Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [66]
He also helped me work through everything from my unfulfilled desires to become an Air Force general to my competitiveness with Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman. Frank and I had been rivals since our days at West Point together. He graduated one class ahead of me, and we both became jet pilots. In the Air Force, I’d edged Frank out for a couple of honors, and I don’t think he ever forgot it.
On Apollo 8, Frank was the commander and I was the lunar module pilot in the backup crew. The mission was a bold move to help us step up the clock and get us closer to landing on the moon. Apollo 8 marked the first time that human beings had broken away completely from Earth’s gravitational pull to fly around the moon. I could honestly say that any competition I felt with Frank fell away like the giant shards of frost breaking off the Saturn V rocket as it lifted Frank and his crew—Jim Lovell and Bill Anders—on their way toward the moon. Frank’s mission was one of the most observed in history, the first mission to orbit the moon, as well as one of the most colorful, with the controversial and inspired Christmas Eve reading of Genesis, and the Christmas Day declaration by Jim Lovell, once they knew they were on their way home, “Houston, please be informed, there is a Santa Claus.”
It wasn’t until fifteen years later that I would discover by accident that I was not NASA’s first choice for the Apollo 11 mission. I stumbled into this revelation when I was hired as a technical consultant for a movie produced by Mary Tyler Moore’s company, MTM. While reading the script, I noticed that after Apollo 8 came back from circling the moon, Frank Borman was offered the commandership of the first lunar landing.
“Where did you guys get this?” I asked the writers.
“Out of Frank Borman’s book,” they replied confidently.
I checked out Frank’s book, Countdown, and sure enough, he writes that in effect it was his decision not to be on the first lunar landing. I approached Jim Lovell, with whom I had flown on Gemini 12, and who had also been on Apollo 8 along with Bill Anders. “Jim, is there anything to this?”
“Yes, they offered the first landing mission to Frank Borman and he turned it down,” Jim confided, “without asking the other two crew members, Bill and me.”
Why would Frank not want to be on the first lunar landing mission? I don’t know; maybe he recognized that the public pressure on that first group would be unprecedented, or perhaps, like me, he was more interested in the subsequent missions on which more advanced scientific exploration would take place. Regardless, to me that illustrated the sort of gamesmanship that went on at NASA during those early years of the Apollo program. It seemed that everyone was vying for position.
Dr. Flinn understood the NASA system as well as any doctor on earth, and he helped me understand the reasons for my anxiety while I was there and especially afterward. He also helped me grapple with the uncertainties I was feeling about the book project I was working on with Wayne Warga.
OUR HOME IN Hidden Hills, for as much as I enjoyed it, was both a blessing and a curse. It was a fantastic playground for our family, yet I worried how we were going to pay for it. The pressure to keep life functioning normally for my family members weighed heavily on me.
Following my retirement, I kept busy by working around the house, being Mr. Handyman, while constantly looking for new opportunities to do something significant with my life that would also encourage others to do the same. And I was spending hundreds of hours in interviews with Wayne from the spring of 1972 well into 1973, rehashing my past, especially on