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6:00 a.m., December 21st, 1968.
The floodlit Apollo Saturn 503 space vehicle is poised like a giant white dart
on pad A of launch complex 39 at the John F. Kennedy Space Center.
While search lights reach up from the pad into the star-filled sky,
three astronauts, Colonel Frank Borman, Captain James Lovell, and Major William Anders
wait inside the Apollo 8 command module for the climactic moment
when the six-million-pound rocket will lift from the ground.
The manned spacecraft's target for the first time in history will be the Moon.
T-minus fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, nine...
We have ignition sequence start.
I'm James Lovell. I was a naval officer and, also, a test pilot and, finally,
NASA astronaut in the period of '62 through '73.
My life was quite varied. I was born in Ohio.
My father died, though, when I was young
and, uh, essentially, my life consisted, basically, in the early years,
uh, living with my mother who was a secretary.
My, uh, early childhood was one of survival.
When I was growing up, Charles Lindbergh made his famous flight across the Atlantic,
and this was the inspiration for a lot of young boys growing up in the '30s.
I was very much interested in aviation, flying.
I built, you know, model airplanes, uh, solid ones, and ones I tried to fly.
When I got out of, uh, college, I hoped, uh, that I would become,
uh, a, either a naval aviator or get involved in aviation.
I was born in Gary, Indiana in 1928.
Uh, at the age of around five or six, I contracted a mastoid and sinus problem.
So my parents really at the beginning of the depression and the height of the depressions,
sold out in, uh, Indiana, and moved to Arizona where the doctors,
uh, said that I would have a chance of recovery.
As an, a youth, I had no interest in space and, uh,
in rockets. While my friends were reading Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers,
I was reading Smilin' Jack and, and the Red Eagle. I was, uh, totally involved,
both in my, my memory or in my aspirations with airplanes.
This is Major William Anders, United States Air Force, NASA astronaut.
I'm Bill Anders. I was born in, uh, Hong Kong, China. My father was number two officer,
the executive officer of the USS Panay,
picking up people who were trying to escape the Sino-Japanese war.
We happened to be in Nanking when the Japanese bombed the ship.
The captain was taken out with the first bomb.
My dad, who was gunnery officer, took over.
And even though it got him a Navy Cross,
uh, it didn't save the ship and eventually they had to abandon it.
And he was, uh, pretty badly wounded.
Uh, we went to San Diego where he spent, uh, several months,
uh, connected to the San Diego Naval Hospital.
So he was, actually, retired, much to his disappointment, and, uh, put in the reserves.
But almost immediately, uh, called back in when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
We spent the balance of the war in San Diego where I went to, to grammar school.
Perhaps the first or second year in high school,
I happened to come across a pamphlet
that was written in 1913 by a, um, fella, a professor called Robert Goddard.
His title was "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes."
It was the story about how to use liquid fuel, rocket technology,
to get into high altitudes, uh, for exploration of the upper atmosphere.
I, uh, didn't understand half of the book or the pamphlet,
but it got me really interested. So towards the last part of my high school education,
I started with some friends building rockets.
Uh, we thought we would try to build a liquid fuel rocket,
but we soon found out that was impossible.
Uh, but we did build some solid rockets using mailing tubes,
uh, a, uh, combination of, uh, potassium nitrate and charcoal, and, uh, sulfur I think it was,
which turns out to be the ingredients of gun powder.
I started building model airplanes with my dad's help.
Eventually would get graduated to, uh, gas-powered model airplanes.
And then, uh, when I was fifteen, I worked, uh, I don't know how many jobs
in order to get enough, uh, money to fly on the, or, uh, get a lesson or two on the weekend.
And in 1944, or '45, I soloed in the Taylorcraft.
My, uh, first aviation experience, uh, first flight in an airplane,
was after my dad had retired.
After the war we went to a small town in, uh, Southeast Texas.
And I remember one day going by this, uh, cattle field
and here was a biplane airplane parked out in the field.
And they had a sign on the fence,
uh, biplane rides, uh, fifteen dollars.
Well that was big money in those days, but my dad said, hey, would you like to do that?
Well sure.
We went out and, uh, took off, and, uh, he asked me if I'd like to do a loop.
I didn't know any better, so I said sure.
So we did a loop and it impressed me that he was relatively close to the ground.
To make a long story short,
we flew around a little bit, landed, I enjoyed it, and, uh, I went to school.
And that afternoon, and coming back,
coming up to the same field, here was this airplane with its nose
buried about two feet into the, into the pasture.
And I guess the guy had been too, too low, and, uh, killed a passenger and the pilot.
I wanted to be a pilot, and I tried to join the Air Force.
The last thing they needed was pilots.
You know, all the people were coming home from World War ll.
They had more pilots than they knew what to do with.
I had... so then I decided, well, I'll, I'll be an aeronautical engineer.
And there was a draft on, but I volunteered for induction
on the theory I'd serve eighteen months, and then get the GI bill,
and I could get an education that way.
This is Camp Buckner, West Point summer training site
where each year cadets of the United States Military Academy,
who have just finished their plebe year, engage in a program of planned military activities.
I graduated from West Point in 1950
and reported into, uh, Perrin Air Force Base in Sherman, Texas
to start basic flying training in a T-6 airplane.
From there I went to, um, Williams Air Force Base
and was, uh, appointed a, uh, pilot on the 4th of August 1951,
and, uh, at Williams Air Force Base in Chandler, Arizona.
Towards the end of my high school days, I, uh, had two choices.
And the first thing, my, my mother wanted me to get, uh, my education all at once,
and, uh, so I applied to the United States Naval Academy.
But when I got my card back, well the information back from the academy,
it turned out that I was third alternate.
So I wrote to the American Rocket Society and I got a very nice letter back from them.
Said that, um, rocketry, uh, as a career, it's just starting, I would suggest you apply to,
uh, colleges like, uh, MIT, and Caltech.
I'm sure that you'll be successful. Well, huh, there wasn't any money for colleges.
In those days, um, we didn't have, uh, student loans like we do today.
And, consequently, my career looked pretty bleak.
And, then, a door of opportunity.
The Navy, after World ll,
found out that most of the naval aviators
didn't want to make the Navy their career, and, consequently,
all these naval aviators were going back into civilian life.
And so the Navy Department set up a program,
a program to get more naval aviators into the service.
I applied immediately, and I was accepted.
I went to the University of Wisconsin for two years in a mechanical engineering course,
and when I was finished there I was sent down to Pensacola,
and I was starting my naval training.
Suddenly, I got, from the Navy Department, a set of orders that if I was still...
wanted to go to the Naval Academy,
I should report to the Naval Academy.
And, consequently, I dropped my career at that time in naval aviation,
and I went to the Naval Academy at Annapolis, started all over again as a plebe.
In 1950 the Korean War happened,
and a lot of my contemporaries that went through what we call the Holloway Program,
uh, that I was in originally, uh, went to sea, got their wings,
uh, were in the war itself and never got back
to their last two years of college. So very fortunately, my mother was right,
get your education while you can.
Well since my father, uh, was a career naval officer,
I had always assumed that I would follow in his footsteps and,
uh, become a, uh, a naval officer.
I got accepted to the Naval Academy and went away as a plebe.
We went on cruises in the summer, and the second cruise as a mid-Shipman
was on an aircraft carrier.
I remember, almost, the very first day.
Pilot, uh, missed the wires, and it was a straight-deck carrier.
All the, the, the other airplanes were up in the front.
He missed the wires and crashed into about six other airplanes,
which they just pushed over the side.
One day the, the head of the, um, Marine Reserve squadron,
the squadron commander came out in, uh, his gull wing Corsair, looks over
and, uh, revs the engine up, and he gives the okay, or they saluted,
whatever they do, and off he goes. Well as he went down the catapult,
this wing came up.
