_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [56]
TEN
A Christmas Moon
Apollo 8’s astronauts were filled with wonder as they looked out their windows. A bright sphere eased into their view and they cheered. Their home planet was moving before them. From 200,000 miles in space they were seeing the whole globe, dominant with blue seas and white clouds and brown continents. There was Europe with its bountiful lands and mountains, and below, Africa with its deserts and its jungle greens and at its southern tip, Lake Victoria. Earth was a perfect sphere, a heavenly blue marble.
“Toasting the ship,” Apollo 8 was turning slowly to keep the sun’s heat distributed evenly around its outside surface, and the slow roll slid the astronauts’ home silently out of their view. They turned from the windows. Tomorrow would be Christmas Eve. That Frank Borman, James Lovell, and Bill Anders were between Earth and the moon seemed impossible. They had gambled their lives by riding the Saturn V onto their now lunar flight path. The mighty machine had flown only twice before. The first flight successfully, the second with some problems. But Borman, Lovell, and Anders’s ride was perfection.
They also had the largest television audience in history, more than a half billion people taking in sights from space they had never before seen. And when Earth came into their view again, commander Frank Borman played tour guide. “What you’re seeing is the Western Hemisphere,” the former airline pilot said as if he were pointing out the Grand Canyon. “In the center, just lower to the center, is South America, all the way down to Cape Horn. I can see Baja California and the southwestern part of the United States.”
Jay Barbree reports Apollo 8’s launch from Cape Canaveral before flying to Houston’s Mission Control to cover the Christmas mission to moon orbit. (Barbree Collection).
Apollo 8 had live television, but it was still television in black-and-white, so astronaut James Lovell joined his commander. “For colors, the waters are all sorts of royal blue. Clouds are bright white. The land areas are generally brownish to light brown in texture.”
Mission Control broke in. “You don’t see anybody waving, do you?”
They laughed, and the transmission ended. It was time for the astronauts to get back to work as they crossed an invisible line between Earth and the moon. The line is called the equigravisphere, meaning equal gravity between two celestial bodies. Until this point Apollo 8 had been “coasting uphill” against Earth’s gravitational pull. Now, less than forty thousand miles from the lunar surface, the moon’s gravitational pull was greater.
That meant for the first time since leaving Earth, Apollo 8 was heading downhill, gaining speed, and tomorrow the astronauts would have the choice of sweeping around the moon and heading back home on their present circumlunar flight path or firing the spacecraft’s main service engine and slipping into an orbit around the lunar surface.
The world would be watching and celebrating the farthest and most daring spaceflight in history. Yet some were asking, “Why are we going to the moon during Christmas? Why couldn’t they have flown the mission after the holidays?”
The astronauts flying Apollo 8 knew the answer.
Zond.
NASA had its super-booster, the seven-million-pound-thrust Saturn V. Russia had its even bigger N–1 rocket.
The difference?
Saturn V had been doing well under Wernher von Braun. My colleague Martin Caidin had learned the N–1 had stalled. Test delays had the N–1 sitting on the ground.
The Russians regrouped, and in the summer of 1968, CIA satellite photographs made NASA aware of the Zond program.
It was a time when the country was in a malaise. America had had it with the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson had refused to run for reelection. Richard Nixon was on his way to the White House to end the lingering conflict, and if all went as planned, the Russians could send a single cosmonaut on a circumlunar journey by year’s end. The fact that cosmonauts could not land on the moon would not stop the Russians from claiming they had reached