Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

Tags: #History, #United States, #20th Century, #test

Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (14 page)

BOOK: Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8
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Page 64
Bill Anders and toothbrush. The command module's 
instrument panel is on the left, the couches on the right. 
The floating cable is the power and transmission line 
for the video camera.
Failing at this, they turned the camera back inside, and with Borman acting as cameraman Bill Anders used his toothbrush to show how things floated in zero gravity. "He has been brushing regularly," Borman noted.
With one last close-up of Jim Lovell to "let everyone see he has already outdistanced us in the beard race," the astronauts signed off. Though their first television show had lasted barely fifteen minutes, and had failed to show the earth to the people on the ground, it had served as a powerful teaser.
Lovell's last words before they turned off the camera were "Happy birthday, Mother!" He hadn't forgotten that this was her 73rd birthday, and he knew she would be watching in Florida.

 

Page 65
"Happy Birthday, Mother!" says Jim Lovell in foreground,
with Frank Borman behind him. The caps the astronauts 
are wearing were called "Snoopy hats" because they 
resembled the cartoon character's helmet when he 
pretended to be a World War I flying ace.
Blanch Lovell was delighted. "I just can't get over it," she later told reporters. "When they had so many things to do in space that he would think of his mother on her birthday."
10
In Houston, Marilyn smiled. She knew how glad it would make Blanch feel to hear Jim say this from space.
He's always thinking of his family
, she thought.
During the telecast Marilyn suddenly became conscious of something else as well: for the first time it dawned on her how far away Jim was going.
They really are heading to another world
, she thought.

 

Page 66
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Valerie Anders, watching from home, was entranced. The three men seemed to be having so much fun bouncing around in zero g. Valerie also could see that whatever had made Frank Borman ill couldn't have been that serious. By now his nausea had become public knowledge, and much was being made in the press about the dangers of "space sickness." As she told reporters a short while later at another front lawn press conference, "They wouldn't be fixing chocolate pudding if they felt bad."
11
Susan Borman also watched the broadcast, but to her the only thing of importance was to keep her guard up, to be ready to react properly when disaster struck.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
For the next nine hours the astronauts had very little to do other than some basic housekeeping chores. All three made several attempts to sleep, with mixed results. With Houston's approval, Borman had decided to shorten the rest periods and make them more frequent. This would not only make the time seem to go faster, but it might improve their chances of sleep.
Anders in particular found sleep difficult. He couldn't help worrying about the spacecraft and its operation, both of which were his direct responsibility. Even as he lay there, supposedly sleeping, he watched the others, checking them to make sure they were pressing the right buttons and flipping the right switches. At one point he thought Lovell was reaching for the wrong switch, and startled him with a correction. Lovell had thought Anders fast asleep.
Finally, however, Anders did doze off, if for no other reason than that the reality of space flight was beginning to settle in: simple boredom. They had a long way to go, and nothing but a lot of repetitive work to do until they got there.
It is difficult to imagine the distances involved. They started their journey at a speed of over 24,000 miles per hour, fast enough to have taken

 

Page 67
Ferdinand Magellan around the globe in one hour instead of three years. Even so, the astronauts needed three full days to get to the moon. After forty hours, moving faster than any human in history, they still had thirty more hours of travel time left.
In the meantime, all they could do was maintain the spacecraft's systems and wait. And watch the earth steadily and relentlessly shrink behind them.
By 11 PM Sunday night, their isolation from earth was truly beginning to have an impact. Earlier that day, Mike Collins had given the astronauts what would become his daily morning news summary, a little report of the world's headlines, intended to keep the spacemen in touch with earth. Unfortunately, Frank Borman had missed that first news summary because he had been too sick to pay attention.
Now, at 11 PM, with Lovell and Anders trying to sleep, Jerry Carr was at capcom. He decided to fill Borman in on what he had missed. Carr had been a Marine fighter pilot and had both a bachelor's and master's degree in aeronautical engineering. When NASA had announced in 1964 it was looking for more astronauts, Carr had applied ore out of a passing curiosity than any real expectation of acceptance. He was astonished when he was picked for the program in 1966. His initial astronaut training complete, he was assigned as support crew to Apollo 8.
Besides giving Borman the football scores, however, Carr also noted that the only real news (outside of the Apollo 8 mission) was that the crew of the
Pueblo
had finally been released. Eleven months earlier, the
U.S.S. Pueblo
and its eighty-two crew members had been seized by North Korean gunboats. The ship, a reconnaissance vessel doing surveillance in international waters, had been boarded and one man killed. The rest of the crew was taken to a prison camp in North Korea.
12
The crew had been tortured and forced to issue false public confessions. Now, in order to obtain the release of the men, the U.S. negotiator had agreed to sign a document admitting to U.S. espionage in North Korean waters, even though the negotiator called the document a lie even as he stood there signing it. "Apparently the North Koreans believe

