Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon(15)

Webb had little to gain by signing his name to such a risky plan. And though he hadn’t announced it, he planned to resign in a few months, ending his seven-year tenure at NASA. No sense in sticking his neck out for a crazy mission he wouldn’t even be around to oversee.

And yet, even as he continued screaming into his telephone, he did not say no. Instead, he said he’d think about it. And he promised to get back to the men the next day.



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As NASA awaited Webb’s verdict on Apollo 8, Soviet cosmonauts trained for their own December lunar mission. It was a treacherous business, and they were taking risks that were normally forbidden, but with the Moon in the balance these were not normal times.

A day later, Webb found a secure phone line in Vienna and called his men in Washington. He still thought the new plan for Apollo 8 was saturated with risk and danger, and that it could ruin NASA, but he could not deny its potential. He gave Paine and Phillips the go-ahead to prepare for a December lunar launch, but warned that he would not sign off on the plan unless and until Apollo 7 orbited Earth and completed its mission objecctives in the fall. That was all the green light these men needed. Even as they hung up they were dialing top NASA brass: The big guy had spoken. Eight was Go for the Moon.

Now NASA needed a flight plan. Ordinarily, that took months to devise, but time was suddenly a luxury of a bygone era. Early in the afternoon on August 18, Borman met with Kraft and some of NASA’s top designers, planners, and engineers in Houston. Everyone had come to hammer out a blueprint for Apollo 8’s flight to the Moon. No one intended to leave until it was done.

Borman looked around the office. To him, this was the ideal setup: no committees, no memos, no suits from Washington, just top-notch guys led by Kraft—cigar in mouth and as tough under pressure as a fighter pilot—who would make the final decisions on everything.

“Okay, so we’re going to the Moon in December,” Kraft said. “Now, let’s figure out how we might do that.”

Everyone started with the same basic questions: How long should the journey last? How many orbits should we make around the Moon? How high above the lunar surface should we fly? What do we most want to accomplish? What should the crew be doing? When do we want to come home?

The planners took on the subject of lunar orbits first, and their desire was simple: They wanted the maximum number the mission could sustain. Borman’s reply was equally simple: Forget it. The meeting was five minutes old and already the players were stuck.

Borman understood their position. Every orbit gave NASA more opportunity to gain experience for a future lunar landing. But they had to understand his first priority, which was the safety of his crew. He, Lovell, and Anders would be flying an unproven spacecraft on a mission riskier than any NASA had ever attempted. To him, each additional orbit was another chance for something to go wrong. As far as Borman was concerned, flying once around the Moon would be a historic accomplishment—and more than enough to beat out the Russians.

Borman’s position didn’t please Kraft’s men, who thought it wasteful to take all the risk of flying to the Moon only to leave early once they got there. Kraft jumped in to calm the planners down.

“What’s the absolute minimum you can take?” he asked them.

The men thought about it and came back with an answer: twelve. Since each orbit would last about two hours, that gave the crew twenty-four hours around the Moon.

“Ten is better,” Borman shot back.

But the men shook their heads. If Apollo 8 flew only ten orbits, it would splash down in the Pacific Ocean before dawn. That meant if the parachutes malfunctioned, no one could see what was happening.

“What the hell does that matter?” Borman said. “If the chute works, great. If it doesn’t, we’re all dead and it won’t make any difference if anyone can see us.”

No one could argue with that.

Kraft asked if his men could accept ten orbits. They nodded. Kraft liked it. Ten was a rational, empirical number. And like that, it was ten orbits.

The question then became at what altitude to orbit. Kraft and his men wanted Apollo 8 to fly just 69 miles above the lunar surface, the same altitude at which the command and service modules would operate during a future landing mission. That required almost unimaginable precision, equivalent in scale to throwing a dart at a peach from a distance of 28 feet—and grazing the very top of the fuzz without touching the fruit’s skin. If that weren’t daunting enough, the Moon would be barreling through space at nearly 2,300 miles per hour. Toss a peach in the air at 28 feet and now hit the top of the fuzz with a dart. That’s what these trajectory experts were proposing to do. And soon everyone agreed to do it.

As the men continued to talk, the details of the flight took shape.

Launch would occur in early morning from the Kennedy Space Center on December 21, when the new Moon would be just a sliver in the sky. Borman and crew would orbit Earth for a short time to check out the health of the rocket and spacecraft. If all looked good, they would attempt to relight the Saturn V’s third-stage engine—no sure thing, as it had failed on the test flight in April. If it did work, the engine would push Apollo 8 to a speed of 24,200 miles per hour, enough to break free of Earth’s gravitational pull. To date, no human had ventured more than 853 miles away from Mother Earth. Borman, Lovell, and Anders would blast past that in a few minutes. Even then, they would still have to cover nearly 240,000 miles to reach the Moon, about fifty-eight times the distance Columbus had sailed to find his own new world.