The Flight of Apollo 8
The decisions that led up to that Christmas Eve had only been taken the previous August. NASA had designed a sequence of test flights that would lead to the Apollo Moon landing the following year. These were an unmanned test of the command module, an unmanned test of the lunar module, a manned test in low Earth orbit of the command module, an manned test of the command and lunar modules in low Earth orbit, a manned test of the command an lunar modules in an elliptical Earth orbit with an apogee of 4600 miles, a manned test of the command and lunar module in lunar orbit, then finally the Moon landing itself.
This sequence was called into question by delays in getting the lunar module ready. So it was decided that after the low Earth orbit test of the command module, which would be the flight of Apollo 7, the next manned Apollo mission would send a crew aboard the Apollo command module into lunar orbit. A number of procedures necessary for the Moon landing would thus be tested. The CIA had also suggested that the Soviets were planning a manned mission around the Moon and NASA officials were keen to beat them to the punch. The lunar orbital mission, designated Apollo 8, was scheduled for late December of 1968.
The crew of Apollo 8 consisted of two space flight veterans, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, who had already flown together on Gemini 7, and a rookie pilot Bill Anders. They had very little time to prepare for their mission and spent many hours in the simulator. When they lifted off on December 21st, the Apollo command module had only flown once with a crew and the Saturn V, the gigantic rocket booster that would shoot them to lunar orbit, had flown twice before in an unmanned mode.
The Apollo space craft, including the S-IVB third stage, was successfully lofted into low Earth orbit. After several hours of check out, the J-2 engine on the S-IVB was ignited again, blasting the Apollo command module on a trajectory toward the Moon. The command module detached from the S-IVB, turned about, and flew in formation with the third stage while the crew photographed it.
The cruise to the Moon went almost uneventfully, with only two course correction burns needed. Frank Borman experienced a bout of sickness that involved both vomiting and diarrhea. It was thought at the time that Borman’s illness had been the result of a twenty four hour flu or perhaps a bad reaction to his sleeping pill. Now most experts believe that he was suffering from space sickness, an inability of the body to adapt to the microgravity of space that seems to affect one third of all space explorers.
Nevertheless, Apollo 8 arrived in orbit around the Moon. The command module looped around the far side of the Moon whereupon her main engines were ignited to bring the space craft into orbit. By this time Borman’s symptoms had subsided. The crew began to photograph the lunar surface, especially areas where landings were being contemplated, and checking out their space craft for the return to Earth.
It was oddly enough on the fourth of the planned ten orbits when Bill Anders first noticed what the Earth looked like as it rose over the lunar surface. It was a blue-white orb slowly rising over the blasted, gray lunar landscape. Except for those three explorers, all the human race-then just over three billion people-lived on that orb. Furiously, the crew took pictures and video of the sight. One of these was a famous color photo of the Earthrise that would hang on many a wall afterwards. Some would claim that the picture of the lonely, fragile Earth taken by the crew of Apollo 8, by showing how tiny and delicate the Earth was, really gave impetus to the environmental movement.
It was on the ninth orbit, during a live television broadcast, that the crew of Apollo 8 gave the world its Christmas present. The crew read in turn from the first ten verses of the Book of Genesis. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day. And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.”
Borman concluded by saying, “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with, Good night, Good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all you on the good Earth”
What a sublime ending to what had been the worst of years. Later, Apollo 8 blasted out of lunar orbit and returned to Earth without incident.
As a footnote, not everyone was impressed by the reading of Genesis. The militant atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair later caused controversy by bringing a lawsuit against NASA over the reading from Genesis; she demanded that the courts ban US astronauts-who were all Government employees-from public prayer in space. This demand was eventually rejected by the Supreme Court, but it caused NASA to be skittish about the issue of religion throughout the rest of the Apollo program. Buzz Aldrin, on Apollo11, took communion on the surface of the moon after landing; he refrained from mentioning this publicly for several years, and only obliquely referred to it at the time. Thus, sadly, an early form of political correctness reached to the heavens.