And I remember, uh, looking over at this,
uh... he was just sitting in the cockpit.
But I thought, well he'll be picked up. So we went by and, uh, the ship missed him,
and by the time the helicopter was close
the, uh... His airplane sunk and he never got out.
The, uh, mortality rate that they had on that cruise, uh, wrecking airplanes, uh,
I'm thinking do I really want to do this? Maybe I would be better off in the Air Force,
uh, where they had ten thousand feet of, uh, nice concrete to land and take off on.
As a result of intensive work by Research Institute and Designing Bureau,
the first artificial earth satellite in the world has now been created.
This first satellite was, today, successfully launched in the USSR.
According to preliminary information, this carrier...
It's hard for people to realize now the impact that had on, uh, on the American psyche,
'cause here were the Russians sending over every ninety minutes a,
a satellite over our heads, the first one that had ever been launched.
And, uh, I, I started to, uh, rethink my priorities
as far as the Air Force went 'cause I hadn't had any combat time,
although I had taught in the Fighter Weapons School.
So I applied to go to the Air Force Test Pilot School,
and I was accepted. We got back in the car and drove to Edwards Air Force Base
and I, uh, I went into the Test Pilot School at Edwards.
We were doing zoom flights in the, in the F-104, uh, to get up high enough to give some people
some idea of what zero G was like in an extended period of time
and, also, what it was like to,
uh, to control an airplane in circumstances that they'd never done before.
They, originally, were around thirty, thirty-two thousand feet up to Mach 2,
and then pull up into a forty-five or fifty degree climb.
About sixty-five thousand feet, as I recall, their afterburner blew out.
About seventy-five or seventy-thousand feet you had to turn the engine off
because it got too hot, you shut the engine off.
So you floated over the top. Uh, we were at... it was gettin',
we were gettin' up around ninety, ninety-one thousand feet,
and then came back down, uh, relit the engine, and landed.
Uh, one of the times I was goin' out of a Mach 2.
Uh, all of a sudden, uh, I had, uh, an explosion in the airplane.
My immediate reaction was to bail out. So I raced for the, uh, for the ejection handle,
but then I remember I'm goin' that fast,
so I was pretty certain that I didn't have a catastrophic failure in the back.
There we go, I still had hydraulics.
And, so I started it and ran it for about two minutes, got enough thrust,
shut it off, and deadsticked into the... landed on the dirt
at Edwards, which was, uh, an exciting time.
I went into Naval Aviation training,
graduated in February of 1954, and I was assigned to a team.
We had a plane called the Banshee,
the F2H Banshee.
We were assigned to a carrier called the Shangri-La.
The skipper of the ship decided that he wanted to have a combat air group
flyin' over the task force, so I was the first person off at night.
Went ahead of the carrier for about three or four minutes,
made my one-eighty turn, came back, only at fifteen-hundred feet.
I had made it special so that as a night fighter pilot,
I had a light that I had built on the kneeboard during the trip from the U.S. to Japan.
I plugged in the wire to the receptacle and then I turned on the switch.
And when I did that, I must have blew a circuit breaker
because every light in my instrument panel of the cockpit went out,
and I'm at fifteen-hundred feet.
I pulled out a little penlight in my suit, put it in my mouth,
but it could shine on only one instrument at a time.
So I, very carefully, turned around, still at fifteen-hundred feet,
which you should never do in a jet airplane,
and I was coming back and trying to see if I can find the carrier.
I did see on the surface of the water,
a shimmering trail that was going on.
A, sort of a phosphorescent thing.
And then it dawned on me
that perhaps that was the algae that was being churned up by the screws of a large ship.
And so as I got to that, I followed it, made the turn to the right,
looked at it down, followed it,
and sure enough as I came up at fifteen-hundred feet
I could see the running lights of two airplanes circling this,
this, uh, darkened ship.
Still no lights in my cockpit, and we're coming down now at five-hundred feet,
and I could hear them as they're landing one by one.
But then we went down to a hundred and twenty-five feet.
Suddenly, when I looked down at my radar altimeter,
and it was going past twenty feet, that scared me half to death.
I pulled full power on the airplane, came back up to five-hundred feet,
made another turn around the carrier.
And finally I crashed on the carrier. My hook got the last cable,
came to a screeching halt,
blew two tires, but I got down that carrier.
I eventually made a hundred and seven night landings,
learned my lesson from the first one, and became a competent night fighter pilot.
When I graduated from pilot training in the Air Force, I was sent to Interceptors.
These are aircraft that are generally lightweight and,
uh, were able to climb rapidly in order to intercept a, uh, a Soviet bomber.
One day, I got scrambled, along with my wingman.
We were sent to a place about forty miles off the eastern shore of Iceland,
well beyond our normal range. It turned out to be a Bear bomber, a six-engine,
counter-rotating turbo prop aircraft, which is still flying even today.
But as we came up alongside, I came alongside to get their number,
my wingman stayed out to shoot 'em down in case they shot at me.
As I approached, their quad, uh, uh, 23-millimeter cannon, tracked me all the way in.
Came up alongside and the crew, the Russian crew
who'd, who knew they were just there to tantalize us,
were looking out the window and smiling, waving, so I gave them the finger.
And I thought, you know, uh, maybe I shouldn't have done that,
maybe I'll get into trouble.
Coming up alongside a armed, uh, probably not nuclear armed, but at least machine-gun armed,
Bear bomber, was a bit of a puckering experience,
but it was, in retrospect,
kind of surprising to see their crews at the windows smiling and waving.
I've always thought you're known more by your enemies than you are by your friends.
And so our enemies in those days, uh, in my view
were much more worthy than some of the friends,
the so-called friends we joined up with later for the domino theory.
And, I found it even more interesting,
as time went on, and the Berlin Wall came down, and we met
our soviet counterparts in the space program,
they all were pretty nice guys and very much like we were.
In 1958, I wanted to become a test pilot,
so I applied for Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland. I was accepted.
Suddenly, in 1958, the old NACA, the government agency
that helped the air space industry
decided that they wanted to, maybe, put a man into space.
And they re-designated that agency to the NASA.
Well they thought, well, what kind of a person should we put into the spacecraft?
They had to be under the age of thirty-five,
they had to be a graduate of an engineering school,
and, also, have to graduate from a test pilot school.
The Navy and the Air Force submitted about,
total, about hundred and forty names.
I was one of them.
NASA had selected thirty-two for the physical.
They dropped eight, they had thirty-two. I was one of the thirty-two.
We took a whole week having physicals.
Now this physical, they did things, actually,
they tested us that were not even necessary,
to see if we were physically fit for the Mercury program,
or any other program.
Out of the thirty-two people that they tested over the period of time,
I was the only guy to flunk the physical.
I think that the Lovelace Clinic just had to flunk somebody.
They couldn't prove all thirty-two people, because that would make them look bad.
And, consequently, I was not accepted. I went back to Virginia Beach
to start training some of the new pilots
coming through on how to operate and fly the Phantom airplane.
In the Cold War period, it was mutual assured destruction.
So neither side was gonna do anything really,
in retrospect, to, uh, upset the, uh, the nuclear applecart.
I was trained, uh, as a Cold Warrior.
And, even though in looking back, the Cold War seems kind of silly.
Its outcome in other wars seemed even more silly.
It was a serious time.
The dramatic achievements in space, which occurred in recent weeks,
should have made clear to us all,
as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere
who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.
I believe that this nation should commit itself
to achieving the goal before this decade is out,
of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.
When Kennedy made his speech, that they were gonna put a man on the Moon,
and that was about two weeks after
Alan Shepard made that suborbital fifteen-minute flight into the Atlantic,
I wasn't in the space program yet but I thought, man, that,
uh... to do this before the end of the decade, how are they gonna do that?
