Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon(17)

That made sense to Borman.

And with that, the plan was complete.

The men checked their watches. It was five P.M. In just four hours, they’d designed a mission that would send the first human beings away from their home planet, have them orbit the Moon, then return home. In a year that was shaping up to be among the most fractious in the nation’s history, in which its citizens were rippling with anger and its institutions were no longer trusted, something sublime had occurred in this office. Shaking hands, Kraft and Borman had the same thought: This was a great afternoon. This was America at her best.

The two men left the building together. As Borman walked past the other astronauts’ Corvettes and climbed into his 1955 Ford pickup, Kraft could only admire him. Even during this technical meeting, Borman had been true to form: direct, principled, and bullshit-free, unwilling to look past minor details or compromise around edges. To many, including Kraft, he seemed the ideal astronaut to command the riskiest flight NASA might ever undertake. To those who knew him best, it seemed Borman had arrived at a crossroads, not just in his career but in his life.





FRANK FREDERICK BORMAN FIRST LEFT EARTH at age five, in 1933, when his father took him on a trip from their home in Gary, Indiana, to an airfield in Ohio. There, a barnstorming pilot wedged father and son into the front seat of a Waco biplane and flew them over the countryside. Five-year-old Frank could hardly process the freedom of it all—the open cockpit, the wind in his face, nothing between him and the rest of the world as the machine growled and swooped through an endless sky. The pilot asked for five dollars when the airplane finally settled back on Earth, a fortune during the Great Depression, and the greatest bargain Frank could imagine.

Not long after, Frank’s family moved to Tucson, Arizona. His father, Edwin Borman, leased a Mobil service station and tried to make a go of it. The Bormans didn’t have much—just a modest two-bedroom home and a 1929 Dodge with creaky wooden spokes. As the Depression moved into the 1930s, Edwin’s business suffered and he lost his gas station lease. It was then that Frank saw his dad live by the mantra he’d been preaching forever: Do not quit, stay in there and pitch. Edwin took a job changing tires at another garage, then found work driving a laundry truck. Frank’s mother opened their house to boarders to make extra money.

At school, Frank’s teachers observed him to be bossy and headstrong, a report that didn’t surprise his parents. Since the day Frank could walk, he had moved in straight lines and with shoulders pinned forward, a kid compelled to arrive. Not everyone knew where Frank was going, not even his mom and dad sometimes, but it seemed to them a mistake to label the boy rude or abrupt just for pushing past people and things that slowed him down. They’d always told Frank he could be the best at whatever he chose if he did things the right way, with excellence and integrity, no shortcuts.

Edwin and Frank often sat together at their living room card table building model airplanes, some powered by rubber bands, others by tiny temperamental gas engines that screamed like banshees. Frank learned to take responsibility for his creations. Edwin never stepped in and finished the job for Frank, no matter how many times the engines wouldn’t fire—even during model airplane competitions, even while judges were waiting. He just let Frank keep working, keep adjusting, until the Borman plane flew better and farther than all the rest.

By the late 1930s, many kids across America had become fascinated by the idea of space travel. Scientists were developing rocket technologies, and the future that these machines promised exploded in color in popular science and adventure magazines, comic strips, and films. Frank couldn’t have cared less. Science fiction bored him. If his friends went to see movies about spaceships, he stayed home and built airplanes, the kind of machines that flew for real.

Frank entered high school in 1942, in the midst of World War II. Schoolwork came easily to him, which left him time for deeper pleasures. One day, he wandered over to nearby Gilpin Airport and told the manager he wanted to fly. The man had no problem with Frank’s age—fifteen—but warned that lessons cost nine dollars an hour. Frank knew his parents couldn’t afford that, but he did some quick mental math. By combining the salaries from his three current jobs—bag boy at Safeway, gas station jockey, and sweeper at Steinfeld’s Department Store—he could put himself into the air.

He signed up and was taken to a hangar where he met his instructor, who was about thirty years old, had trained very few students, and was dressed not like a pilot but in Levi’s and a white T-shirt, which was unusual at the time for a woman.

In the 1940s, only about a hundred women worked as flight instructors in the United States. Bobbie Kroll was one of them. Frank hardly noticed her gender, she hardly noticed his age, and at once they were together in the cockpit. Miss Bobbie was an ideal teacher. She would not yell or panic, and she remained calm when Frank banked too hard or struggled to come out of a stall. After just eight hours of dual instruction, she turned Frank loose to solo.

For the next three years, Frank continued taking flying lessons, making good grades, and playing quarterback on his high school football team. But his best night of high school came during senior year at a local dance in Tucson, when he spent the evening moonstruck by a golden-haired sophomore named Susan Bugbee. She’d been voted the most beautiful girl in her class, and Frank, a longtime believer in democracy, thought the voters had gotten it right. He was aching to ask her out, but this young man who stared down thunderstorms in small airplanes couldn’t stomach the idea of rejection. Instead, he came up with a plan. A friend of Frank’s would call Susan on the phone. Pretending to be Frank, he would ask her for a date. That way, if she said no, Frank wouldn’t hear it.