[Scientific American] Apollo 8, 50 Years Later: The Greater Leap

[Orionid]

Apollo 8, 50 Years Later: The Greater Leap
The first flight to take astronauts around the moon looms larger than the first to land
By Ned Potter on December 20, 2018


“Earthrise,” photographed by Apollo 8 astronaut William A. Anders, December 24, 1968. Credit: Project Apollo Archive Flickr (Public Domain Mark 1.0)

At first Bill Anders thought it was no big deal. He and his Apollo 8 crewmates, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, were on their fourth orbit of the moon, passing over the far side, farther from home than any human beings had ever been, when they happened to see the Earth beginning to peek out over the lunar horizon. It was December 24, 1968.

“Oh, my God, look at that picture over there! There's the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” said Anders, the crew’s lead photographer. He fired off a single frame in black and white while Lovell found him some color film. He took a few more shots, then went back to business. Of the 865 still pictures the astronauts took, only 14 show the Earth with the lunar horizon in the foreground.


William A. Anders shot one black-and white photo shot of the Earth a moment before the famous color picture. He and his crewmates, Frank F. Borman II and James A. Lovell Jr., had not been able to see the Earth from lunar orbit before this moment, and had made no plans to photograph it. Anders took this picture while Lovell found him a magazine of color film. Credit: NASA

“We had a mission to do, we weren’t sent as poets,” Anders says now. “We’d had no briefing on taking Earth pictures. It wasn’t a big emotional event. It really wasn’t a big thing.”

But one of those shots came to be known as “Earthrise,” and on any list of the most important photographs of all time, it almost always ranks near the top. For all the risk and effort involved, all the money America spent, all the symbolism about attaining the impossible, the sight of the tiny blue Earth from deep space is probably the Apollo program’s greatest gift to us. In retrospect, that first sighting by the crew of Apollo 8 has eclipsed all that came after—even (I invite disagreement) the landing of Apollo 11 on the lunar surface less than a year later.


Astronaut Bill Anders during the Apollo 8 flight. This image is from 16mm movie film the crew shot. They did not take any still pictures of each other during the mission. Credit: NASA

There were only nine Apollo flights to circle or land on the moon, and they happened during an all-too-brief period of less than four years. Neil Armstrong’s first lunar footstep was the most-watched moment in the history of exploration, but polls showed that Americans’ enthusiasm for their space program had already peaked with Apollo 8, when Borman, Lovell and Anders read from the book of Genesis as they orbited the moon on Christmas Eve.

“A hundred years from now, when people reflect on our space effort, they won’t bother with Apollo 13, despite the movie and all the hoopla,” Anders says, referring to NASA’s famous near-disaster. “But they’ll certainly remember the first step on the moon, though they may not remember who made it. And the Earthrise picture will go down as the historic image of the time.”

And yet, as its afterglow has faded over the years, a chorus of voices has steadily risen, expressing regret that the Apollo program’s sense of boundless possibility has somehow dissipated. If we could go to the moon in the 1960s, they ask, why don’t we have bases on the moon now? Why, for that matter, haven’t we sent astronauts on to Mars? We have the ability, goes the argument, but we no longer have the will.


Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell (left to right) outside a spacecraft simulator a month before flight. Borman and Lovell, then age 40, had flown in space before. Anders, then 35, was a rookie. Credit: NASA

Except that we no longer have the ability either, at least for now. Historians of science say America got exactly what it paid for from Apollo: a Cold War victory over the Soviet Union, with little capacity to follow up. The Trump White House, like several administrations before it, has plans to send astronauts back to the moon, but even if everything goes right, the plan will take 12 years to do what Apollo accomplished in eight.

In many ways the space race echoed other, earlier competitions. The parallels are far from perfect, but think of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott racing to the South Pole in 1911, or Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic airplane flight in 1927 that won him a $25,000 prize and worldwide fame. (Even Columbus and Magellan were out for profit, trying to find new trade routes for Spain before the Portuguese did.) All of these have gone down in history as voyages of exploration—but in their time they were competitive efforts, with similar results. There was a sprint toward a goal and then, with victory in hand, a retreat. Amundsen did not start a wave of polar settlements; Lindbergh, who had been an airmail pilot, is not the reason for intercontinental airline travel.


Mission commander Frank Borman suiting up, about four hours before launch on December 21, 1968. Jim Lovell is behind him. Borman later said he was not terribly interested in the idea of exploration; his goal, as an Air Force officer, was to help the United States beat the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Credit: NASA

Exploration can lead to great things—people may even reach the moon—but historians say it rarely happens for its own sake, or as an effort to push back the frontiers of knowledge. The reasons for going tend to be more parochial. Roger Launius, the former NASA and Smithsonian historian, talks of “the four Gs—guns, gold, glory and God”—and Apollo was about glory. That leaves out other important words, such as “sustainability” or “science.”

John F. Kennedy, the martyred U.S. president, is often lionized as the father of America’s lunar triumph (even though Apollo was conceived a year before he took office in 1961, and NASA had plans for a moon landing sometime after 1970). When he spoke about space, his words could soar: “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people,” he said in September 1962.


Apollo 8 leaves for the moon, December 21, 1968, 7:51 a.m. The Saturn V rocket, 110 meters (363 feet) tall, generated 34.5 million newtons (7.6 million pounds) of thrust at liftoff. The astronauts later said they were surprised how violently the spacecraft shook as they left the launchpad. Credit: NASA

But two months later, in a closed meeting about NASA funding, Kennedy sounded testy. “Everything that we do ought to really be tied into getting onto the moon ahead of the Russians,” he said when NASA’s then-administrator, James Webb, asked for money to study the environment of space. When Webb pleaded, Kennedy cut him off. “Otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money, because I’m not that interested in space.”

John F. Kennedy? Not that interested in space? After Yuri Gagarin’s surprise world-first orbital spaceflight from the Soviet Union in 1961, Kennedy made it clear he wanted the U.S. to be first at something in space, and it didn’t terribly matter what the something was. John Logsdon, now a professor emeritus of space policy at George Washington University, writes that Kennedy made overtures to the Soviets for cooperative flights—certainly less expensive than a race—but when they didn’t respond, he instead asked NASA if it could land astronauts on the moon by the end of 1966.


Anders says the view of the shrinking Earth impressed him more than the sight of it from lunar orbit. He took nearly 100 pictures of it as they headed toward the moon, but he and Lovell took only 14 with the moon in the foreground. Credit: NASA

That turned out to be too ambitious, but Kennedy’s challenge—to land astronauts on the moon before the decade was out—pushed existing technology to its limits. The modus operandi of the Apollo flights—sending a command ship with three astronauts to orbit the moon and then landing two of them in a lunar module (LM) —was chosen because it saved weight, fuel and, therefore, development time. The LM was a remarkable piece of technology, in no small part because it was the minimum needed to do the job. Anything expendable, such as seats for the crew, was stripped away. Apollo 8, originally planned as a test of the LM in Earth orbit, became an around-the-moon flight because the LM wasn’t ready—and because intelligence suggested that the Soviets might be about to try a moon flight of their own.

Logsdon wrote in 1970 that Apollo, like the Panama Canal and the Interstate Highway System before it, could be a model for other great governmental ventures in the future. If we could go to the moon, it seemed, we could do anything. But as the years passed, and the moon flights receded into history, Logsdon changed his mind. Yes, he says, Apollo showed government could do great things under the right conditions. But in hindsight he believes the conditions that led to the moon effort were unique and unlikely to occur ever again.


The first color image of the whole Earth was taken by the American ATS-3 satellite on November 10, 1967. South America is at bottom center, seen from a distance of about 35,800 kilometers. The picture got considerable attention at the time, but, perhaps since it was shot by a robotic spacecraft, it made less of an impression than Anders’s “Earthrise.” Credit: NASA

“I do not think there will be another Kennedy moment,” he says. “Certainly not in space and probably not elsewhere.”

The Trump administration’s nascent plans for lunar return are the latest in a long line of as-yet-unsuccessful efforts to prove such thinking wrong. NASA’s current marching orders from the White House call for the space agency to place a space station, called the Gateway, in lunar orbit—a much better starting point, it says, than Earth for constructing settlements on the lunar surface and embarking on missions to Mars. And this time, the plan’s architects insist that the government will not bear the burden alone, instead exploring beyond low-Earth orbit through extensive partnerships with private industry and other cooperative spacefaring nations. This more equitable distribution of labor and responsibility, they say, would advance the national interest by strengthening international relations and bolstering the competitiveness of U.S. science and industry.


Artist’s conception of NASA’s Gateway station in lunar orbit, with an Orion spacecraft (left) approaching for docking. The Trump administration proposes sending it to the moon in the next decade. Credit: NASA

In other words, the Trump plan fits the mold—all in favor of exploration, but not for its own sake. “Space exploration is not only essential to our character as a nation, but also our economy and our great nation’s security,” Trump said in 2017.