I got a call from the Navy and said that, that NASA needed,
or wanted, more pilots and would you be interested in applying again?
Well I said, "Nothing ventured, nothing gained."
Yes, I'd be more than happy to." So the Navy submitted my name one more time.
NASA was selecting the second group of astronauts.
The first seven had already been selected.
They were flying Mercury. And now they were looking for the second group. So I volunteered.
I passed the physical very nicely.
I was then, uh, finally selected for what we called the Gemini program.
I went in and told, uh, Colonel Yeager that, then I said,
"Look, Colonel, I got new-good news today." He said, "What's that Borman?"
I said, "Well, I've just been selected to go to NASA."
And, uh, he looked at me and he said, "Well, Borman,
you can just kiss your blank-blank Air Force career goodbye."
And he was right.
Before I had left Virginia Beach to go down, I got a set of orders that said,
"When you arrive at Houston,
uh, get yourself some transportation over there and check into the Rice Hotel.
Now this is somewhat still secretive, so don't use your regular name.
"Say you're Max Peck and the hotel will give you a room and they'll know all about it."
Unpacking for a while and thinking what to do and suddenly the phone rings...
and a fellow on the line says, "Who are you?"
And I said, "I'm Max Peck."
He says, "No you're not because I'm Max Peck."
And I said, "Well I don't know, there's an awful lot of Max Pecks here, but I'm Max Peck."
Well that turned out to be, uh, Ed White.
Other people were checking in, the other nine,
and we all looked at each other and I recognized Pete Conrad and Jim McDivitt was there
and Frank Borman was there, so that's how we all got started, uh, in the Gemini program.
I decided that to be-being a interceptor pilot for the rest of my career
was not that challenging,
so I thought I'd apply for test pilot school and went and seek the advice of, uh, Chuck Yeager.
He recommended that I apply to go and get a, uh-a graduate degree, which I did.
In the meantime NASA put out a release for a third group of astronauts.
So I was driving home from work one Friday evening
listening to the radio and the NASA announcer came over with the,
uh, new NASA selection criteria. When he said that you either had to be
a test pilot or have an advanced degree, I couldn't believe it.
So I quickly pulled over to the side of the road and waited for the next, uh, news cycle.
To my surprise, uh, on my birthday in 1963,
I got a call from Deke Slayton saying,
uh, "How'd you like to come to work for us?"
Which I accepted immediately and totally amazed that I made it that far.
The next day I get a call from Chuck Yeager...
and he said, "Well, Bill," he said,
"Keep applying but you didn't make it this time. Uh, but keep applying."
Then I made the first of a series of errors.
I said, "Well, Colonel Yeager, uh, I, uh-I got a better offer."
"What do you mean you got a better offer?"
And I said, "Well I was just, uh-I got a call yesterday
from, uh, Deke Slayton to say I'd been selected for the Apollo Program."
He said, "Not possible." I said, "What do you mean?"
He said, "Because I sat on the screening board for the Air Force
and for all those forms that were filled out,
we threw every one of them out if they hadn't been test pilots."
I said, "Well, Colonel, it must have been that letter I sent to them, uh, in parallel."
Well he went ballistic, saying that,
uh, "You went and you made an end run, you went out of channels."
This is Chuck Yeager. I mean, out of channels for Chuck Yeager?
He spent his life out of channels.
But, uh, so he said, "I'm gonna have you thrown out."
Well I, uh, immediately called Deke Slayton, the head of the astronaut group,
not realizing that Deke Slayton and most of the astronauts, the Mercury astronauts,
did not like Chuck Yeager.
So when I told Slayton this,
he said, "Don't worry about it."
And I didn't realize that that locked me in since he didn't like, uh, Yeager very much.
Gemini program in, in total
was designed to prove all of the things that you needed to go to the Moon.
You had to be able to last zero-in zero-G for two weeks.
You had to be able to rendezvous.
You had to be able to dock. You had to be able to do extravehicular activity
and you had to have guided re-entry.
We had to prove all of these things on Gemini.
And Lovell and I were assigned to, uh, Gemini 7, which was the two-week mission.
This is Gemini Launch Control. T-minus one minute and forty seconds and counting.
Last several minutes of the countdown. All conditions still looking good.
As we proceed down to the final moments of the countdown,
the launch vehicle first stage engines will ignite
and build up some four hundred and thirty thousand pounds of thrust.
When seventy-seven percent of this thrust is reached,
the launch vehicle is released from the pad.
All this takes a matter of seconds, some two and a half to three seconds.
T-minus one minute and counting. T-minus one minute and counting.
T-minus fifty.
T-minus forty seconds and counting.
The astronauts have been alerted that the pre-valves on stage two
that permit the oxidizer to come down into the engine compartment will be opened.
T-minus thirty seconds and counting.
T-minus twenty-five.
T-minus twenty.
Fifteen.
T-minus ten. Nine. Eight. Seven.
Six. Five.
Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.
We're on our way, Frank. Yup.
I flew on a lot of airplanes but I never had ridden a rocket before.
Uh, and I have to tell you the Gemini, uh, booster, called the Titan,
was really a booster to ride.
It is a two-stage booster. So the fuel burned out in the... in the booster itself,
it got lighter of course, and that meant it accelerated.
First stage burned out, all the fuel was expended and we jettisoned it
at the second stage.
Now the second stage was trying to get us all the way up
into the proper altitude for being in orbit
and the proper speed to get it into circular orbit,
about seventeen thousand five hundred miles an hour.
And as the second stage fuel burned off, then we got lighter and lighter and lighter,
the G-loading got more and more and finally it got up to eight G's
when suddenly the engine shut down
and we went inside the spacecraft from eight G's
to zero G's and it was quite a site.
Some of the old washers and stuff that was left over by the... by the workmen floated up.
When we first separated from the rocket and looked down,
uh, I frankly thought it was like flying a-
a fighter airplane but at very high altitude.
You could see of course clouds below you and the oceans,
uh, airports with the runways laid out and you see railroads and, uh, freeways.
It was very much like flying at very high altitude in a... in a airplane, except more so.
Gemini 7 required Lovell and I to stay in the cockpit of a Gemini capsule
smaller than the front seat of a Volkswagen for two weeks.
I think two weeks in a Gemini capsule,
you know, trying to get out of pressure suits and two weeks of Frank Borman
is a real challenge.
Gemini 7 is basically a medical mission.
It's the culmination of our efforts to increase
or double man's exposure to the spaceflight environment
ending with a fourteen-day manned space flight.
NASA, being run by engineers,
kinda looked at the astronauts as a piece of equipment
uh, that was, uh, put on a, uh, on a shelf
and when the time came they would take it off the shelf,
stick it into a spacecraft, uh, then said, "Don't touch anything."
And then take off and they would find out just how humans would... would last.
Gemini 6 mission was, uh, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford.
It was gonna be the first rendezvous with an Agena rocket.
But unfortunately, the Agena blew up.
Why doesn't Gemini 6 then rendezvous with Gemini 7?
Because 7 will be up there for two weeks,
will give us time to turn around the Gemini 6 booster and the spacecraft to rendezvous.
And so that's exactly what happened.
The controllers here think hey heard, uh, Tom Stafford say
that he had the spacecraft in sight,
the 7 spacecraft with its blinking lights,
at twelve o'clock high.
We've had no, uh, conversation via Tananarive
at this point and as Chris Kraft observed earlier,
the ground has done all it can at this point through computations.
It's all up to them now.
We're standing by. We'll come back to you when we have additional information.
This is Gemini control, Houston.
We'd been up there maybe eleven or twelve days,
uh, Gemini 6 came up. First it looked like a star.
