¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ

On Christmas Eve, if the weather’s fine, look up at the night sky. It
will be four days until the full Moon. Twenty-five years ago, on 24 December
1968, humans visited it for the first time. Not Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin
and Michael Collins – they were the first to land, in Apollo 11 the following
summer. Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders were the pioneers
who first journeyed to the Moon in the Apollo 8 spacecraft on a six-day
mission which captivated the world.

The Apollo programme was set up to fulfil President John F. Kennedy’s
call for the US to send a man safely to the Moon by the end of the 1960s.
It should have begun in spring 1967 following the American Mercury and Gemini
crewed space programmes, but the Apollo programme got off to a bad start.

The first mission was supposed to test the command module, carrying
the three astronauts, and the service module, which supplied the crew with
oxygen and manoeuvred the craft in and out of lunar orbit. But in January
1967, during a trial countdown on the launch pad at Cape Kennedy, a short
circuit next to some flammable material in an atmosphere of pure oxygen
produced a sudden inferno. Within seconds, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White
and Roger Chaffee were dead. Crewed missions were delayed while the spacecraft
was redesigned.

Complicated countdown

The numbering of the early Apollo flights was complicated by the deaths
of Grissom, White and Chaffee. Their mission was originally designated AS-204
but NASA renamed it Apollo 1 at their widows’ joint request. NASA was also
planning, retrospectively, to name three uncrewed launches of Saturn I rockets
Apollo 1A, 2 and 3. But while this was being discussed, officials needed
a name for the high-profile first flight of the Saturn V rocket. They called
it Apollo 4 and, in the end, the names Apollo 2 and Apollo 3 were never
officially used.

To meet President Kennedy’s deadline, NASA made the unprecedented decision
to fly the gigantic three-stage rocket ‘all up’ rather than test it section
by section. Testing the entire rocket, with an Apollo module on top, seemed
risky to rocket engineers used to watching prototypes explode on the launch
pad. But NASA realised that no matter how many times it tested each section
of the Saturn V, the rocket’s safety could not be guaranteed. The launch
of Apollo 4 into orbit round the Earth, in November 1967, was a complete
success.

The programme continued in January 1968 with Apollo 5 – a successful
uncrewed test of a partially completed lunar module launched into Earth
orbit with the smaller Saturn I rocket. But three months later, NASA encountered
problems with Apollo 6 – the second test of the Saturn V rocket. The first
stage experienced unusually strong oscillations known as ‘pogoing’. The
problem, familar to rocket scientists, was particularly severe for Apollo
6, producing forces equivalent to 10Gs for some 10 seconds. Then, after
the second stage ignited, two of the five engines mysteriously cut out.
The controllers’ hands inched towards the ‘abort’ buttons. But the uncrewed
rocket was allowed to fly on over the Atlantic. Eventually, it reached orbit
and was publicly claimed as a success. Privately, the Apollo team was deeply
disturbed.

The first crewed Apollo flight, Apollo 7, was launched on a Saturn I
rocket in October 1968. The aim was a crewed test of the command module
in Earth orbit, the mission that would have been flown by Grissom, White
and Chaffee. The redesigned module worked perfectly. Over the next five
years it became the workhorse of the US crewed space programme.

But NASA realised that the Kennedy deadline was looming ever closer.
Apollo 8 was a crewed mission due to test, in Earth orbit, the spider-like
lunar excursion module that would actually land on the Moon. But by spring
1968, the building of the lunar module was running late. NASA had a working
command module but the Saturn V rocket had worked in only one out of two
launches.

The Americans believed that the Soviets were planning to send a crewed
Soyuz spacecraft around the Moon. NASA felt the USSR couldn’t beat the Americans
to a Moon landing because it did not have the expertise in space docking
that NASA had built up with the Gemini programme. But the Soviet Union had
already taken terrible risks to secure a series of space records – first
man in space, first two-man mission, first woman, first spacewalk. Then,
in September 1968, the Soviets sent an uncrewed craft, Zond 5, around the
Moon and back to Earth.

The Americans decided to bring their programme forward. In spring 1968,
George Low, the Apollo programme chief, held a series of meetings with Borman,
the veteran astronaut who was due to command the second crewed Apollo mission.
Low suggested sending the next mission, without the lunar module, around
the Moon. At first, the crew was dubious. Borman said later: ‘I was a little
sceptical. I had confidence in the crew and in the equipment, but we had
been training hard for a lunar module flight and we were interested in
that mission.’ The plan was particularly hard on Anders, who would have
been the lunar module pilot. But in the end, the historic challenge of the
mission swayed the astronauts.

NASA announced the revised mission on 12 November 1968 and Apollo 8
blasted off from Pad 39A, Cape Kennedy, on the morning of 21 December. Media
attention was intense. Newspapers and TV broadcasts endlessly repeated statistics
about Saturn V: it was 110 metres high, it weighed more than 3000 tonnes,
the first stage consumed more than a tonne of kerosene and two tonnes of
liquid oxygen per second. After ignition, it took more than 10 seconds to
clear the top of the launchpad tower. Less than 12 minutes later, the command
and service modules, still attached to the Saturn’s third stage, were in
orbit.