This kind of competition, in a sense, sometimes pushes explorers to do something that isn’t quite yet possible at the time. But when they rush to take those historic first steps, they don’t lay much groundwork for later steps, and they don’t have time to figure out the meaning of what they’ve done. When the goal is narrow—landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth—the best you can hope for is to achieve it without any surprises. That is what happened with Apollo. It fulfilled Kennedy’s mandate. After that, moon flights went back to being impossible.


Astronauts Borman, Anders and Lovell (left to right) after splashing down in the Pacific Ocean and being recovered by the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown. They had been in space 6 days, 3 hours and 42 seconds. Borman shaved in the Navy helicopter that picked them up and flew them to the carrier deck. Credit: NASA

But there was one very pleasant surprise, and that was Apollo 8’s view back home. It was one of the few things for which the astronauts had not trained. Today, Bill Anders says that the most striking image to him was not the Earth as seen from the moon, so much as it was the Earth receding in the distance as they left it behind on their outbound voyage. Arguably, that view has changed us—colored our attitude toward the environment, international affairs, our place in the universe—more than Apollo’s other accomplishments.

“It took a while to affect me,” Anders says, “this beautiful blue ball against the darkest black you could imagine, getting smaller and smaller as we went. It made me realize how insignificant our little planet was.”

Ned Potter, a writer from New York, spent more than 25 years as an ABC News and CBS News correspondent, covering science, technology, space and the environment.

Source: Apollo 8, 50 Years Later: The Greater Leap

[Orionid]

'Why Complicate It?' Remembering Apollo 8, 50 Years On (Part 1)
By Ben Evans, on December 16th, 2018 [AmericaSpace]


For some time, the exact content of Apollo 8 (whether circumlunar or lunar-orbital) remained undecided. The crew patch, originally sketched by Jim Lovell onto his kneeboard during a cross-country T-38 flight with Frank Borman, illustrates the ambiguity and enormity of their mission. Image Credit: NASA

Since July 1969, astronaut Mike Collins has achieved worldwide renown as “the other one” on the first lunar landing mission. But a year earlier, he might have been aboard Apollo 9, shoulder-to-shoulder with Frank Borman and Bill Anders, to perform a high-Earth-orbit test of the Command and Service Module (CSM) and Lunar Module (LM). That mission changed markedly by the time it eventually flew—redesignated“Apollo 8”, and with a very different destination—but for Collins the most significant change was that in a matter of weeks, he had gone from sitting in the Senior Pilot’s seat to sitting on the sidelines in Mission Control. It must have been a devastating blow, for 50 years ago, this month, the first humans in history set sail for another world.

NASA’s original line-up for Apollo envisaged a seven-step process, labeled “A” to “G”. First would have come the unmanned test-flights (“A”) of the CSM, achieved by Apollo 4 in November 1967 and Apollo 6 in April 1968. Next, the “B” mission—completed by Apollo 5 in January 1968—would test the LM. A manned “C” flight, involving the CSM in low-Earth orbit, was executed by astronauts Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and Walt Cunningham in October 1968 and final strides focused on four increasingly more complex voyages: “D” (a manned demo of the entire spacecraft in low-Earth orbit), “E” (a repeat of D, albeit in a highly elliptical orbit around the Home Planet), “F” (a full dress-rehearsal in lunar orbit) and “G” (the landing itself).


Astronauts Bill Anders, Mike Collins and Frank Borman were originally assigned to fly the E mission, targeted for a high-apogee Earth-orbital mission. However, Collins’ surgery led to his replacement by backup crewman Jim Lovell. Photo Credit: NASA, via Joachim Becker/SpaceFacts.de

It was to the E mission that Borman, Collins and Anders were assigned. By the end of 1967, an increased waveof optimism swept NASA that a manned lunar landing was possible before the decade’s end. And in August 1968, senior managers provisionally decided to expedite Borman’smission from a highly elliptical Earth-orbital flight—with an estimated apogeeof 4,000 miles (6,400 km)—to a full circumnavigation of the Moon, the furthest voyage ever undertaken in human history. However, by this time, Collins was already gone from the crew. In July 1968, whilst playing handball, he noticed that his knees buckled when he walked down stairs, accompanied by a peculiar tingling and numbness. A neurologist diagnosed a bony growth between his fifth and sixth vertebrae, which was pushing against his spinal column, with surgery deemed the only option. The procedure went well, but Collins lost his seat on the lunar mission to his backup, veteran astronaut Jim Lovell.

By this time, the layout of missions had also changed. Delays in the development of the LM—a critical element of the D mission—caused it to move back to Apollo 9 and Borman’s flight was correspondingly brought forward to Apollo 8. The flight was redesignated “C-Prime”, with an expectation that the crew would test-fire the spacecraft’s Service Propulsion System (SPS) engine during their translunar coast. If it failed to work properly, Apollo 8’s free-return trajectory would still enable them to loop around the Moon and come safely back to Earth without the SPS. But Borman had other worries. The six-day flight was targeted to splashdown in the Pacific Ocean and, to do so in daylight would require at least 12 lunar orbits, two more than were on the flight plan. Borman could not care if he landed in daylight or darkness. “Frank didn’t want to spend any more time in lunar orbit than was absolutely necessary,” wrote Deke Slayton, head of Flight Crew Operations at the time, “and pushed for—and got—approval of a splashdown in the early morning, before dawn.” Apollo 8 would do ten orbits of the Moon.


A North American Rockwell artist’s concept of the Spacecraft/Lunar Module Adaptor (SLA) panels and the S-IVB third stage being jettisoned, soon after Trans-Lunar Injection. Apollo 8 was now on its own in a mysterious region, betwixt Earth and the Moon, known as ‘cislunar space’…and Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were travelling faster than any humans ever before. Image Credit: NASA/North American Rockwell

To understand Borman’s reluctance to do more than was necessary is to understand part of his character and military bearing: he was wholly committed to “The Mission”, whatever it might be. On Apollo 8, that mission was to reach the Moon and bring his crew home safely. Nothing else mattered. All non-essential requests irritated him. “Some idiot had the idea that on the wayto the Moon, we’d do an EVA,” he recounted years later in a NASA oral history. “What do you want to do? What’s the main objective? The main objective was togo to the Moon, do enough orbits so that they could do the tracking, be the pathfinders for Apollo 11 and get your ass home. Why complicate it?”

The four months leading up to the mission were conducted at a break-neck pace. The lunar launch window opened on 21 December 1968, at which time Mare Tranquillitatis (the Sea of Tranquillity, a low, relatively flat plain tipped as a possible first landing site) would be experiencing lunar sunrise and its landscape would be thrown into stark relief, allowing Borman, Lovell and Anders to photograph it. In the final six weeks before launch, the crew regularly put in ten-hour workdays, with weekends existing only to wade through piles of mail. At the end of November, outgoing President Lyndon Johnson threw them a bon voyage partyin Washington, D.C. Then, on the evening of 20 December, the legendary Charles Lindbergh—first to fly solo across the Atlantic—visited their quarters at Cape Kennedy, Fla. During their meal, the topic of conversation turned to the Saturn V rocket, which would burn nearly 40,000 pounds (1,800 kg) of propellant in its first second of firing.


Frank Borman leads his men to the transfer van in the pre-dawn darkness of 21 December 1968. Jim Lovell waves for the cameras, whilst Bill Anders brings up the rear. Photo Credit: NASA

 As quoted by Andrew Chaikin in his landmark book, A Man on the Moon, Lindbergh was astounded.

“In the first second of your flight tomorrow,” he told them, “you’ll burn ten times more fuel than I did all the way to Paris!”

Shortly after 2:30 a.m. EST on launch morning, 21 December 1968, Deke Slayton woke them in Cape Kennedy’s crew quarters and joined them for the ritual breakfast of steak and eggs. Also in attendance were Chief Astronaut Al Shepard and Apollo 8 backup crewmen Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. (The third backup crew member, Fred Haise, was busily setting switch positions inside the command module at Pad 39A.) Shortly thereafter, clad in their snow-white spacesuits and bubble helmets, they arrived at the brilliantly floodlit pad, where their Saturn V awaited. First Borman, then Anders, and finally Lovell took their seats in the command module, joining Haise, who had by now finished his job of checking switches. After offering them his hand in solidarity and farewell, Haise crawled out of the cabin, and the heavy unified hatch slammed shut at 5:34 a.m.


Watched by a global audience of millions, and seemingly also by a crescent Moon, the first Saturn V ever trusted with human passengers takes flight on the morning of 21 December 1968. Photo Credit: NASA

Years later, Bill Anders told Andrew Chaikin that he glanced over at a window in the boost-protective cover and saw a hornet fluttering around outside. “She’s building a nest,” he thought, “and did she pick the wrong place to build it!”