Eventually it came right up to us, uh, and there was Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford flying
within a foot of us.
You guys are really a shoddy looking group with all those wires hanging around.
Where are they hanging from?
Frank, it looks like it comes out at the separation plane.
It might be the fiberglass.
It's approximately, oh, ten to fifteen feet long.
The separation plane from the booster, right?
Affirmative.
That's exactly where you have one, too.
We flew nose to nose, uh, side to side.
We found out that flying the two spacecraft,
using our attitude thrusters was very nice,
even though of course we didn't have wings but we had thrusters,
we had zero gravity and the vacuum of space,
uh, and it was a very successful flight.
We came to the conclusion that, you know, in Gemini 6 there were two, uh, graduate of-
uh, graduates of the Naval Academy,
and in Gemini 7 there was another Naval Academy graduate,
Jim Lovell, and, uh, Frank Borman was a West Pointer.
And it was just that time was near the,
uh, Army-Navy game, and so when Gemini 6 went up to rendezvous
us and during the position that we were nose to nose,
uh, Tom Stafford held up a little plaque that said, "Beat Army".
I took the picture and it was then known as the highest Beat Army rally known to man.
The reentry, you fire three retro solid retro rockets that you fire to slow you up enough
so that the Earth's gravity would capture you and take you back in to a landing.
It was like flying a-an instrument landing system on an airplane,
except instead of making connections
on an airplane they can only make three to five degrees,
they were making hundred and eighty degree corrections.
That really set the Apollo program back.
They assigned Frank Borman to be the major,
main astronaut interface with the, uh, accident investigation, and Frank basically disappeared
where this command module was being assembled and,
uh, found all kinds of problems.
We found that there had been very slipshod workmanship at North American
on the spacecraft.
We were given carte blanche to find out what the problem was and fix it.
It was a, uh... a revealing time.
I'd been waiting around hoping to fly on Gemini,
realizing that, uh, being a non-test pilot
and engineer put me sort of near the bottom of the totem pole.
So when I was informed by Frank Borman,
that I would be on his crew as a lunar module pilot, I was, uh, quite satisfied.
Finally gonna get a chance to fly and to maybe even land on the Moon.
Jim Lovell and Bill Anders and I were out at North American
with a spacecraft, Spacecraft 104.
Our mission was Apollo 9
and we were to fly basically the Apollo 8 mission, uh, which was a-
a rendezvous mission with the lunar module,
uh, but instead of doing it in low earth orbit,
we were gonna do it out into a, I believe it was an eight-thousand mile orbit.
I got a phone call. I was in the spacecraft.
They got me out and said, "Deke Slayton wants to talk to you."
So I went over and talked to him, told him, "Hi Deke, what can I-"
He said, uh, "Come back to Houston."
And I said, "Deke, I'm busy. I can't come back."
And he said, "Come back to Houston right away.
Get an airplane and come back right away."
And, "Yes, sir."
Uh, he said, "Come on in and close the door."
I closed the door and he told me that the... the CIA
had determined that the Russians were going to try a lunar flyby
before the end of 1968
and he wanted to know if, uh, we would object to changing our mission
and taking just the command module and going, uh,
around the Moon before the Russians did.
When I learned that we were gonna lose the lunar module and be accelerated,
uh, for a circumlunar flight,
I was quite disappointed because I knew that without the lunar module background,
if I ever flew again it would be as a command module pilot
and not land on the Moon.
I made two flights around the Earth.
I've done a lot with Gemini. It was a very small flight.
Of course Apollo would be a new challenge, but the fact that we'd be the first people to,
uh, go to the Moon, I was very excited.
We're gonna change your... your launch date to December.
It originally was in February, we're gonna move you up.
You'll have to take, uh, McDivitt's command module and McDivitt will take yours
and they'll just switch time and numbers.
McDivitt will be on number nine and you'll be Apollo 8.
The final objective of, uh, President Kennedy's, uh,
talk back in '61 was that we were gonna land somebody
on the surface of the Moon and bring them back safely before the end of the decade.
But in reality, to do that, you needed a pathfinder.
You needed someone to really work out the majority
of the problems with going to the Moon, and that was Apollo 8.
We had a... a great deal to do
and only four months to do it in because this was August
when we learned that our mission had been changed and we were supposed to launch in December.
Blinders on, how do we make Apollo 8 work?
When I look back on 1968,
of course we were so, uh, in... involved in training and,
uh, worrying about the Apollo 8 spacecraft and getting ready for the flight,
we had kinda forgotten what the tenure of the,
uh, uh... of the United States was in at that time.
The protestors have been prevented from marching toward the amphitheater.
The clashes have occurred five miles away in downtown Chicago
outside the Democrat's headquarters hotel.
There was serious violence there last night and Jack Lawrence reports.
They jabbed nightsticks into stomachs and skulls, battering demonstrators and bystanders
who were hopelessly trapped on sidewalks in panic with nowhere to run.
Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated, Martin Luther King had been assassinated.
Things were building up.
You know, it's strange but...
and I suppose I shouldn't, uh,
even admit this,
but we were so absorbed in the, uh, space program and so or...
oriented toward beating the Russian and... and making certain that things went well
that it didn't have a large impact on me.
We were very, very
I think so... so much Cold Warriors on our own
that they, uh... the Cold War had three battles.
Korea we tied. Vietnam we lost. Space we won.
And my Cold War war was in space.
The Saturn V is the world's, uh, most powerful, successful rocket.
The Saturn V never had a failure on a manned mission.
It was really a, uh-a marvel of engineering and... and, uh, production.
It was gigantic, three sixty-five feet tall.
Weighed six million pounds.
Developed seven and a half million pounds of thrust. It was really a beast.
Three stages. It had been tested several times, each test having some anomalies.
Had five big engines on the first stage,
five smaller engines on the second stage, and then one engine on the third stage.
The time you lifted off 'til you were in orbit was about eleven minutes.
Frank Borman was the, sort of the rocket expert
and when he said it was okay with him, that was okay with me.
And as the time got close to launch and we figured the launch would be December 21,
1968,
that was a good window to get to the Moon,
and we were still worried about what the Soviets were going to do.
Uh, the last night, we spent in the quarters.
Doing final lookings at... at charts and maps.
Did one last look at the... the chart that showed the lunar topography,
and of course they were going to go around the Moon.
Woke up in the morning.
My favorite breakfast is bacon and eggs, so I had bacon and eggs.
It's for the last meal of your choice.
But then we went and suited up.
Apollo set and launch control at three hours, twenty-one minutes,
twenty-seven seconds and counting.
The spacecraft test conductor now has given a go for crew departure.
We expect that the astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders
will be coming out in a matter of a few minutes.
This is Launch Control.
Conductor Dick Proffitt has advised that the prime crew is now leaving the suit room,
and we should expect them downstairs ready to, uh, board their transfer van
in just a matter of, uh, a short time.
First, Frank Borman, away from, uh, Frank, also Jim Lovell,
and the final man aboard the transfer van, astronaut Bill Anders.
They're being joined by two suit technicians,
and we expect the door on the transfer van to be closed shortly.
Astronaut, uh, Deke Slayton, Director of Flight Crew Operations
also aboard the transfer van.
He'll drop off here at the, uh, control center.
The transfer van now departs...
We went down into the van, and, uh, the van took us,
uh, to the, uh, to the booster, to the launch area.
It's kind of... it's kind of eerie to go down to that big Saturn V on launch day.
It's loaded with about five-and-a-half million pounds of high explosive.
The Apollo 8 crew now on the way to the pad.
Our countdown is go at this time.
Still aiming for a plan liftoff time of 7:51 AM, Eastern Standard Time.
This is Launch Control.
As we got to the gantry and went up, only the check-out people.