 

Page 68
there is propaganda value even in a worthless document," said Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
13
Carr described to Borman how the
Pueblo
crew was released. "It took about thirty minutes for all eighty-two men to come across the Bridge of No Return, that's the one separating North and South Korea . . . They brought the body of the crewman that was killed also."
Then Carr gave Borman some football scores, and soon the conversation drifted to the weather. "It's beginning to feel like winter again," Carr noted.
"Good time for Christmas," Borman mused. "Good weather for Christmas."
Carr felt a need to talk some more. "Frank, we had a little eggnog over at Charlie Duke's tonight. Val Anders dropped by. She's looking fine. Tell Bill she's doing real fine."
"Fine." There was a long thirty second pause, and then Borman spoke up. "How do you like shift work, Jerry?"
"It's great, Frank. You've got the Black Watch watching you tonight." The Black Team was the official name for Carr's shift, because they were scheduled to work mostly late night hours.
"Yes, that's what I figured." There was another long pause, this time lasting more than two minutes. Borman sat and stared at his tiny home planet, far, far away. The conversation with Jerry Carr had made him think of Susan and his family. He struggled to think of other things.
He thought of the
Pueblo
. Borman felt, as did many military men, that the
Pueblo's
captain had surrendered too easily the previous year. Anders, for example, remembered how in China his badly wounded father and his crew had refused to capitulate, fighting until the
Panay
was sunk.
Borman thought of the
Pueblo
crew's imprisonment, torture, and release, and how those men would now be able to celebrate Christmas with their families. He stared out the window. He could almost feel the vast black emptiness of space that surrounded the earth. The vastness seemed to press down on him like a terrible weight. He exhaled. "Boy, Jerry. That earth is sure looking small."

 

Page 69
Carr could only agree. "Roger. I guess it'll get smaller too."
Sunday, December 22nd, 1968 was coming to an end.

 

Page 71
Chapter Four
"We Stand for Freedom."
Berlin
At About 1 AM on the night of August 13th, 1961, the streets of the Soviet zone of Berlin were filled with the roar of vehicles. Hundreds of East German trucks, escorted by Soviet tanks, were on the move, converging on the perimeter of the American, British, and French zones of West Berlin.
At the same time, all subway trains attempting to cross the border between East and West Berlin were stopped, their passengers forced to disembark and find other ways home. Even the trains that only cut through East Berlin on their way from one part of West Berlin to another were emptied of passengers before being allowed to proceed. Announcements from loudspeakers blared that subway "traffic will be interrupted until further notice."
1
At the Brandenburg Gate, just inside the Soviet zone, the six large floodlights that illuminated the plaza from the Soviet side abruptly went dark, and in the dim streetlight a single truck sped between the gate's pillars to deposit a dozen machine gun-armed East German soldiers. Behind them

 

Page 72
came additional soldiers, carrying barricades, soon followed by an almost unending line of military trucks. From these the soldiers unloaded heavy eight-foot high concrete posts and rolls of barbed wire and wire fencing.
Bulldozers and heavy construction equipment appeared. Silently ignoring the insults hurled at them by the small crowd that had gathered on the West Berlin side, the soldiers began drilling holes in the ground. Soon they eased the concrete posts into place and attached the wire fencing to them. Behind this wire wall they then unrolled the bushels of barbed wire, creating a second, more deadly obstruction. As they worked, the line of military trucks kept rumbling into the plaza, with more soldiers quickly unloading more concrete posts and wire.
By dawn the East German soldiers had built a fence 2,500 feet long across the face of the Brandenburg Gate. On the radio the East German government announced:
In the face of the aggressive aspirations of the reactionary forces of [West Germany] and its NATO allies, the Warsaw Pact member states cannot but take necessary measures to guarantee their security and, primarily, the security of [East Germany] in the interests of the German peoples themselves.
They were therefore establishing controls
on the borders of West Berlin which will securely block the way to the subversive activity against the socialist camp countries.
2
This "subversive activity" referred to what in recent weeks had become an unceasing flood of East German refugees, fleeing to the West by entering East Berlin and taking the subway across. When rumors indicated that this escape route might soon be closed, the numbers of refugees skyrocketed to over 30,000 in July and almost 20,000 in the first twelve days of August. This exodus of East German citizens had made the communist state one of the only nations in the world with a declining population. In the twelve years since Frank Borman had seen those East German refugees in the Dachau
BOOK: Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8
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