As their 7:51 a.m. launch time drew closer, a sense of unreal calm pervaded Apollo 8’s cabin. With five minutes to go, the white room and its access arm rotated away from the spacecraft and, shortly thereafter, the launch pad’s automatic sequencer took charge of the countdown, monitoring the final topping-off of propellants needed by the Saturn V to reach space. Sixty seconds before launch the giant rocket was declared fully pressurized, and it transferred its systems to internal battery power as four of the nine servicing arms linking it to utilities on Pad 39A were disconnected.

“T-50 seconds and counting,” intoned public affairs commentator Jack King in the Launch Control Center. “We have the power transfer. We’re now on the flight batteries within the launch vehicle.”

The seconds ticked away.

At 17 seconds came the final alignment of the Saturn’s guidance computer, and it was transferred to internal power.

“T-15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, nine … ”

It was at this stage that the ignition sequence of the largest and most powerful rocket ever brought to operational status began and pressurized propellants flooded into the five F-1 engines on the Saturn’s first stage. Despite being cocooned inside their space suits, Borman, Lovell and Anders could faintly hear the sound of fuel pouring into the combustion chambers, 36 stories below them.

“We have ignition sequence start. The engines are armed…”

Source: 'Why Complicate It?' Remembering Apollo 8, 50 Years On (Part 1)

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'He Lost His Record': Remembering Apollo 8, 50 Years On (Part 2)
By Ben Evans, on December 23rd, 2018 [AmericaSpace]


View of Earth from Apollo 8, showing the day-night terminator crossing from Brazil to the north-eastern United States. Photo Credit: NASA

Five decades have now passed since the largest and most powerful rocket ever brought to operational status—the gigantic Saturn V—set off from Earth, bound for another world, with a human crew aboard. At 7:51 a.m. EST on 21 December 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders roared aloft from Pad 39A at Cape Kennedy in Florida to begin the first piloted voyage to the Moon. In doing so, their six-day flight would court both drama and controversy and would clear a significant hurtle as the United States worked to fulfil a presidential goal of landing a man on the lunar surface, before the end of the decade. And as outlined in last weekend’s AmericaSpace history article, the lunar mission of Apollo 8 was only a few months in the making.


Apollo 8 crewmen (from left) Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders witness the rollout of their Saturn V launch vehicle at Cape Kennedy. Photo Credit: NASA

Of the three men aboard Apollo 8, only Anders was an astronaut “rookie”; Lovell had flown into space twice before, and Borman once, but all three were first-timers as far as flying the Saturn V was concerned. As the final seconds of the countdown evaporated that December morning, 50 winters ago, the gushing of propellants into combustion chambers was eerily replaced by a distant sound of rolling thunder.

“…Four, three, two, one, zero…”

Finally, as Pad 39A’s deluge system unleashed a torrent of water onto the launch platform to reduce the reflected energy, the Saturn V’s internal computerized brain performed its final checks. All was well. “We have Commit…”


Watched by a global audience of millions, and seemingly also by a crescent Moon, the first Saturn V ever trusted with human passengers takes flight on the morning of 21 December 1968. Photo Credit: NASA

The Launch Commit signal released clamps securing the 363-foot-tall (110-meter) booster to the pad and Borman, Lovell and Anders began to rise from Earth. Fromthe astronauts’ couches in the command module it was hard to discern—other than from the clock in front of their eyes—when they precisely left Earth, but at some point in the commotion the first Saturn V ever trusted with human passengers took flight.

“We have a liftoff,” exulted launch commentator Jack King. “We have liftoff at 7:51 a.m. Eastern Standard Time…”

“Liftoff,” confirmed Borman, gazing at the clock on his instrument panel. “The clock is running.” After the mission, all three men would have their own recollections of what it was like to launch atop the Saturn, but Andrew Chaikin summed it up best in his landmark book A Man on the Moon when he quoted Bill Anders: They felt as if they were helpless prey in the mouth of a giant, angry dog.


High-altitude perspective of the Home Planet from Apollo 8. Photo Credit: NASA

Forty seconds into the climb, the rocket burst through the sound barrier and the G loads on the three astronauts climbed steadily—three, then four, and still climbing—but when they hit 4.5 the uncomfortable feeling of intense acceleration ended as the Saturn’s S-IC first stage burned out and separated. “The staging,” Borman recounted, “from the first to the second stage, as we went from S-IC cutoff to S-II ignition, was a violent maneuver: we were thrown forward against our straps and smashed back into the seat.” So violent, in fact, was the motion that Anders felt he was being hurled headlong into the instrument panel. Seconds later, the now-unneeded escape tower and the command module’s boost-protective cover were jettisoned, flooding the cabin with daylight as windows were uncovered. For Anders, his first glimpse of Earth from space was electrifying.

A little under nine minutes after launch the S-II finally expired and the S-IVB picked up the remainder of the thrust needed to achieve orbit. “The smoothest ride in the world” was how Borman described riding the Saturn’s restartable third stage, before it, too, shut down, at 8:02 a.m. Barely 11 minutes had passed since leaving Cape Kennedy, and the astronauts were in orbit. In less than three hours’ time, assuming that their spacecraft checked out satisfactorily, they would relight the S-IVB for six minutes to begin the Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI) burn and set themselves on an appropriate path for the Moon. However, if Apollo 8 did not pass its tests with flying colors and the lunar shot was called off, they would be consigned to what had been called “the alternate mission”: ten long days in Earth orbit.

Borman could thinkof nothing worse. Indeed, at one stage, Jim Lovell, working under one of the couches to adjust a valve, accidentally inflated his space suit’s life vest and Borman gave him a dirty look. In true Frank Borman fashion, nothing would be permitted to interfere with The Mission. At length, it was Capcom Mike Collins who gave them the news they so badly needed to hear: “Apollo 8, you are Go for TLI!”


The spent S-IVB third stage of the Saturn V booster drifts away into the inky blackness. Photo Credit: NASA

Drifting high above the Pacific Ocean at the time, the astronauts knew that the six-minute “burn” by the S-IVB would be entirely controlled by the computers and, with ten seconds to go, a flashing number “99” appeared on the command module’s display panel. In essence, it asked them to confirm that they wanted to go ahead with the specific maneuver. Lovell punched the “Proceed” button, and at 10:38 a.m., two hours and 47 minutes into the mission, the third stage ignited with a long, slow push.

Although Borman kept a keen eye on his instruments in the event that he had to assume manual control, Collins relayed updates from the trajectory specialists that Apollo 8 was in perfect shape. It did not feel that way to Borman, who was convinced from the intense shaking and rattling that he might be forced to abort the burn. Steadily, as Anders watched the third stage’s propellant temperatures and pressures, they turned from Earth-orbiting astronauts to Moon-bound adventurers. By the time the S-IVB finally shut down after five minutes and 18 seconds, their velocity had increased from 17,500 mph (28,100 km/h) to 23,200 mph (37,340 km/h): the “escape velocity” needed to depart Earth’s gravitational clutches and chart a course to the Moon.

Borman, Lovell and Anders were traveling faster than any human beings ever before.


Arguably the most famous photograph from Apollo 8 was the sight of ‘Earthrise’, peeping above the lunar limb. Photo Credit: NASA

Surprisingly, though, with no outside point of reference there was not the slightest sense of this tremendous speed. Then, when Borman separated the command and service module from the now-spent S-IVB and maneuvered around to face the third stage, they saw the effect of TLI: the Home Planet was no longer a seemingly-flat expanse of land and sea and cloud “below” them, but spherical, its curvature obvious in the black void. They could actually see it receding from them as they continued traveling outward. And as their altitude increased, Earth grew so small that it seemed to fit neatly inside the frame of one of the command module’s windows. They quickly broke the 850-mile (1,360-km) altitude record set by Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon on Gemini XI in September 1966. “Tell Conrad he lost his record,” Borman radioed. For his part, Lovell launched into a geography lesson and asked Mike Collins to warn the people of Tierra del Fuego to put on their raincoats, as a storm was approaching them.

Maneuvering Apollo 8 with its nose pointed toward Earth and the S-IVB had not been done for sightseeing: Borman’s next task was to rendezvous with it, just as future crews would need to do in order to extract their lunar modules from the enormous “garage” atop the S-IVB. After completing this demonstration, he pulled away for the final time and Apollo 8 set sail for the Moon. Five hours into the flight, Lovell set to work taking star sightings with the 28-power sextant and navigation telescopes. If they lost contact with Earth, he might have to measure the angles between target stars and the home planet and punch the data into the computer to figure out their position. He would do the same in lunar orbit, measuring craters and landmarks to refine their flight path.

Heading across the vast cislunar gulf, the astronauts awakened the first sensations of space sickness. Borman, it seemed, suffered the most. A number of cases of gastroenteritis had plagued Cape Kennedy in the days before launch, and it was suggested that this 24-hour intestinal flu could have triggered the malady; alternatively, Borman had taken a Seconal tablet to help him sleep and blamed the medication for hisdiscomfort. Unbeknownst to Borman, his case caused much consternation among the flight surgeons and even led to suggestions that the mission might have to be terminated. Fortunately, all three men were fine and, even if they were ill, the SPS could not be fired to about-face them back to Earth.