Three... about three nervous check-out people were anywhere near that vehicle with us.
Everybody else was a comfortable three-and-a-half miles away at the Launch Control Center.
All three astronauts now getting aboard the first of two elevators
that will take them to the three-twenty-foot level, and their Apollo 8 spacecraft.
Now being joined by two suit technicians.
Gate to the elevator closing, and we expect it will be going up shortly.
We expect they'll be up at the three-twenty-foot level,
and the Apollo 8 spacecraft in a matter of minutes from this time.
When I got on the elevator and went up thirty-six stories to the, uh, spacecraft,
and I do remember walking on the gantry over to the spacecraft from the elevator.
It was a long way down there.
You got the... you could see then the size of that, uh, of that launch vehicle.
Was... was really, uh, impressive.
Astronauts Frank Borman and Bill Anders
now going across swing-arm nine, the top swing-arm at the launch pad.
And, of course, the access arm that attaches to the Apollo spacecraft.
I remember looking down through the grating, and thinking, "Boy, this is a big rocket."
Borman and Anders now have arrived in the White Room.
The spacecraft commander, astronaut Frank Borman, is now aboard the Apollo 8 spacecraft,
and Bill Anders is now boarding the spacecraft.
Astronaut Jim Lovell, the third member of the crew now is aboard the spacecraft.
Hatch closure at 5:34 AM, Eastern Standard Time.
Strapped in, uh, and they closed the hatch, and we waited.
Sort of quiet during that period.
Because in the meantime lots of people started coming out of the-
the beaches, and everything was set up, uh, the people were gathering the stands.
The NASA PR guy with... through loudspeakers,
telling everybody what was happening in the countdown at that time,
and meanwhile, we heard nothing. Everything was quiet in there.
We were left alone for the final countdown of, uh, the Saturn to launch.
The Apollo 8 crew standing y. Spacecraft commander, Frank orman, Jim Lovell, Bill Anders.
We were out there doing our job, and here was our chance
to make a major strike for freedom in the Cold War.
Propellants pressurized at this time
as we come up on the sixty-second mark on a flight to the Moon.
First flight on the Saturn V, first to leave the Earth.
So there, you know, there really wasn't much to wring your hands about.
T-minus sixty seconds and counting.
The vehicle now is completely pressurized.
I thought we had about one chance in three, of having a successful mission.
T-minus fifty seconds and counting, we have the power transfer.
We're now on the flight batteries within the launch vehicle.
The launch vehicle almost came alive as they opened different valves,
you could hear fuel gurgling,
and, and, uh, it swayed a little bit in the, uh, breeze.
Thirty-five seconds and counting. We'll lead up to an...
an ignition sequence start at 8.9 seconds.
This will lead up as we build up the thrust...
The biggest stress for a pilot is screwing up in public.
Almost rather die than screw up in public.
And so we were mainly severely motivated not to screw up.
T-minus fifteen, fourteen, thirteen,
twelve, eleven, ten, nine.
We have ignition sequence start.
When the countdown came to zero, all hell broke loose. Mighty F-1 engines kicked in.
We were held down for a second or two, check 'em out, and then released.
Liftoff, the clock is running.
Roger. Clock.
The one distinguishing thing that I can say about a Saturn V launch
was it was noisy.
And the Saturn V was really an old man's booster,
because I don't believe we got more than six G's.
So it wasn't a rapid acceleration to begin with, it was quite slow.
The people are watching that vehicle lift off,
and then suddenly sort of dance away from the gantry,
because the vehicle is being controlled by the four outside F-1 engines that are gimbaled.
And so the guidance system gimbals them to allow the spacecraft
to move a little bit away from the gantry, and then start to take off.
Tower clear at thirteen seconds.
Roll and pitch program.
Roger.
- How do you hear me, Houston? - Loud and clear.
I only got scared twice in the flight, and the launch was one of them.
And I thought this is a bad way to start.
We've simulated everything we could think of,
and we didn't simulate the launch that was unbelievably violent.
Mark. Mode 1 Bravo, Apollo 8.
Mode 1B.
One minute out. Mike Collins tells the crew we're looking good.
It was so noisy, uh, you couldn't think. You couldn't speak.
If something happened, you couldn't communicate.
Apollo 8, Houston. You are go for staging. Over.
Staging.
S2 has ignited, we can confirm.
And the thrust looks good.
All engines, all sources show the second stage is burning perfectly.
Two minutes, fifty-one seconds into the mission.
The staging from first stage to second stage, particularly, was extremely abrupt.
When the first stage fuel is expended, we're pulled down about five G's,
because as the first stage gets lighter the faster we're going.
I felt like I was being catapulted through the, uh, instrument panel.
On the Saturn V, everybody was a rookie.
Apollo 8, Houston. You are go. Over.
Apollo 8 is go. Thank you, Houston.
S4-B ignition.
Guidance initiate.
Hey, Houston. How do you read? Apollo 8.
Apollo 8, reading you loud and clear.
Everything was... was exactly perfect, we got it.
We find ourselves in orbit eleven minutes later,
and we had to go around once-and-a-half, uh, an earth orbit
before we re-lit the S4-B third stage,
and got injected out to the velocity that would allow us to escape Earth gravity
and go to the Moon.
Apollo 8, Houston. We'll have LOS in, uh, one minute.
We'll pick you up again over Tananarive at 2:09.
Roger, Michael. Thank you.
Correct. How does it feel up there?
Very good, very good. Everything is going rather well.
It looks just about the same way it did three years ago.
I was afraid, that in that orbit-and-a-half,
the ground was obviously going over every system on board.
I'm afraid if they find any anomaly at all,
you know, they weren't going to inject us toward the Moon
with, uh, some sort of concern about a system.
So I was afraid that we would end up spending eleven days in earth orbit, and, uh,
I was relieved when, uh, I heard Mike Collins say,
"Apollo 8, you're go for TLI," go for trans-lunar injection.
Apollo 8, Houston.
Go ahead, Houston.
Apollo 8, you are go for TLI. Over.
Roger. We understand; we are go for TLI.
Well, once you add the velocity that you already have in orbit,
but you add the velocity necessary to escape it, you knew there was no coming back.
Apollo 8 coming up on twenty seconds to ignition.
Mark it, and you're looking very good.
As the spacecraft came around the Earth, on the far side of the Earth, away from the Moon,
we lit the third stage a second time.
And they gave us... that gave us the proper velocity,
and on the proper course, to coast all the way to the Moon.
So we knew we were on our way, and, uh, our fate was now in the hands of, uh,
the, uh, physicists and, uh... and computers.
We're past forty-two. That was when our light...
That's 58:42 or 59...
59.
Nine, eight, seven, four,
three, two, light on.
- Ignition. - Ignition.
Ignition.
Apollo 8, Houston. You're looking good, right down the center line.
Roger. Apollo 8.
I'd like to tell you it required a great deal of skill and piloting ability
and... and we cheated death.
But the fact is, it worked perfectly.
We came into sunlight, we had to disengage from the third stage, separate.
The idea was to turn the spacecraft one hundred and eighty degrees,
and go back to the third stage.
Every flight to the Moon, after Apollo 8, would have a lunar module,
and the lunar module was tucked into the end of the third stage.
What a view.
Looks pretty good, huh?
We've SEP'd Houston. We got the IVB, right?
Roger, Apollo 8.
Roger. Loud and clear. We are taking pictures of the S-IVB.
Uh, the, uh, post-separation sequence is-
is completed, and we seem to have a high gain.
We stayed closer to the S-IVB than I liked.
Because the S-IVB was now unpowered,
but it was slowly beginning to tumble, and venting, spewing out all the unburned fuel.
It was a remarkable sight, it, uh, looked like a... a giant lawn sprinkler.
