_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [59]
Early Christmas morning, Apollo 8 moved through its tenth and final trip around the lunar landscape. Again, the astronauts were on the far side, out of contact with Mission Control, and the most important event of their flight was before them, the critical rocket blast to come home. If it worked, they would return to their families. If it didn’t, they would be marooned in lunar orbit.
Command Module pilot Jim Lovell counted down the final seconds—“Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, ignition,”—and the three astronauts felt the kick of the big rocket’s instant life, etching the vacuum with flame sixty miles above the moon.
Lovell watched the timer like a hawk. He needed that rocket to burn for 304 seconds. That was the Delta V needed—engineer’s talk for the exact thrust required to get from one point to another—to get from the moon to Earth. The timer clicked and the seconds dragged and those in Mission Control bit their nails, lips, pencils, or most anything within reach. They, along with the worldwide television audience, could only wait.
Finally, Apollo 8 came around the moon and there was the voice of Jim Lovell: “Please be informed there is a Santa Claus. The burn was good.”
Fifty-eight hours after leaving lunar orbit, and with Earth’s gravity dragging Apollo 8 home, the world’s first travelers to the moon splashed down on the Pacific in sight of—you guessed it—Christmas Island.
Three citizens of Earth had just completed what the New York Times called a “fantastic odyssey.”
The road to the moon had been opened.
ELEVEN
The Secret Side of Space
Fog.
Fog and mist.
They are living elements of the craggy mountainous cliffs where a Thor/Agena rocket appeared to rise silently, climbing from its launch pad at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base.
At first, no one except those launching the rocket knew it was there. It was ghostlike rising through the mist, its growing roar awakening all living creatures within its voice.
Off shore, a spy ship disguised as a Russian trawler had locked its tracking equipment onto the climbing rocket.
Martin Caidin and I were working on a secret space book as the Thor/Agena raced away, burning a fiery path across the brilliantly lit sky. Two minutes and forty-five seconds later, the big rocket loaded with its spy cameras was high over the Pacific, heading toward the South Pole as the Thor stage burned out and dropped away.
Agena would fire twice to boost its photo-reconnaissance satellite into orbit—an all-seeing two-camera system arranged so that it produced stereo pictures of Russian and Chinese secrets. The 3-D prints could tell CIA analysts what they were looking at, its height and depth, as well as many other details.
The spy’s name was Discoverer, and it settled into a one-hundred-mile-high orbit above Earth’s north and south poles where our planet below would, every twenty-four hours, rotate its entire surface beneath the seeing lenses of Discoverer’s cameras.
America’s adversary’s borders were closed, but its sky was open and Discoverer was there to steal the secrets it labored to protect. Film-drive motors switched on, and the American spy opened its eyes. Below was Russia’s Baikonur rocket base with its launch pads and supporting structures. Discoverer blinked and blinked, and twenty-one minutes later the spy satellite had completed its first trip across the Soviet Union.
Next time around, the spy’s stereo cameras gathered shots of airfields. Missile installations. Military facilities. Soviet harbors. It was a solid sweep, and ground controllers started the procedures needed to bring Discoverer’s secrets back to Earth.
They monitored a countdown display as it fell toward zero.
“Ten seconds,” reported the recovery director of the classified flight. “I’ll call it out,” he told the technician to his right. “I want manual safety override for the retros.” Nothing really new. The flight controllers