They were heading for the Moon, whether they liked it or not.

Source: 'He Lost His Record': Remembering Apollo 8, 50 Years On (Part 2)

[Orionid]

'From American Cheese': Remembering Apollo 8, 50 Years On (Part 3)
By Ben Evans, on December 30th, 2018 [AmericaSpace]


Truly the voyage of Apollo 8 over the Christmas period in 1968 carried with it the most profound message of the Greatest Story Ever Told: a message of peace, goodwill and harmony to the inhabitants of Planet Earth. Photo Credit: NASA

Five decades ago, in December 1968, three men were launched atop the most powerful rocket ever brought to operational status—the Saturn V—to begin a mission more adventurous, more audacious, more challenging and more dangerous than had ever been attempted. As described in last weekend’s AmericaSpace history article, and in Part 1 of this series, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders roared away from their Home Planet and re-lit the third stage of their launch vehicle in an event somewhat innocuously described as “Trans-Lunar Injection” (TLI). That six-minute firing propelled them out of Earth’s gravitational clutches for the first time in history and set them on course to visit our closest celestial neighbor, the Moon.


A North American Rockwell artist’s concept of the Spacecraft/Lunar Module Adaptor (SLA) panels and the S-IVB third stage being jettisoned, soon after Trans-Lunar Injection. Image Credit: NASA/North American Rockwell

Strangely, in the hours after TLI, they could barely see the Moon at all. It was just a crescent from their perspective and they would not really see it in its entirety until they arrived in orbit around it on Christmas Eve. “I saw it several times in the optics as I was doing some sightings,” admitted Lovell, but “by and large, the body that we were rendezvousing with—that was coming from one direction as we were going to another—we never saw…and we took it on faith that the Moon would be there, which says quite a bit for ground control.” As they headed toward their target, Apollo 8 slowly rotated on its axis in a so-called “barbecue roll”, to even out thermal extremes of blistering heat and frigid cold across its metallic surfaces.

Thirty-one hours after launch, the astronauts began their first live telecast, midway between Earth and the Moon. Borman had tried to have the camera removed from the mission, but had been overruled, and now found himself using it to film Lovell in the command module’s lower equipment bay, preparing a chocolate pudding for dessert. Next there was a shot of Bill Anders, twirling his weightless toothbrush. “This transmission,” Borman commenced for his terrestrial audience, “is coming to you approximately halfway between the Moon and the Earth. We have about less than 40 hours to go to the Moon. I certainly wish we could show you the Earth. Very, very beautiful.” Unfortunately, a telephoto lens fitted to the camera by Anders did not work, and when they switched back to the interior lens it resolved the Home Planet as little more than a white blob, giving away little of its splendor.


As the mission’s senior pilot, one of Jim Lovell’s responsibilities was taking star sightings and navigational measurements using the sextant and telescope. He is pictured at work in the command module’s lower equipment bay. Photo Credit: NASA

By the afternoon of 23 December, the gravitational influence of their home planet was finally overcome by that of the Moon. At this point, Apollo 8 was 190,000 miles (305,700 km) from Earth and just over 40,000 miles (64,000 km) from its target, and the spacecraft’s velocity had slowed to 2,700 mph (4,350 km/h) as it moved farther into the Moon’s gravitational well. As they sailed toward Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI), their trajectory was near-perfect: only two of four planned mid-course correction burns had been needed to keep Apollo 8 locked into its free return trajectory. At 3:55 a.m. EST on Christmas Eve, Capcom Gerry Carr told Borman that they were “Go for LOI.”

The three astronauts had still not seen the Moon, despite their close proximity to it, since their angle of approach caused it to be lost in the Sun’s glare. At length, Carr asked them what they could see. “Nothing,” replied Anders glumly, adding “it’s like being on the inside of a submarine.” Less than an hour later, at 4:49 a.m., Apollo 8 passed behind the Moon, with Lovell telling Carr that “we’ll see you on the other side.” Eleven minutes later, they fired the service module’s large Service Propulsion System (SPS) engine for four minutes to reduce their speed and brake themselves into an orbit of 69 x 193 miles (111 x 310 km). The burn was flawless, although Lovell admitted that it was “the longest four minutes I ever spent”. Had the engine burned too long or too short, they could have ended up either crashing into the Moon or vanishing into some errant orbit. Just to be sure, Borman hit the shutdown button as soon as the clock touched zero.


High-oblique view of the lunar terrain, looking west-southwest, at the cusp of Earthrise, from Apollo 8. Photo Credit: NASA

Back on Earth, a tense world—nearly a billion people were listening in, NASA estimated, scattered across 64 different countries—waited for word of their insertion into lunar orbit. If Apollo 8 had not achieved orbit, then Borman, Lovell, and Anders would come back into communications range some ten minutes sooner than planned. At length, right on time, following a 45-minute blackout, public affairs officer Paul Haney announced with joy: “We got it! We got it!”

Fifteen minutes later, the astronauts’ first close-range descriptions of the Moon came across a quarter of a million miles of emptiness. “The Moon,” Lovell began, “is essentially grey; no color; looks like plaster of Paris or sort of a greyish deep sand. We can see quite a bit of detail. The Sea of Fertility doesn’t stand out as well here as it does back on Earth. There’s not as much contrast between that and the surrounding craters. The craters are all rounded off. There’s quite a few of them; some of them are newer. Many of them—especially the round ones—look like hits by meteorites or projectiles of some sort…”


Resembling plaster of Paris, and ubiquitously grey in color, the lunar farside was quite distinct from its Earth-facing side. Photo Credit: NASA

The lack of even the slightest vestiges of an atmosphere lent a weird clarity to what was, in effect, a scene of the utmost desolation, silence, and stillness. Only weeks earlier, the film of Arthur C. Clarke’s, 2001: A Space Odyssey, had premiered and even the astronauts imagined the lunar terrain to be composed of dramatic mountains and jagged cliffs. Instead they were presented with an essentially dead place, ubiquitous in its blandness. Anders, tasked with the bulk of the lunar photography, had his own flight plan to plough through, but found it hard because of dirty windows. In fact, only the command module’s two small rendezvous windows remained reasonably clear.

For Anders, the far side of the Moon, never seen from Earth or ever by human eyes, resembled “a sand pile my kids have been playing in for a long time…all beat up, no definition, just a lot of bumps and holes.” He considered the lunar surface to be unappealing, but with a “stark beauty” of its own, and all three men found pleasure in giving temporary names to some of the craters to honor their colleagues and managers: Low, Gilruth, Shea, Grissom, White, Webb, Chaffee, Kraft, See and Bassett. “These,” said Borman, “were all the giants who made it work.” At one stage, when flight controller John Aaron noticed that the command module’s environmental control system needed adjustment, they responded by naming a crater for him, too. (Before the flight, Lovell had even given his wife, Marilyn, a photograph of a mountain, near the edge of the Sea of Tranquility, which he had unofficially named for her: Mount Marilyn.)


This interesting perspective, captured in the command module simulator in October 1968, illustrates the cramped quarters of the Apollo 8 spacecraft. From left to right are Bill Anders, Jim Lovell and Frank Borman. Photo Credit: NASA

Four hours after entering orbit, another SPS burn—this time thankfully shorter at just 11 seconds—adjusted Apollo 8’s path around the Moon into a near-perfect circle. Then, at 10:37 a.m. EST on 24 December, the astronauts became the first humans to witness “Earthrise” from behind the lunar limb. Borman was in the process of turning the spacecraft to permit Lovell to take some sextant readings, when all at once Anders yelled: “Oh my God! Look at that picture over there.” It would become a running, though light-hearted, competition among the crew over who took the “Earthrise Picture”, which has since become world-famous: a shot of the Home Planet, a pretty blue-and-white marble, rising in the void above the Moon’s grey-brown surface.

With Lovell in attendance, it was Anders who, after fitting the color magazine and aiming the telephoto lens, snapped one of the most iconic images of the Space Age. In perhaps no other image has the beauty, fragility and loneliness of Earth been captured with more meaning. Years later, Anders would win praise from environmentalists for his assertion that Apollo 8’s goal was to explore the Moon…and what it really did was rediscover the Earth!


Captured on 26 December 1968, during the journey home, this image exemplifies the irony that Apollo 8 actually rediscovered the Earth. Photo Credit: NASA

The astronauts’ intense workload during their 20 hours in orbit was getting the better of them, with tiredness causing them to make mistakes. On occasion, Lovell had punched the wrong code into the command module’s computer, triggering warning alarms, and Anders was overcome with his own schedule: stereo imagery, dim-light photography and filter work. At length, clearly irritated that the timeline was too full, Borman snapped at Capcom Mike Collins that he was taking an executive decision for his two crewmates to get some rest. “I’ll stay up and keep the spacecraft vertical,” he told Collins, “and take some automatic pictures.” With some difficulty, he had to force Lovell and Anders to pry their eyes away from the windows and get some sleep.