Escape from Earth

At 9.41am US time, the ground controller at Houston told the orbiting
Apollo 8 that it was clear to fire its rocket for the Moon. The crew lit
the third stage, and the vehicle accelerated to escape velocity, 39 000
kilometres per hour. Apollo 8 was the 26th crewed mission to reach Earth
orbit but the first to leave it for the Moon.

Two days later the command and service modules entered the Moon’s gravitational
field. If anything went wrong now, there would be no turning back. Anders
later confessed: ‘The long ride out to the Moon was, frankly, a bit of a
drag.’ He found it difficult to sleep in the cramped and noisy capsule.
Navigating by the stars and with an inertial-guidance system, the crew carried
out two course corrections during the flight by firing the service module’s
engine, known as the service propulsion system (SPS).

The only moment of anxiety came when Borman suffered from vomiting and
diarrhoea – a serious problem in a weightless capsule measuring 4 metres
across and shared with two other astronauts. The concern was that the crew
had received a dangerous dose of cosmic radiation. But Borman recovered
quickly, putting the illness down to 24-hour flu.

On Christmas Eve, 1968, television stations throughout the Western world
interrupted their seasonal offerings in favour of live broadcasts from
Houston. Early in the morning, US time, Apollo 8 disappeared for the first
time into radio silence behind the Moon. It was a tense moment, although
the vehicle’s trajectory was calculated to ensure the spacecraft would simply
loop around the Moon and return to Earth without going into lunar orbit
if anything went wrong. Houston’s farewell message was: ‘Apollo 8, you’re
riding the best bird we can find.’ Lovell, the pilot of the command module,
replied: ‘Thanks a lot troops. We’ll see you on the other side.’

Back from the dark side

Once behind the Moon, the crew fired the SPS for 242 seconds, slowing
the craft to a speed of 6000 kilometres per hour and entering lunar orbit.
As the spacecraft reappeared 45 minutes later, Borman, Lovell and Anders
were the first humans to witness Earthrise.

The crew made their second live TV broadcast during the 9th lunar orbit.
The world watched as the astronauts read from the first 10 verses of Genesis
1, from the King James Bible.

The reading caused consternation in some quarters. A Japanese journalist
phoned NASA’s press office from his astronauts were talking about. A resourceful
press officer referred him to the top drawer in his bedside table where
he would find a Gideon Bible. NASA headquarters also received complaints
that the federally funded broadcast had contravened a recent Supreme Court
decision separating religion and state.

Few, however, were unmoved by Borman’s concluding words: ‘And from the
crew of Apollo 8, we pause with: good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas
and God bless all of you – all of you on the good Earth.’ In Europe, which
received the broadcast via a NASA station in Madrid, it was already Christmas
Day.

After 20 hours in lunar orbit the crew once again fired the SPS for
210 seconds to build up speed for the return to Earth. Failure would have
stranded the crew in lunar orbit, still in radio contact with the Earth
for about nine days until their air ran out. But the SPS fired successfully,
as it did on all the Apollo missions, and Apollo 8 cruised home.

Re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere at a far higher speed than ever before,
the mission faced a final test. After separating from the service module,
the command module travelling at 39 000 kilometres per hour, had to align
itself in a corridor just 16 kilometres wide. Too shallow an angle and it
would skim off the atmosphere and out into space; too steep and it would
burn up. But the re-entry was perfect and, with what Borman called a ‘real
bone-rattling jar’, the capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean four
miles from the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown. Typically, Borman had arranged
for the helicopter that picked him up to bring an electric razor so that
he could shave off his beard.

The Apollo 8 gamble had paid off, but it could very easily have gone
the other way. On the outward journey to the Moon, the Apollo 8 astronauts
carried out routine measurements of the service module’s oxygen tanks, which
enabled the spacecraft’s fuel cells to produce air, water and electricity.
The tests passed without incident. But a year and a half later, when Apollo
13 was on its way to the Moon for the third Apollo landing, the procedure
caused a faulty oxygen tank to explode. The accident also wrecked the back-up
tank, leaving the command and service modules without power. The astronauts,
under Lovell’s command, survived by moving into the lunar module. Its power
and air kept the crew alive and its engine guided the command and service
modules back to Earth. For re-entry the crew returned to the command module
with enough oxygen to support them until they splashed down.

The rescue of Apollo 13 was a triumph of courage and ingenuity. But
if the fault had happened on Apollo 8, which had no lunar module, the astronauts
would have suffocated in a freezing capsule before they reached the Moon.

After the success of Apollo 8, the Soviet Union threw in the towel,
claiming that it had never been interested in racing to the Moon. In that
respect, the mission achieved Kennedy’s dream – American supremacy in space.

Apollo 8’s scientific achievements were modest, and some planned observations
of the Moon’s surface were lost when the exhausted astronauts cancelled
the flight plan for the final three orbits. Apollo 8’s contribution must
be seen in the context of the whole programme. Apollo missions collected
386 kilograms of Moon rock and dust and carried out some 60 major experiments
on the surface. But had science been the main goal, NASA would never have
spent $24 billion in such a rush to put men on the Moon.