Boy, it's starting to vent now, blowing down. The S-IVB is really venting.
Roger, understand. That is supposedly a non-propulsive vent.
That is a non-propulsive vent, but it's pretty spectacular.
We see the Earth now, almost as a disk.
Good show, get a picture of it.
We are.
Tell Conrad he lost his record.
We have a beautiful view of Florida now. We can see the Cape, uh, just the point.
Roger.
And at the same time, we can see Africa.
West Africa is beautiful.
What window are you looking out of?
- The center window. - Roger.
We've slithered out of our space suits with some help from each other.
And, uh, stowed them under the seats.
Uh, then, had an opportunity
to look out the window,
and, uh, see the Earth as a full Earth for the first time, and that was a beautiful sight.
Well, Mike.
I can see the entire Earth now out of the center window.
I can see Florida, Cuba, Central America,
the whole northern half of Central America,
in fact all the way down through Argentina and down through, uh, Chile.
When we first left the Earth,
and the... and we were looking back at the Earth as we were going out,
and the, uh, we started on at a very high velocity, and slowly we're slowing down.
But I can see the Earth then get smaller and smaller and smaller as we got away.
Uh, it's some... it looked like, uh, being in the backseat of an automobile,
as you go through a tunnel, and you're looking out the back window,
and you see the tunnel shrink and shrink and shrink and shrink,
until, you know, it gets smaller and smaller.
Are you receiving television now?
Apollo 8, Houston. We just got it.
You are getting it?
We had a relatively primitive, uh, black and white television camera.
Frank didn't want to take it, he didn't...
he basically didn't want to take anything that might detract from the mission.
I was, uh, wrong.
Because I had, uh,
suggested or advocated not taking a television camera at all on the spacecraft.
But I was wrong, and I was overruled by my smarter people in... in NASA.
You know, people deserve to understand and see,
and be as much a part of it as they could be.
This transmission is coming to you
approximately halfway between the Moon and the Earth.
We've been thirty-one hours and about twenty minutes into flight. We have about, uh,
less than forty hours left to go to the Moon. Jim is busy working preparing lunch.
Uh, Bill is, uh, playing cameraman right now,
and I'm, uh, about to take a light reading on the Earth.
We all feel fine. It was a very exciting ride on that big Saturn,
but it worked perfectly,
and we are looking forward now, of course, to the day after tomorrow
when we will be just sixty miles away from the Moon.
Happy birthday, mother.
Hello, Houston. This is Apollo 8.
We have the television camera pointed directly at the Earth now.
Okay, we're just picking it up at three o'clock on our screen.
The bright blob on the upper right of the screen is the Earth.
It's looking better.
You're-you're holding up about one to two o'clock. Looking better.
Give us a little more in that same direction.
You're down at three o'clock now, we see about half of what you see.
That... you're going the right way, you're going the right way.
A little bit more, a little bit more.
Ah, whoa, stop right there.
Mark, it's right at the center of our screen.
Just hold her-hold her steady. It's really looking good.
Houston, what you're seeing is the Western Hemisphere.
Looking at the top is the North Pole.
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.
For colors, the waters are all sort of a royal blue.
The clouds, of course, are bright white.
The reflection off the Earth is, appears much greater than the Moon.
The land areas are generally a brownish.
You're all looking at yourselves
as seen from hundred and eighty thousand miles out in space.
Mike, what I keep imagining is,
if I'm a... some lonely traveler from another planet,
what I think about the Earth from this altitude, whether I think it'd be inhabited or not.
You don't see anybody waving, is that what you're saying?
Right. Well we're seeing the entire Earth now, including the... the terminator.
I was just kind of curious
whether I would land on the blue or the brown part of the Earth.
You better hope we land in the blue part.
So do we, babe.
Jim is always for land landings.
I took what, to me, was the most notable picture of the flight.
Showing the Earth against a dark,
velvet background in space.
About the size of your fist in arm's length.
One lunar distance
seems like a long way, but it's hardly anywhere in space.
Indeed, ten lunar distances are hardly going anywhere in space.
In a ten lunar distances' fist, it's down to a one-tenth size marble.
At a hundred lunar distances where you're not even close to Mars yet,
you're down now to a tiny little sand grain.
And five hundred lunar distances,
you can't really see the Earth with the naked eye, physically.
The idea that, uh, the Earth was the center of the universe,
and therefore, you know, humans were the center of, uh, universal civilization,
sounded to me like baloney the more I thought about it.
Very selfish, very, you know, uh, human-centric.
And so, uh, that has sort of upset my views
on, uh, a lot of things that we've taken for granted.
Uh, politics, religion, you name it.
Uh, to think that we're just probably one among millions
or billions of centers of intelligence that have existed,
or maybe even still exist, in the universe.
Frank, uh, is being an old Air Force officer, and I, Navy, he was...
he got a pretty bad case of, uh, airsickness.
He gets that way. Gemini, because he was so tied in, and so... looking so straight
I was sitting next to him that he...
if he had it at the very beginning, he overcame it and didn't even tell me.
Uh, but, he couldn't do that on Apollo, because as soon as you got out of that seat,
uh, you had enough room to move around in, and you had to move around and do things.
So he got quite ill.
This is Apollo Control, ouston. Within the last hour, in a private conversation,
we've learned that there is some, uh, a little nausea aboard.
Frank Borman reported an upset stomach.
I remember Lovell and I were up on our couches,
and this glob came up.
We immediately donned- or I put on, uh,
uh, oxygen mask.
It was supposed to be saved for... only for fire.
I said to hell with that, so I put the mask on.
And, uh, this thing about that big came floating up.
And it, and I thought, "Boy, that's fascinating."
You know, I was initially repulsed, but then the physicist in me rose to the occasion.
So here was this three-dimensional, multi-colored, oscillating ball.
And uh, both Lovell and I kind of watched it, it was going this way.
Then it split.
And the laws of conservation momentum sends one piece went that way,
the other piece had to go this way, right towards Lovell.
So I watched it go, and it splatted like a fried egg on his chest.
That was, uh, built up a lot more than it was, because, uh,
you know, the doctors all of a sudden had a chance to shine.
And they go, "Oh my goodness, we oughta do this, or we oughta do that."
If you're in that environment for that amount of time, your stomach finally says,
"Hey, there's no sense fighting this thing, I'll go along with it."
And that's essen... essentially what happened, uh, to Borman.
I got over it quite quickly, and I can tell you if the... if the doctors had threatened,
or, uh, recommended-I get... maybe... I had heard that,
that Dr. Murray even recommended that we abort the mission,
because I-but if that would've happened, we would've had radio failure.
I can... I can guarantee you that.
Frank, is... is this lunar orbit mission too risky
after only one manned Apollo flight?
No, Jules, as I said before. If I-I can honestly say this, if I thought it was too risky,
I don't know how the other two people feel, but I wouldn't be on board.
We've, uh, flown many unmanned Apollos, as you know, we have, uh,
the, uh, the - the system history of the Apollo is fantastic,
and the testing, the redundancy, the quality control,
and the care that we've made, and then the proceed -
the changes that we made since the fire. I think-I think it's a safe vehicle.
Uh, Apollo 8, this is Houston. At 68:04, you're go for LOI.
Okay. Apollo 8 is go.
Apollo 8, Houston. You're riding the best bird we can find. Over.
Thank you.
Here in Mission Control, we're standing by.
Here's, uh, certainly a great deal of anxiety at this moment,
as in the next two and a half minutes,
we will not talk with the crew for some period of time.
As we approached the Moon, we were in complete darkness.
We hadn't seen the Moon on the entire trip to the Moon.
We were upside down and going backwards
so that we could fire the rockets to slow us up.
One minute, uh, thirty seconds away now from loss of signal,
as we continue with this flight of Apollo 8.