It seemed inevitable, after thousands of years of watching and wondering about the Moon, that humanity’s first visit would be commemorated in a religious, spiritual, or symbolic way. Before the launch, Borman, Lovell and Anders had discussed this issue at length with friends and concluded that they would read the story of Creation from the first ten verses of Genesis. During their ninth orbit, on their second live telecast from the Moon, they read it. Anders spoke first, then Lovell, and finally Borman closed with “Good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you…all of you on the good Earth.”


The Apollo 8 command module is recovered on 27 December 1968. Photo Credit: NASA

Eight minutes into Christmas morning, the return home got underway when the SPS engine was ignited to increase their speed by 2,300 mph (3,700 km/h). As they rounded the Moon for the last time, Lovell told Capcom Ken Mattingly, who was just coming on duty in Houston, “Please be informed there is a Santa Claus.” Mattingly replied that they were the best ones to know.

The return journey proved uneventful, with fogged windows, puddling water and clattering cabin fans creating mere annoyances. A final televised tour of Apollo 8 showed Anders preparing a freeze-dried meal…and, when the camera stopped rolling, they found a treat in their food locker: real turkey and real cranberry sauce, wrapped in foil with red and green ribbons. It turned out to be their best meal of the entire flight, although Borman was annoyed that Deke Slayton had slipped three small bottles of brandy aboard as well. Why, if anything went wrong on the flight, the overly zealous Borman fumed, the press and public would have a field day and blame it on the “drunk” astronauts. Lovell and Anders, who have admitted that they had no intention of touching the brandy, felt that Borman had gone a little too far. Christmas spirit returned, however, with festive presents: pairs of cufflinks and a man-in-the-Moon tie pin from Susan Borman and Marilyn Lovell, and a gold “figure-8” tie pin from Valerie Anders.


After a dreadful 1968, characterized by the trauma of the Vietnam conflict, civil strife in the United States and political assassinations, Apollo 8 ended the year on a note of hope. Photo Credit: NASA

Only one minor trajectory correction burn was needed, and early on 27 December the astronauts fired pyrotechnics to jettison the service module and plunged into Earth’s atmosphere at almost 22,000 mph (35,400 km/h). During re-entry, which carried them over northeastern China, then brought the command module in a long slanting path toward the southeast, Borman, Lovell and Anders were subjected to deceleration forces as high as 7 G. Splashdown came as Cape Kennedy clocks read 10:51 a.m., but still in pre-dawn darkness over the western Pacific, completing a mission of just over six days.

Amidst the radio chatter from a rescue helicopter despatched by the aircraft carrier Yorktown came an age-old question which the world now wanted answered. “Apollo 8, is the Moon made from Limburger cheese?”

“Nope,” replied Bill Anders. “It’s made from American cheese!”

Source: 'From American Cheese': Remembering Apollo 8, 50 Years On (Part 3)

[Orionid]

To the Moon and Back: Apollo 8 and the Future of Lunar Exploration
Dec. 18, 2018 By Stephanie Zeller NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Muscle cars. Film cameras. Concert tees stuffed into bell-bottomed jeans. Rotary phones and 8-track tapes, TVs measured in cubic footage, crowded wallpaper. Slide rules and chalkboards and all-paper filing systems and vacuum tubes. It’s 1968, and we’re sending men to the Moon.


Prior to the Apollo 8 launch, a select group of politicians, celebrities, and families and friends of the astronauts received this official letter from NASA inviting them to attend the historic event. The letter reads, “You are cordially invited to attend the departure of the United States Spaceship Apollo VIII on its voyage around the Moon, departing from Launch Complex 39A, Kennedy Space Center, with the launch window commencing at seven a.m. on December 21st, 1968. R.S.V.P., The Apollo VIII Crew” Credits: Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library

Apollo 8 was supposed to be a test flight, meant to simulate atmospheric re-entry from the Moon but never meant to go there. Hurtling toward Earth at 25,000 miles per hour is hairy business and NASA, having never done so before, needed practice. But then the USSR successfully launched two of its own Moon-shots (unmanned Zond 5 and 6) on the heels of President Kennedy’s call for men on the Moon by the end of the ’60s. It felt to most like a matter of time before America lost its space race for good.

NASA’s plan for Apollo 8 had to change.

Following a spark of ambitious vision, NASA reorganized, galvanizing a wild rush of fervor and late nights. In mid-August of 1968, astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders received a call telling them to cancel their holiday plans—they were going to the Moon.

By December, the three men were suddenly farther away than any human had ever been from our home planet, traveling faster and seeing more than could be seen in the entire history of life on Earth. From prehistoric cephalopods to T-Rex to our ape-like ancestors to Alexander the Great, no single pair of eyeballs had ever been so far from Earth’s gravitational influence until Dec. 21, 1968.


Frank Borman and Jim Lovell were in California when they received news that their new mission would be going to the Moon. On orders to return to Houston immediately, Borman flew a plane back to Texas while Lovell sat in the passenger seat, sketching ideas for a mission patch. His illustration, which serves the double purpose of a large red ‘8’ for Apollo’s 8th mission and a figure 8, which outlines the path the Apollo vehicle took on its journey, was polished off by a NASA artist and later adapted as the official patch for the landmark mission. Credits: NASA

We were shooting for the Moon and we got there, sure enough, but the real triumph of Apollo 8 was beyond nationalism, beyond the tumultuousness of an age that catapulted these three men into the dark unknown. Apollo 8 was the fruition of ancient Chinese stargazers, renaissance dreamers and mid-century physicists. It was, above all, our first good look at ourselves, with the best possible perspective.

Today, leading up to the anniversary of one of humankind’s most audacious missions, we begin to celebrate 50 years of learning, inspiration, altitude and ingenuity not only about our nearest neighbor but also about Earth and where modern lunar exploration will take us next.


Astronauts James (Jim) Lovell, Frank Borman, and William (Bill) Anders pose for a portrait in their space suits on November 22, 1968, just less than a month before they would orbit the Moon. Credits: NASA

This is the first in a five-part series on the Apollo 8 mission and its influence on human exploration.

Source: To the Moon and Back: Apollo 8 and the Future of Lunar Exploration

[Orionid]

Part 2: Apollo 8 - In the Beginning There Was Liftoff
Dec. 19, 2018 By Stephanie Zeller NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Though some may romanticize the revolutionary 1960s, they were troubled times. The year 1968 was shaped by the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Bobby Kennedy, which fueled violent riots and antagonized already severe discord over the Vietnam War. At the advent of the television era, such conflicts played out in living rooms across the country.

Amidst this atmosphere — and surely not immune to the country’s troubling overtones — NASA engineers huddled in sequestered, cinder block buildings and strategized with abandon. They focused their collective efforts on the task readily at hand: responding to John F. Kennedy’s call, made seven years prior, to send Americans to the Moon and return them safely to Earth by the close of the decade.

NASA understood that such a trailblazing mission would not be a forgiving one. Failure was not an option. The astronauts and the NASA employees on the ground executed their jobs with focus and precision, with the cultural and historical impact of the mission yet to be felt.

As Saturn V stood magnificently on the launch pad, illuminated like a beacon in early morning Florida darkness, those in Mission Control Houston, the engineers at the assembly facility, and the astronauts and their families were counting on those monstrous engines to fly as truly as when tested.


Searchlights penetrate the darkness surrounding Apollo 8 on Pad 39-A at Kennedy Space Center. This mission was the first manned flight using the Saturn V. The towering 363-foot Saturn V was a multi-stage, multi-engine launch vehicle standing taller than the Statue of Liberty. Altogether, the Saturn V engines produced as much power as 85 Hoover Dams. Credits: NASA/MSFC

On Dec. 21, 1968, the Saturn V rocket was visible for miles from Cape Kennedy, now known as Cape Canaveral, in the center of Florida’s Atlantic coast. Thousands gathered on nearby sandy beaches to watch the historic event — the first time this powerful rocket would take humans beyond Earth’s orbit. Perched atop the 36-story-tall rocket filled to the brim with nearly 1 million pounds of fuel, astronauts William Anders and Frank Borman were strapping into their seats. As Command Module Pilot and Navigator, Jim Lovell was the last to enter the Apollo 8 spacecraft and took a moment of pause to look around him. He reflected on this moment in a 2013 interview with the National Air and Space Museum:

“Everyone else is a comfortable three and a half miles away ... and my companions, they walk across the gantry [the bridge] to the spacecraft and so I’m left alone, fully suited up, breathing pure oxygen, and I look into the night and I see these lights from the press corps, I look down to the ground and I said ... these people are really serious! We’re gonna go to the Moon!”


This illustration compares the sizes of American space launch vehicles of the 1960s, set to scale with the Statue of Liberty. Each vehicle was used for crewed spaceflight launches, which means that humans sat atop each of these massive rockets and were launched upward through the atmosphere. The Saturn V, the farthest to the right and the largest of the bunch, is the launch vehicle that took Americans to the Moon. Credits: NASA

Just prior to 8 a.m., the Saturn V’s 7.6 million pounds of thrust pushed the crew up through the atmosphere. Anders later said he felt like “a ladybug at the end of your car antenna” in the 2013 interview.

