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

At 7 A.M., the rocket’s five enormous engines ignited, sending shock waves of sound and light and energy in every direction as 7.5 million pounds of thrust lifted the six-million-pound behemoth up and away from the launchpad. Three miles away, plaster dust fell from the ceiling in the Launch Control Center, while sand shifted on beaches even more distant than that. Describing the event for a live television audience, CBS anchor Walter Cronkite grabbed the plate glass window of his booth to keep it from collapsing.

“Our building is shaking here!” Cronkite said with uncharacteristic exuberance. “Oh, it’s terrific! The building’s shaking! This big blast window is shaking and we’re holding it with our hands! Look at that rocket go into the clouds at three thousand feet! The roar is terrific! Look at it going!”

The flight worked, every part of it, almost perfectly. It was clear now that America stood a fighting chance, not just of putting a man on the Moon, but of doing it by a long-dead president’s impossible deadline.



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NASA kicked off 1968 by flying Apollo 5 in January, an unmanned test of the lunar module, the landing craft that would shuttle astronauts between the orbiting spacecraft and the lunar surface. The mission used a smaller rocket, and despite a few problems it was classified a success.

And then came Apollo 6.

It would be just the second test of the Saturn V, a necessary step before NASA would certify the booster for manned flight. Lift-off was proceeding normally on the morning of April 4, 1968, but just a few minutes into the flight, things started to go wrong. The rocket’s first stage began to “pogo”—to shake violently up and down. Pieces of the spacecraft flew off. Later in the flight, two of the five engines on the second stage shut down prematurely. Still, the third stage struggled into orbit, but its engine—the one required to send Apollo to the Moon—failed to reignite. A backup plan was put into effect, but the reentry of the command module into Earth’s atmosphere was too slow to fully test the heat shield.

To many at NASA, the ten-hour flight had been a disaster. By the time the Apollo command module splashed down into the ocean, any chance for a lunar landing by the end of 1969 looked to have burned away.

“What was illustrated,” wrote The New York Times, “…was the extraordinary difficulty of assuring that every one of the literally millions of components in such an extremely complicated system as the Saturn 5 works perfectly….This fact argues for a slow but sure approach to future Apollo tests, rather than an adventuresome policy aimed primarily at completing the job by the end of 1969.”



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On the same day that Apollo 6 went haywire, United States intelligence agencies delivered a report on the Soviet space program. It was marked TOP SECRET and went only to high-ranking government policymakers and top NASA officials. It read:

    The Soviets will probably attempt a manned circumlunar flight both as a preliminary to a manned lunar landing and as an attempt to lessen the psychological impact of the Apollo program.



That much wasn’t news. But the estimate on when it would happen jumped off the page. The report said that 1969 was more likely for this manned circumlunar flight. But the second half of 1968 was entirely possible.

NASA had no plans to send men to the Moon in 1968. The soonest they’d be ready to try was mid-1969, when Apollo 10 would orbit the Moon—a test run before Apollo 11 attempted a landing.

By that time, a cosmonaut might already have reached the Moon. And that would be more than just the greatest technological achievement in history. It would be a definitive victory for the Soviets in the Space Race. The landing would still matter, of course. But no one ever again would ask, “Can we get there?” By that time, someone else would have answered, “We did.”

NASA had little choice but to keep working. But as spring turned to summer, there was more bad news for the agency. Plagued by design and production problems, the lunar module had fallen behind schedule. Engineers reported that a fix could take six months or more. That threatened to delay several planned Apollo flights—including those to the Moon.

By early August 1968, things looked dire for the American space program. The Saturn V rocket was in no shape to fly with a crew aboard. The Soviets looked ready to send men around the Moon by year’s end. And now, because of issues with the lunar module, Kennedy’s end-of-decade deadline for a lunar landing was slipping away.

NASA always proceeded deliberately and carefully. They didn’t skip ahead; the risks of manned spaceflight were simply too great. But their hand had been forced. So Deke Slayton had to ask Frank Borman an unthinkable question: Will you and your crew go suddenly—in just four months’ time—to the Moon?

Now Slayton needed an answer.





BORMAN HAD NO IDEA WHAT SLAYTON’S proposed mission entailed. He did know, however, that NASA couldn’t be ready     to go to the Moon in just four months. He knew the agency had yet to build essential     systems, calculate proper trajectories, solve problems with its Moon rocket,     determine fundamental navigation, develop software, even make a basic flight plan.     And he knew how badly the lunar module had fallen behind schedule.

Borman hadn’t joined NASA for the usual reasons. He had little     interest in exploration, adventure, or pioneering. He didn’t thrive on speed or     adrenaline. Even the glamorous perks of the job—the availability of beautiful     women, discounts on Corvettes, the public’s adoration—meant nothing to him.     He’d joined NASA for a single purpose: to fight the Soviet Union on the world’s new     battlefield, outer space.