One of the issues that, uh, Frank was concerned about, and rightly so,
that if they could calculate the trajectory right,
they oughta be able to calculate when we would lose signal.
Apollo 8, Houston. One inute to LOS. All systems go.
Thanks a lot, troops.
We'll see you on the other side.
And sure enough, at the exact time we were supposed to lose radio communications,
we lost it.
Okay, we got ten minutes.
Well, I'll tell you, gentlemen, that Moon is pretty close.
Okay, go ahead and start pitch one. One.
- Yaw one. - Got it.
Okay.
Transitional Hand Controller, clockwise.
Clockwise.
We fired the engine, and that slowed us down, so that we could get...
and be captured by, uh, the Moon.
Standing by for engine on enable. Proceed when you get it.
Okay.
Start your watch when you get ignition.
One second, two seconds, all right, how's every-Got 'em!
Pressure's holding good.
All right. Everything good over here so far.
Everything is looking good.
We went into the shadow of the Moon from the Sun.
Call it the umbra.
There was no earth-shine, there was no sunshine.
And so consequently we looked out of the window, all the stars, they came out.
Suddenly there were stars everywhere. More stars than you could count.
You couldn't recognize the constellations, because even the little stars seemed bright.
And yet, as I looked back over my shoulder, I saw suddenly the stars disappeared.
A black hole, and that was the Moon.
And I must say, at that stage of the game,
the hair came up on the back of my neck a little bit.
If we were sailing into this, uh, black hole.
We rolled out the spacecraft
and then we were just getting into, uh, where the darkness
slipped into the long shadows of the, uh, of the sunlight started to come in.
We saw the long shadows of darkness on the Moon's craters.
Finally, we got into where there was sunshine on the Moon,
and that's the first time we saw, saw the Moon itself.
- Hey, I got the Moon. - Do you?
- Right below us. - Okay. It is below us-
Yeah. And it's, uh... Oh my god.
- What's wrong? - Look at that.
Looks like a big beach down there.
Fantastic.
Yup.
You know, I still have trouble telling the holes from the bumps.
Alright, alright, come on.
Here we'd gone two-hundred and forty-thousand miles,
and we were only, uh, about sixty or sixty-five miles above the lunar surface.
We were the first people to really see alive these craters.
At just sixty miles above the surface,
had no atmosphere around the Moon.
And with the sun shining, things were very, very, very clear.
Apollo 8. Houston. Over.
Go ahead, uh, Houston, this is Apollo 8.
Burn complete. Our orbit is 160.9 by 60.5.
Uh, Apollo 8, Houston. h, what does the old Moon look ike from sixty miles? Over.
Okay, uh, Houston. The Moon is essentially gray.
No, no color.
Looks like plaster of PARIS,
uh, or a sort of a grayish beach sand.
We can see quite a bit of detail. Uh, the crater, craters are all rounded off.
There's quite a few of them. Some of them are newer. Many of them look like,
especially the round ones look like, um, hits by meteorites or projectiles of some sort.
Uh, roger. Understand.
Good evening. American astronauts Borman, Lovell, and Anders
are whirling about the Moon on this Christmas Eve.
Further away from home than man has ever been.
It may be lonely for them, so far away.
Two hundred and thirty thousand miles from their families.
But they are busy making history that will loom large as long as there is civilization on Earth.
They're in the remarkable Apollo 8.
They are the explorers who have first transited space,
and have opened the way for the lunar age.
Instead of going around the Moon upside down and backwards,
Frank, uh, repositioned the spacecraft so it was more like driving a car, uh, down a road.
Alright, we're gonna roll.
Ready?
Set.
I guess he was turning in my direction, because something caught my eye out of the, uh-
out of my window and I said, "Hey, look at that."
And it turned about to be the Earth coming up over the stark lunar horizon.
Oh my God, look at that picture over there.
You can see the Earth coming up. Wow, that's pretty.
Hey don't take that, it's not scheduled.
You got a color film, Jim?
- Hand me a roll of color quick, would you? - Oh man, that's great.
- Where is it? - Quick.
Just grab me a color. A color exterior.
Got one?
Yeah, I'm looking for one. C368.
Anything, quick.
Hey, I've got it right here. Bill, I've got it framed it's very clear right here.
- Got it? - Yup.
- Just take several of them. - Take several of... Here, give it to me.
Wait a minute, let me just get the right setting here now. Just calm...
Take... Calm down, Lovell.
Well I got it right. Oh, that's a beautiful shot.
We had not been programmed, for an Earthrise.
Uh, nobody had said anything about taking pictures of it.
We didn't even have a light meter.
What did it really mean, as the three of us looked at the Earth coming up, and
finally getting a, a true perspective of where we were,
three guys just two-hundred and forty-thousand miles from the Earth.
There is this beautiful planet. Blue, with white clouds.
Kinda brownish pink on us that you could clearly distinguish.
Terribly isolated, with a black, black background of, uh, of space.
I thought, you know, how insignificant we all are.
Everybody I ever knew.
Five billion people could be behind my thumb as I put it up.
And I thought how lucky we are that we have a body like that,
that, uh, is there so that we can live and enjoy it.
There were no other points of color in the whole universe except for the Earth.
But it was everything that we held dear was back there.
Two hundred and forty-thousand miles away.
Our families, our country, uh, everything, and it was, uh, uh, Christmas Eve.
So it was a very nostalgic moment, uh, looking back at the Earth.
We often talk about going to heaven when we die.
But in reality, don't we go to heaven when we're born?
Because, uh, don't we arrive on a, uh, on a body that has the proper mass,
uh, that can contain water, and an atmosphere?
The very essentials of, of life?
And don't we arrive on a body that's just at the right distance
from a star that provides the energy, the energy to the Earth?
And that energy is what caused life to evolve in the beginning.
In some aspects, God has really given us a stage. A stage on which to perform.
And I think that how this play comes out, uh, is really up to us.
This is Apollo 8, uh, coming to you live from the Moon.
Bill Anders, Jim Lovell and myself
have spent the, the day before Christmas up here, and doing experiments, taking pictures.
And, uh, firing our spacecraft and just the maneuver around.
The Moon is a, uh, different thing to each one of us.
I think that each one of, uh... each one, uh, carries his own impressions
of what, uh, of what he's seen today.
I know my own impression is that it's a, a vast, lonely forbidding type...
existence.
Like spans of nothing.
We are, uh, now approaching a lunar sunrise.
And, uh, for all the people back on Earth,
the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth.
And the Earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, "Let there be light."And there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good,
and God divided the light from the darkness.
And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck,
a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you.
All of you on the good Earth.
Ken, we'd like to get all squared away for TEI here.
Could you, uh, give us some good words like you promised?
Yes, sir. I have a Maneuver PAD.
Uh, I think we'd like to start by dumping the tape.
If we can have that, I have your TEI-10 Maneuver PAD,
and then we'll run through a systems brief.
After we had, uh, read from Genesis, and we prepared to return to the Earth,
on the backside of the Moon we lit the, uh, service propulsion engine
to accelerate, uh, out of lunar gravity.
But this time, pointing forward, in order to accelerate the spacecraft
to a velocity that would now tear the... itself away from lunar gravity.
If it hadn't worked, we'd be in big trouble. I mean, we'd still be there.
Pretty desiccated, but still be, uh, uh, monuments to Apollo's failure.
Okay, Apollo 8. Uh, we've reviewed all your systems.
You have a go for TEI. Three minutes LOS.
All systems are go. Over.
Roger. Thank you, Houston. Apollo 8.
We came up with, uh, a number. I think it was 99, 22, I'm not mistaken.
And that number essentially said to you, do you really wanna make this maneuver?
It gave you a little chance to get out of it.