The crew felt the crushing forces of 3.9g (like suddenly feeling 3.9 times your normal weight) as they embarked on a journey unlike any before, hoping to establish a new precedent of flight and human achievement that would stand for generations to come.


The launch of the Apollo 8 space vehicle from the Kennedy Space Center at 7:51 a.m. (EST), Dec. 21, 1968, was the beginning of the historic journey to orbit the Moon and return. The Apollo 8 astronauts who made the first trip around the moon were Frank Borman, commander; James A. Lovell Jr., command module pilot; and William A. Anders, lunar module pilot. Apollo 8 was the first manned Saturn V launch. Credits: NASA

Source: Part 2: Apollo 8 - In the Beginning There Was Liftoff

[Orionid]

Part 3: Apollo 8 - The Far Side
Dec. 20, 2018 [NASA] By Stephanie Zeller NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Halfway to the Moon, on Sunday, Dec. 22, 1968, the Apollo 8 crew glimpsed Earth outside their windows from a never-before-seen vantage point, slowly decreasing in size as they cut away through the deep black. “It’s a beautiful, beautiful view,” Frank Borman said to Mission Control as the spacecraft sped onward toward its destination. ( , NASA audio courtesy Kipp Teague).


High altitude view of Earth as photographed from the Apollo 8 spacecraft during its translunar journey to the Moon. Visible is nearly the entire Western Hemisphere, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, including nearby Newfoundland to Tierra Del Fuego at the southern tip of South America. Central America is clearly outlined. Nearly all of South America is covered by clouds, except the high Andes Mountain chain along the west coast. A small portion of the bulge of west Africa shows along the sunset terminator. Credits: NASA

69 hours, 8 minutes and 16 seconds after launch, the crew reached the far side of the Moon. They burned their engines for a lunar orbit insertion (LOI), which lasted four minutes. The burn slowed the spacecraft down so it could be captured by the Moon’s gravitational pull, making it the first ever manned satellite of another world. Listen to the pre-burn communications with NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston on Monday, Dec. 23: , NASA audio courtesy Kipp Teague.

The Moon is tidally locked to Earth, which means it rotates on its axis at the exact same rate that it orbits Earth. As a result, we only see one side of the Moon from Earth’s surface. Borman, Lovell and Anders were about to get the first naked-eye glimpse in history of the other side. Rocky, barren, and marred with craters of all shapes and sizes, Lovell described it during a live telecast as, “essentially gray, no color...like Plaster of Paris or some sort of grayish beach sand.”

That grayish beach sand passed rapidly outside the spacecraft windows, 96.6 kilometers (60 miles) below as the crew carried out a variety of tasks. These included capturing dozens of photos and conducting six live telecasts, two of them broadcast from lunar orbit in real-time to five different continents and watched by more people than any other television program at the time.

International television broadcasting was a relatively new concept, and spaceships only a very modern reality — the Wright brothers flew for the first time just 65 years prior. NASA had only existed for 10, and within that decade, an outpouring of national pride and ambition had mobilized a government agency to not only get three men to the Moon, but to broadcast it live. Such a feat was not lost on the world, nor on the astronauts themselves. On Christmas Eve, 1968, Borman, Lovell and Anders filmed the surface of the Moon from Apollo 8 and commemorated their moment of awe, each man taking his turn to read from the book of Genesis ( , NASA audio courtesy Kipp Teague).


Photo taken from Apollo 8 during the 1968 mission on their first approach to the Moon.
Credits: NASA

The Christmas Eve broadcast ended an apprehensive year on a hopeful note, bringing to the world a reminder of the all-encompassing curiosity stitched into the fabric of the human race — our primordial need to stretch out our arms, to see what is over the next hill. Both the crew on board and the mission’s orchestrators on the ground expected stunning views of the Moon, but over that proverbial hill, they were graced with a sight unexpectedly beautiful: Earth, our tiny blue marble, our one-and-only home.


This video is a montage of NASA archival footage from the Apollo 8 mission. Credits: NASA

Jim Lovell said of the view:

“The vastness up here of the Moon is awe inspiring. It makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth. The Earth from here is a grand oasis in the blackness of space.” ( , NASA audio courtesy Kipp Teague).

As Earth rose over the lunar horizon, Anders immortalized his view of the moment in an image now known as “Earthrise.”


In December of 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first people to leave our home planet and travel to another body in space. But as crew members Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders all later recalled, the most important thing they discovered was Earth. Using photo mosaics and elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), this video commemorates Apollo 8's historic flight by recreating the moment when the crew first saw and photographed the Earth rising from behind the Moon. Narrator Andrew Chaikin, author of "A Man on the Moon," sets the scene for a three-minute visualization of the view from both inside and outside the spacecraft accompanied by the onboard audio of the astronauts. Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Source: Part 3: Apollo 8 - The Far Side

[Orionid]

Part 4: Apollo 8 - The Return
Dec. 21, 2018 By Stephanie Zeller NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center


The Apollo 8 crew stands in the doorway of a recovery helicopter after arriving aboard the carrier USS Yorktown, prime recovery ship for the historic Apollo 8 lunar orbit mission. Left to right, are astronauts Frank Borman, commander; James A. Lovell Jr., command module pilot; and William A. Anders, lunar module pilot. Apollo 8 splashed down at 10:51 a.m. (EST), Dec. 27, 1968, in the central Pacific approximately 1,000 miles south-southwest of Hawaii. Credits: NASA

Christmas morning of 1968, nine-and-a-half Moon orbits and 3 days, 17 hours and 17 seconds after launch, the Apollo 8 crew fired its service module engines to propel them out of lunar orbit and back to their families at home. Though the people on Earth were already celebrating an equally successful and trailblazing mission, NASA’s Mission Control in Houston refused to relax until its three ambassadors were safely back on the ground. Following a series of well-executed re-entry trajectory corrections, Apollo 8 tore through our atmosphere at higher speeds than humans had ever moved before, culminating in what Lovell called “a real fireball” in the re-entry audio recording. Listen to the re-entry audio between Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell and Mission Control: , NASA audio courtesy Kipp Teague.

Splashdown went as planned on the morning of Dec. 27. The crew, still confined to the Apollo capsule, awaited the Navy men aboard USS Yorktown, who were instructed to rendezvous with the battered spaceship rather than to return home for Christmas. As the astronauts waited to be lifted from the ill-tempered waters, Frank Borman made small talk with the helicopter crew. The sun began to diffuse the early morning darkness and the crew was pulled to safety, heralded on the Yorktown with cheers and cake and unimpeded patriotism. Back in Houston, cigars were lit, handshakes exchanged, and with unabashed enthusiasm a room stuffed with white button-downs and black ties exulted in the emotion of the moment, allowing themselves to take a breath and understand the gravity of their accomplishments.

Not long after the crew had returned to land, they received a call from President Lyndon B. Johnson ( , audio courtesy LBJ Presidential Library), congratulating their efforts and relaying a message from the Soviets, who were “very felicitous about the welfare of the astronauts.” Acknowledging the scale of teamwork that made such a feat possible, Johnson said, “Now we all know that you men were supported by an elaborate technical apparatus and by many brilliant and devoted men and women here on the ground, and we salute all of them as we salute you.” He went on to dignify the bravery of the astronauts, saying “You’ve seen what man has really never seen before. You’ve taken us, taken all of us all over the world, into a new era.”

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/46385280361/

Source: Part 4: Apollo 8 - The Return

[Orionid]

Part 5: Apollo 8 and Beyond - The Next Epoch
Dec. 21, 2018 By Stephanie Zeller NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center


The moon descends almost completely into Earth’s shadow during a total lunar eclipse on Dec. 21, 2010. Photo taken from Arlington, Virginia. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Half a century ago, Apollo 8 ushered in a new era of space exploration. The missions that followed in close succession would herald these breakthroughs in science and in engineering prowess with drama and color. They would bring a cornucopia of knowledge about the Moon, the origins of our solar system, the nature of our universe, the history of our Earth and even the history of life. In addition to tangible, scientific assets gained from Apollo, the mission brought some degree of unification to a nation fractured by conflict at home and abroad.

Flash forward 50 years, and humankind is still learning from these landmark missions, using the data gathered from the Moon and the instruments deployed there to plan our next grand endeavor: Orion, which will travel to the Moon, to Mars and beyond. For years we have mapped the Moon for future landing sites using missions like Lunar Prospector (1998) and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO. LRO has also preformed dozens of other experiments over its lifetime that will help NASA put humans back on Earth’s large, gray-speckled satellite.

The crew aboard Apollo 8 got the first close up view in history (67.4 nautical miles [108.5 kilometers] on nearest approach) of the lunar surface and took the highest quality photos available at the time. We have come a long way since then, building on our database of knowledge through new missions and revisiting old data from these original pioneers.

