt. Caldwell Johnson, speaking as a designer of the spacecraft, explained it. He knew about the checks and balances and all the other people working on the design who were bound to catch a major error. But still, he said, “after a while, you really become appalled that you’ve gotten yourself involved in the thing. At first, it’s an academic exercise. And then the first thing you know, there’s people building these things, and they are really getting ready to do it, and you start thinking: Have I made a real bad judgment somewhere, and the damn thing is just not going to work at all?” Marty Cioffoletti, despite knowing all the ways that the S.P.S. was supposed to be foolproof, concurred. For him as for the most unsophisticated citizen watching on TV, “it was darn scary.”

As the spacecraft disappeared behind the moon on its last revolution, the one when it would fire the S.P.S. to free itself of lunar gravity, the MOCR once again filled with off-shift controllers. Once again the room fell silent. Chris Kraft later reported that waiting to reacquire the signal was his most apprehensive moment since he had joined the space program, worse even than Glenn’s entry after the heat shield problem.

FlDO Jay Greene reported the news: “Flight, we have U.S.B. [upper side band] data. Initial residuals look good.”

Then came the first words from the crew. “Please be informed,” astronaut Jim Lovell intoned across the 240,000 miles, “there is a Santa Claus.”

In the FIDO flight log, Greene wrote in small, neat writing, “Burn status: Burn time 3 + 23. Ignition on time. Attitude nominal. Vx –.5. Vy+.4. Vz 0.” And below that, in big, sloppy, joyous script, “WE IS COMING HOME.”

For many of the people in the Apollo Program, Apollo 8 was the most magical flight of all, surpassing even the first landing of Apollo 11. For some, like Mike Collins, Eight’s momentous historic significance was foremost. For John Aaron, an EECOM, it was simpler than that: “When you’re twenty-five and caught up in the thing, and the MOCR’s the only environment you know, you don’t tend to view things that way.” For Aaron, it was the sheer excitement of going to the moon for the first time. Or as FIDO Jay Greene put it, Apollo 8 was the time that they stopped “just running around in circles. Apollo 8 went some place.”

Around the world, people looked at the moon with a special wonder. So did the controllers. In Jay Greene’s case, it occupied most of the rest of the night. He went home and took a bottle of Scotch and some ice and went out beside the pool at his apartment complex and lay back on a lounge chair for hours, all by himself, getting happily drunk and watching the moon.

Dick Koos wanted to do something like that, but he couldn’t. On Christmas Eve after the reading from Genesis, Dick Koos didn’t get back home from the Control Center until 3:00 in the morning. When he did, he had to hurry to put together his five-year-old daughter’s Christmas present, a bicycle. Just as he finished, he heard a little girl’s voice say, “Santa Claus has been here!” He never did get any sleep that Christmas.

The people of M.S.C. always waited until after splashdown and recovery were safely over to hold the parties, and so it wasn’t until the afternoon of December 27 that NASA 1 Boulevard exploded in a no-holds-barred moveable feast that went on through the night. John Aaron and Rod Loe went to the Flintlock—along with the Singing Wheel, one of the controllers’ favorite watering holes. They were taking a break, standing in the downstairs entrance as people streamed up the stairs to join the mob on the second floor, when a friend passed by. What was Rod doing down here? Why wasn’t he upstairs partying?

There were only four days left in that sad and chaotic year of 1968. Things hadn’t gotten any better after April 4. Since then, Robert Kennedy had been shot and killed, the nation’s cities had been torn by riots and burnings, and unprecedented bitterness over the Vietnam War divided Americans from one another. Still, at that moment all Loe could think of to say was, “I’m just standing here being very proud to be an American.”