If you didn't wanna make the maneuver, you could say cancel.
And so then, uh, then five seconds later,
uh, you know, uh, I, I hit proceed, and then it would go.
And of course I, I hesitated after I saw that, for a little bit.
And of course Borman gave me the elbow.
He said, you know, "Push the button. Push the button." So I pushed the button,
and of course that set up the thing to fire the engine.
Apollo 8, Houston.
Houston, Apollo 8, over.
Hello, Apollo 8. Loud and clear.
Roger. Please be informed there is a Santa Clause.
There is a Santa Clause.
The astronauts' historic confirmation that on Christmas Day they were headed home.
As we slowly got closer and closer to Earth, when everything was fine,
we jettisoned the service module.
As it tuckered away, we made a maneuver to make sure we wouldn't get hit by it.
Nobody had done a, a reentry from this high velocity.
Had to make certain that you were properly positioned.
We had to hit a quarter, I think it was something like six or seven degrees wide.
We were making a night reentry. First night reentry. First high speed reentry. A lot of firsts.
Through a set of marks on the commander's window,
he could then kinda take a look at when the...
when he would see the Moon at a certain time,
looking out his window, that would tell him pretty much that he was on the proper course,
uh, to come on and, uh, make a landing.
I mentioned, uh, to, uh, Frank and Jim, uh, that it looked like
the, uh... things were getting pink.
And they said, oh don't worry, uh, that's just sunrise.
These are the experts speaking.
Turns out that the reentry from the Moon is exciting for anybody.
Oh man, we're getting close.
There's no turning back now.
Old Mother Earth has us.
God damn this is going to be a real ride. Hang on.
I've never seen it this bright before.
0.05g!
- 0.05g! - Okay, we got it.
- Put the EMS, On. - Hang on.
0.05g switch on.
- 0.05g Roll to EMS. - Right.
Okay, gang.
They're building up.
We're 1g.
Three! Four!
Okay.
Five!
Six!
Damndest thing I ever saw.
Gemini was never like that, was it, Jim?
I assure you I've never seen anything like it.
Drogue set, uh... You got them there? 8:16.
Houston, Apollo 8. Over.
Roger, this is a real fireball. It's looking good.
Come on, John Glenn.
We're in real good shape, Houston.
- ELS logic on. - Right.
- ELS. Auto. - Auto.
Stand by for RCS to be disabled. Stand by on the apex cover.
Right.
- There's the apex cover. - There go the drogues.
Okay.
Twenty-thousand.
Cabin pressure is coming up.
Nineteen-thousand. Fifteen.
Stand by with the mains in one second.
- You see it? - Can't see it.
It should reef pretty soon.
- Okay, you got them? - Yeah.
Float Bag, three, circuit breakers closed.
Closed.
VHF antennas, recovery. VHFAM, simplex.
Beacons going on. Get your light on.
It's on.
You got your... You got it, Jim.
Huh?
You got the call. Give them a call.
Okay.
Houston, Apollo 8. Over.
Apollo 8. Airboss 1. Welcome home, gentlemen.
And we'll have you aboard in no time.
When we hit the surface, we must have hit on an uprising swell,
because we hit so hard that I thought the spacecraft had split open.
And I got inundated with water.
Uh, we weren't sure where the water came from.
I thought at first maybe we'd popped a seam, or a, a vent valve had opened.
But later on I think it was probably condensation
from around environmental control unit that had inundated me.
We hit so hard that it knocked Frank's finger off the, uh, parachute release switch.
So the parachutes were released late. And it turned us over.
So here we were floating upside down in the Pacific.
And so with pointy end down, all the trash that had collected in the spacecraft
and, uh, came raining down on our faces in the dark.
And I thought this is not a, a great way to end this historic adventure,
as if we were in a New York subway that somebody turned upside down and shook.
The spacecraft was going up and down, and around.
It was a very poor boat. Uh, a, a wonderful spacecraft, but a very poor boat.
So we were floating out there. Pretty rough sea. Uh, poor Frank got sick again.
Jim and I were somewhat merciless, maybe a little mean,
because we were both Naval Academy graduates and he was a West Point guy.
All you did was push another switch and started a compressor,
blew up a couple balloons,
and the buoyancy of the balloons below the surface flipped us back right upside.
Waited there quite a few hours for the sun to come up,
because the rescue crews, uh, were somewhat reluctant to jump in the dark.
Uh, and there were apparently sharks swimming around the spacecraft.
And so they had to, uh...
I think they dispatched a few sharks, so that NASA didn't make a release about that.
But then, uh, jumped in and, uh... put a, uh, stabilization ring,
like a big life ring, around the spacecraft.
We ope... started opening the hatch. And, uh, this young man poked his head in,
and immediately fell backwards.
So anyway, we got out. And I noticed there was a strange smell.
Turned out to be fresh air.
Things had gotten pretty ripe in that spacecraft.
This is Apollo Control.
Houston, we've just been advised that the hatch of Apollo 8, the hatch is now open.
And we, uh, we are advised that the first astronaut is in the helicopter.
No more identification than that, just the first astronaut in a helicopter.
And I kept thinking, this has to be the most dangerous part of the flight,
because whereas we had triple redundancy on most things during the flight,
here was just one cable.
Second astronaut's on his way up.
Uh, second astronaut in the sling and on his way.
Right, the third astronaut is in the sling and is being, uh, brought up into the helicopter.
Recovery 3 has been given permission to land first.
And touchdown at, uh, twenty minutes, uh, for the hour. 11:20 Central Standard Time.
Astronaut Borman, and Lovell, and Anders, standing on the steps.
And a great cheer goes up from the sailors out here on the flight deck.
Roar in here, the North American people are in. The room is awash with cigar smoke.
Every console operator is displaying a flag at his desk. And I have never seen,
uh, the degree of this emotional outpouring in any previous mission,
including Alan Shepard's.
I've seen, uh, rallies in locker rooms after championship games.
I've seen happy politicians after elections.
But I... none of them do justice to the spirit pervading this room.
Someone suggested we've set the American Cancer Society's anti-smoking campaign back,
uh, several light years.
Being the kind of men they are, they certainly have no taste for being heroes.
But even in this age of cynicism, and skepticism, when we almost don't have any heroes,
they may have a hard time escaping.
I think Apollo 8 was perhaps, of all the Apollo missions to the Moon,
uh, was the one that was the most perfect.
Least amount of problems.
Uh, things worked as planned, uh, and, uh, there were no bits of the mission
that we didn't know about, we didn't plan for,
uh, for the follow on, uh, lunar landing flights.
I think Apollo 8's legacy is really a, uh, turning point
in the history of exploration, uh, from Columbus,
uh, to Lewis and Clark, uh, to Apollo 8. This was the forerunners.
This was the people who put their first step forward into, uh, the, uh final frontier.
I think it helped to unify the country, and to... to give us some, uh, cohesiveness
in the space of the terrible problems of Vietnam.
The greatest accomplishment was doing what the president had asked us to do
within the time frame that he asked us to. That was an... a heck of an achievement.
We got tons of telegrams and letters after the flight.
And I reme- The one that sticks out in my mind more than any other was it said,
"Congratulations, Apollo 8. You saved 1968."
Apollo 8 will go down in history as the first flight away from the Earth,
and to another body in the solar system, uh, our moon.
Uh, it will go down in the technical history as the first flight on the Saturn V,
and setting the world speed record.
I frankly think that Apollo 8 will be remembered more
by the Earthrise picture a hundred years from now.
And the fact that this was our first, uh, view of looking back,
uh, at the Earth from relatively deep space.
And I said at the time, and, uh, uh, it certainly affects me today,
that I think it's ironic that we went all the way to the Moon,
and to explore the Moon, what we really discovered was the Earth.