David Williams is a lunar scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and works on a project that aims to restore and investigate data from the Apollo program. “The only long-term data we have from the Moon is this data from Apollo,” said Williams. “Now, we can put it into a digital format and use modern computers to analyze it. When we go back and take a closer look at it, we are actually able to learn new things with this old data!”

Though the Moon may be a beautiful object at which to gaze, it also holds secrets of Earth’s development, as well as that of our solar system. Earth’s atmosphere protects us from all manner of dangerous radiation, meteorites and other debris from space. The Moon does not have this buffer, and is instead directly affected by objects in deep space acting on its bare surface.

“The Moon is essentially a fossil,” said Ernie Wright, a media specialist at Goddard Space Flight Center’s Science Visualization Studio. “All of the geological history of the Earth that has been erased by weather or people is still present on the Moon. The Moon can tell us about the evolution of the Earth, what the Earth was originally made of, and how the chemistry of life has changed our planet’s surface.”


The visualization uses a digital 3D model of the Moon built from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter global elevation maps and image mosaics. The lighting is derived from actual Sun angles during lunar days in 2018. Credits: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

“The idea now, looking back on this data, is that we can look for things we’ve never looked for before,” said Williams. During the Apollo era, “we thought the Moon was dead, no water, no movement of dust. Now we find that the Moon is actually this dynamic system...we’re looking at the data differently.”

As NASA turns its attention to putting human explorers on the Moon once again, both new and old data will be used to choose landing sites and to decide what new instruments the next generation of astronauts should carry with them. Apollo 8 and later missions could not make observations about the Moon’s space environment or complex geology, a gap that LRO and missions like Clementine, LADEE, GRAIL, ARTEMIS and M3 have been able to fill. The Moon is our nearest neighbor and therefore the first stepping stone to deep space exploration.


Take a virtual tour of the Moon in 4K resolution, thanks to data provided by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. As the visualization moves around the near side, far side, north and south poles, we highlight interesting features, sites, and information gathered on the lunar terrain. Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/David Ladd & Ernie Wright

“We can use the Moon as a practice ground before going further,” said Wright. None of the Apollo missions observed the Moon’s poles, areas that have prompted a growing curiosity among lunar scientists. “We think that the poles might have water,” said Wright, “so those could be possible future landing sites for the Orion missions.”

Comparing data from these satellites to photos from Apollo 8 and later missions, we can see where new craters have formed as a result of meteorite collisions. We can also see areas that are permanently illuminated by the sun’s light and those in permanent shadow. “If we needed solar power during our next Moon landing,” Wright said, “we would know where to put the arrays.”

Scientists are studying our Earth-Moon system to better understand our home. But they also want to know how unique our situation is. Are there other systems like ours out there somewhere? Is a Moon somehow essential to the successful development of life on its parent planet? How could we learn to survive without a protective atmosphere like Earth’s?

Missions like LRO and its predecessors have done much of the preliminary work to begin finding answers to these questions, but the next phase is people, out there with human eyes and brains exploring our local neighborhood. Apollo 8 advanced this harrowing journey to the beyond. The mission splashed down after a six-day odyssey, but the broader campaign for exploration is just beginning. “There is a human spirit, there is a human need to get out there and explore,” said Williams. “And I just don’t think we can deny that.”

Source: Part 5: Apollo 8 and Beyond - The Next Epoch

[Orionid]

NASA's 1st flight to moon, Apollo 8, marks 50th anniversary
December 18, 2018 by Marcia Dunn [PHYS ORG]


This Dec. 24, 1968, file photo made available by NASA shows the Earth behind the surface of the moon during the Apollo 8 mission. (William Anders/NASA via AP, File)

Fifty years ago on Christmas Eve, a tumultuous year of assassinations, riots and war drew to a close in heroic and hopeful fashion with the three Apollo 8 astronauts reading from the Book of Genesis on live TV as they orbited the moon.

To this day, that 1968 mission is considered to be NASA's boldest and perhaps most dangerous undertaking. That first voyage by humans to another world set the stage for the still grander Apollo 11 moon landing seven months later.

There was unprecedented and unfathomable risk to putting three men atop a monstrous new rocket for the first time and sending them all the way to the moon. The mission was whipped together in just four months in order to reach the moon by year's end, before the Soviet Union.

There was the Old Testament reading by commander Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders.

Lastly, there was the photo named "Earthrise," showing our blue and white ball—humanity's home—rising above the bleak, gray lunar landscape and 240,000 miles (386 million kilometers) in the distance.

Humans had never set eyes on the far side of the moon, or on our planet as a cosmic oasis, surrounded completely by the black void of space. A half-century later, only 24 U.S. astronauts who flew to the moon have witnessed these wondrous sights in person.


In this Dec. 21, 1968, file photo, the Apollo 8 crew lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Friday, Dec. 21, 2018 marks the 50th anniversary of the historic mission. (AP Photo/File)

The Apollo 8 crew is still around: Borman and Lovell are 90, Anders is 85.

To Lovell, the journey had the thrill and romance of true exploration, and provided an uplifting cap for Americans to a painful, contentious year marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, nationwide riots and protests of the Vietnam War.

The mission's impact was perhaps best summed up in a four-word telegram received by Borman. "Thanks, you saved 1968."

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine—who at age 43 missed Apollo—marvels over the gutsy decision in August that year to launch astronauts to the moon in four months' time. He's pushing for a return to the moon, but with real sustainability this next go-around.

The space agency flipped missions and decided that instead of orbiting Earth, Borman and his crew would fly to the moon to beat the Soviets and pave the way for the lunar landings to come. And that was despite on its previous test flight, the Saturn V rocket lost parts and engines failed.


In this Dec. 18, 1968, file photo, Apollo 8 astronauts, from left, James Lovell, command module pilot; William Anders, lunar module pilot; and Frank Borman, commander, stand in front of mission simulator prior to training in exercise for their scheduled six-day lunar orbital mission at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (AP Photo/File)

"Even more worrisome than all of this," Bridenstine noted earlier this month, Apollo 8 would be in orbit around the moon on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. "In other words, if there was a failure here, it would wreck Christmas not only for everybody in the United States, but for everybody in the world."

As that first moon shot neared, Borman's wife, Susan, demanded to know the crew's chances. A NASA director answered: 50-50.

Borman wanted to get to the moon and get back fast. In his mind, a single lap around the moon would suffice. His bosses insisted on more.

"My main concern in this whole flight was to get there ahead of the Russians and get home. That was a significant achievement in my eyes," Borman explained at the Chicago launch of the book "Rocket Men" last spring.

Everyone eventually agreed: Ten orbits it would be.


This April 5, 2018 photo provided by the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago shows Apollo 8 astronauts, from left, William Anders, James Lovell, Frank Borman at the museum. (J.B. Spector/Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago via AP, File)

Liftoff of the Saturn V occurred on the morning of Saturday, Dec. 21, 1968.

On Christmas Eve, the spaceship successfully slipped into orbit around the moon. Before bedtime, the first envoys to another world took turns reading the first 10 verses from Genesis. It had been left to Borman, before the flight, to find "something appropriate" to say for what was expected to be the biggest broadcast audience to date.

"We all tried for quite a while to figure out something, and it all came up trite or foolish," Borman recalled. Finally, the wife of a friend of a friend came up with the idea of Genesis.

"In the beginning," Anders read, "God created the heaven and the Earth ..."

Borman ended the broadcast with, "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."


In this Dec. 21, 1968, file photo made available by NASA, Apollo 8 Commander Col. Frank Borman leads the way as he, and fellow astronauts Command Module Pilot Capt. James A Lovell Jr., and Lunar Module Pilot Maj. William A. Anders head to the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (NASA via AP, File)

On Christmas morning, their spacecraft went around the moon for the final time. The engine firing needed to shoot them back to Earth occurred while the capsule was out of communication with Mission Control in Houston. Lovell broke the nervous silence as the ship reappeared: "Please be informed there is a Santa Claus."

Back in Houston, meanwhile, a limousine driver knocked on Marilyn Lovell's door and handed her a gift-wrapped mink stole with a card that read: "To Marilyn, Merry Christmas from the man in the moon." Lovell bought the coat for his wife and arranged its fancy delivery before liftoff.

Splashdown occurred in the pre-dawn darkness on Dec. 27, bringing the incredible six-day journey to a close. Time magazine named the three astronauts "Men of the Year."

It wasn't until after the astronauts were back that the significance of their Earth pictures sank in.

Anders snapped the iconic Earthrise photo during the crew's fourth orbit of the moon, frantically switching from black-and-white to color film to capture the planet's exquisite, fragile beauty.


In this 1968 photo made available by NASA, a section of the Saturn V rocket is prepared for the Dec. 21, 1968 launch of the Apollo 8 mission at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (NASA via AP, File)

"Oh my God, look at that picture over there!" Anders said. "There's the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!"
Before the flight, no one had thought about photographing Earth, according to Anders. The astronauts were under orders to get pictures for potential lunar landing sites while orbiting 70 miles (112 kilometers) above the moon.

