Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon(13)

Borman gathered his crew outside the test bay where they’d been working on the command module.

“Things have changed,” Borman said. “If everything goes right with Apollo 7, they want to send Apollo 8 to the Moon by the end of the year. And we are now Apollo 8.”

It took a few moments for Lovell and Anders to process what they were hearing. The Moon? By December? Us?

And there was more, Borman said. Apollo 8 would go without a lunar module. And it would orbit the Moon.

Lovell could not fight back his smile.

Oh, man, this is great! he thought. This is what I’ve been dreaming about.

He could see the genius in the plan right away. And the personal benefits weren’t lost on him, either. A lunar mission would spare him another Earth-orbital flight, two of which he’d made already as part of the Gemini program. Best of all, it positioned him to do what he loved most—explore and pioneer—and there seemed no better way to do it than by becoming the first man ever to fly to the Moon.

Anders saw it differently.

This new mission would kneecap his chances for landing on the Moon. He’d trained as a lunar module pilot; unless he messed that up, it meant he would walk on the Moon one day. But this new mission had no lunar module, so his duties would shift to the command module, and guys who flew command modules didn’t land on the Moon. Five minutes ago, Anders would have put his chances of walking on the lunar surface at 80 percent. Now they’d slipped to between slim and none.

It was a Saturday and the end of the workweek for all of them. The men packed away their gear and climbed into their T-38s, Borman and Lovell in one, Anders by himself in another, and took off into the clouds.

In the backseat of Borman’s plane, Lovell began sketching an image on his kneepad—a big Earth in the foreground, a smaller Moon in the background, with a figure eight drawn around the two bodies—it formed both the mission trajectory and its designated number—eight. “What a natural thing for Apollo 8,” he thought, and he knew this would be a fine insignia for the patch the crew would wear on their way—on mankind’s way—to the Moon.



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It was just a few minutes’ drive from Ellington Air Force Base to the astronauts’ homes in the suburbs. Each man would have preferred more than the usual one day per week at home with his family, but the rigors of training required subordinating family—and everything else—to the mission at hand. In fact, the men and their wives felt lucky. Borman, Lovell, and Anders had served in the military and knew what it was like to be away from home for long stretches. And each of them had friends fighting thousands of miles away in Vietnam, and they gladly would have served there, or anywhere else the country needed them to fight. The couples had all become expert at making the most of twenty-four hours of family time every week.

None of the men had called home to discuss the proposed new mission with his wife. It hadn’t even crossed their minds. It wasn’t that they didn’t respect their wives’ opinions. It wasn’t even that they were living in a male-dominated culture. These were military men, and even though NASA had been set up as a civilian organization, it was clear to all astronauts—and to their families—that NASA assignments were orders.



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Borman greeted his wife with a kiss and told her about the new mission. As always, Susan smiled and clasped his hand. Inside, she was dying.

The Moon? she thought, trying to absorb what he was telling her. It was August. NASA hadn’t even tested the command module yet. December—that was what, four months away? Usually crews trained for a year or more. To the Moon?

She told Frank how proud she was, how important the mission sounded, that there was no better man for the job. Then she turned and went into another room, where she wished she could kick down a door. They’re rushing it, she thought. They’re leapfrogging, they’re too anxious to get it going. Over the course of Frank’s career, she’d closed her eyes and hoped for the best, but she could see that this mission was different, that she needed to stop living in a cocoon and pretending her husband would always be home for Sunday dinner, because this time Frank wouldn’t just be running another test flight—this time he would be leaving the world.

As always, Frank thanked God for Susan. She always supported him, never made him worry about her or their two teenage boys. He had no inkling of what was going on inside her, or how badly she’d been hurting since Apollo 1 had taken Ed White, the husband of her close friend Pat White. Susan knew Frank had enough pressure at work, and she considered it her mission to make home a place where he never worried.

Borman told the news to his two sons, Fred and Edwin. To the boys, the Moon sounded pretty cool. Borman would have showed them where he was going if only he’d owned a lunar map.

At his home, Anders shared the news with his wife, Valerie. Even as he spoke she thought This is a big and scary change, but she also had been steeling herself to danger since she was a little girl (her father had been a motorcycle-riding California Highway Patrolman), and she believed beating the Soviets to be a worthy goal.

Bill had always been straight with Valerie, and it would do no good to sugarcoat things now. He laid out his thinking on the risks. He thought there was a one-third chance of a successful mission, a one-third chance of a failed mission that managed to make it back home, and a one-third chance the crew wouldn’t return at all. He hated to worry her, but he knew if she sensed he was bullshitting, she just would have worried more.