"We came to explore the moon and what we discovered was the Earth," Anders is fond of saying.

His Earthrise photo is a pillar of today's environmental movement. It remains a legacy of Apollo and humanity's achievement, said professor emeritus John Logsdon of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute, forever underscoring the absence of political borders as seen from space.

Anders wondered then—and now—"This is not a very big place, why can't we get along?"

Lovell remains awestruck by the fact he could hide all of Earth behind his thumb.

"Over 3 billion people, mountains, oceans, deserts, everything I ever knew was behind my thumb," he recalled at a recent anniversary celebration at Washington's National Cathedral.

Astronaut-artist Nicole Stott said the golden anniversary provides an opportunity to reintroduce the world to Earthrise. She and three other former space travelers are holding a celebration at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Friday, 50 years to the day Apollo 8 launched.

"That one image, I think, it just gives us the who and where we are in the universe so beautifully," she said.

By July 1969, Apollo 8 was overshadowed by Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin moon landing. But without Apollo 8, noted George Washington's Logsdon, NASA likely would not have met President John F. Kennedy's deadline of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade.


In this December 1968, file photo made available by NASA, Lt. Col. William A. Anders, Apollo 8 lunar module pilot, looks out of a window during the spaceflight. (NASA via AP, File)

Borman and Anders never flew in space again, and Soviet cosmonauts never made it to the moon.

Lovell went on to command the ill-fated Apollo 13—"but that's another story." That flight was the most demanding, he said, "But Apollo 8 was the one of exploration, the one of repeating the Lewis and Clark expedition ... finding the new Earth."


In this Dec. 21, 1968 photo made available by NASA, the Saturn V rocket carrying the Apollo 8 crew launches from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with 7.5 million pounds of thrust. The vehicle has just cleared the tower at Launch Complex 39A (NASA via AP, File)


This Dec. 29, 1968 photo made available by NASA shows the large moon crater Goclenius, foreground, approximately 40 statute miles in diameter, and three clustered craters Magelhaens, Magelhaens A, and Colombo A, during the Apollo 8 mission. (NASA via AP, File)


In this December 1968 file photo, the Saturn V rocket carrying the Apollo 8 crew is prepared for launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (AP Photo/File)


In this Dec. 27, 1968 file photo, divers help recover the Apollo 8 crew from their capsule after splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. (AP Photo/File)


In this Dec. 19, 1968, file photo, spotlights illuminate the 363-foot-tall Saturn V booster rocket on the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying the Apollo 8 spacecraft and its crew of three astronauts. (AP Photo/File)

Source: NASA's 1st flight to moon, Apollo 8, marks 50th anniversary

[Orionid]

The Apollo 8 voyage 50 years on: reflecting on our common humanity and fragility
John S Gardner  Fri 21 Dec 2018 16.00 GMT [The Guardian]
The mission marked the first time humans could see the whole of the planet at once and ‘see the Earth as it really is’


‘Remembering the flight of Apollo 8 should engender reflection but not give way to despair as to what has been lost. Instead, it should give hope, for in the cosmic scheme, 50 years is the blink of an eye.’ Photograph: NASA

Like its cousin, 1848, in which Europe was convulsed with revolution, 1968 was a year of tumult. It was the year of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War, the murder of the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr and the rioting that followed in America’s cities, the murder two months later of Robert F Kennedy, the student riots in Paris and strikes in France, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that crushed the “Prague Spring,” the youth protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the hundreds of deaths in Mexico City at Tlatelolco Square just before the Olympics.

Yet if 1968 witnessed too numerous examples of the smallness of humanity or at least of individual humans, the year would close from the void of outer space with a resounding proof of our smallness in the universe – and, ironically, serve as a unifying vision and a force for good.

For it was also the era of the space race between the US and USSR, and NASA was working to fulfill Kennedy’s dream of an American walking on the moon and returning safely by the end of the decade. As time grew short, the rumor grew that the Soviets were seeking a translunar flight by the end of 1968, and so NASA changed a regular testing mission to become a flight around the moon: Apollo 8.

Launched on December 21, 1968, Apollo 8 marked the first time that humans had seen the far side of the moon and the first time that humans saw “Earthrise,” in a famous picture that sparked the nascent environmental movement. For the first time, those on Earth could see the whole of the planet at once – and think about our common humanity and our common fragility. As astronaut James Lovell said recently, “we saw the Earth as it really is”: a small planet, insignificant in size compared to the galaxy, still less the universe.

The crew arrived in lunar orbit on Christmas Eve after 68 hours of flight and, leaving its ninth orbit, made a television broadcast. About a billion people saw the broadcast in some form, the most watched event in history. After describing the Moon, the crew read the first ten verses of Genesis, concluding with “And God saw that it was good”.

Despite everything in 1968, the Earth was good, and the astronauts closed by wishing everyone: “good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth”. Good, and fragile, and it required keeping, far better than had been done with war or racial discrimination or environmental pollution. A small planet, insignificant in size compared to the galaxy, but still our home and one perfectly suited for life, with water and air and soil and a sun nearby to give warmth.

All three astronauts – Frank Borman, Lovell, and William Anders – are living, and the anniversary of the flight was recently commemorated at a service at Washington’s National Cathedral. Presiding Bishop Michael Curry (who earlier this year preached at the royal wedding), wondered in his sermon that “if when they saw it, and then later we saw it, and when they read from Genesis, if God kind of gave a cosmic smile. And I wonder if God said, ‘Now y’all see what I see.’” And, as Curry noted, “This is God’s world. We are here because the great God Almighty looked back and said, ‘I’m lonely; I’ll make me a world.’”


William Anders, James Lovell and Frank Borman at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Photograph: JB Spector/AP

What did it all mean? During the flight itself, the scientific view prevailed. Borman first described the moon on television as “a vast, lonely, forbidding expanse of nothing”. But safe return and the passage of time led to more philosophical reflections. James Lovell said that “in this cathedral, my world exists within these walls. But seeing the Earth at 240,000 miles, my world suddenly expanded to infinity”. Cosmically insignificant, we became significant because of our responsibility to care for this planet entrusted to us; and seeing the world as Apollo 8 did, floating in the universe, awakened a new global consciousness.

It is one thing merely to marvel at technological achievement, still another to recall the sense of national purpose that it restored after a terrible year of violence and war and the environmental awakening it sparked. Remembering the flight of Apollo 8 should engender reflection but not give way to despair as to what has been lost. Instead, it should give hope, for in the cosmic scheme, 50 years is the blink of an eye. Lovell perhaps summed it up best: “God gave mankind a stage upon which to perform; how the play ends is up to us.”

Humanity can still redeem the promise of this remarkable voyage.

John S Gardner, a writer in Alexandria, Virginia, served as Special Assistant to President George Bush, Deputy Assistant to President George W Bush and General Counsel of USAID

Source: The Apollo 8 voyage 50 years on: reflecting on our common humanity and fragility

[Orionid]

Apollo 8 Astronaut On How Crew Saw The Earth Rise, Won The Space Race And Saved Christmas Forever
Jamie Carter,  Dec 20, 2018 [Forbes]


Earthrise ... but Apollo 8 should be remembered for a lot more than this incredible image. NASA

The space race ended with Neil Armstrong's 'one small step', right?

Actually, it was over the previous year, 50 years ago this Christmas Eve, when the crew of Apollo 8 took a beautiful photo of our planet, and read the world an origin story while orbiting the moon.

NASA's Apollo 8 mission is mostly remembered for the Earthrise photograph (above). It's also celebrated for its astronauts reading from the Book of Genesis to nearly one-third of the world's population, delivered via radio from the moon's orbit on Christmas Eve, 1968. That spine-tingling message ended:

"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."

The man who spoke those words so eloquently – one of the three men who traveled to the moon for the first time – thinks that history forgets something about Apollo 8. Something that Apollo 11 often gets credit for.

Apollo 8 ended the space race. "I was there to participate in the Cold War battle with the Soviets," says Frank Borman, now 90 years old and the oldest living former American astronaut, from his home in Billings, Montana. Borman was the commander, and traveled to the moon with Jim Lovell and Bill Anders on a week-long mission, orbiting it 10 times over 20 hours.

"I was confident that Apollo 8 would succeed, and that the Soviets were beat," he says.

So before the mission, he told NASA that Apollo 8 would be his last mission. He knew his crew's first-ever ride on a Saturn V rocket was also going to be his last. The job was as good as done, and he had no desire whatsoever to make two trips to the moon.

"There was no way on God's green Earth that I was going to go back to the moon to pick up rocks," says Borman. "I was always more interested in airplanes than spacecraft."

This astronaut believed he had a straightforward task. “He joined NASA for a single purpose, and that was to defeat the Soviet Union on the most important battlefield anywhere – outer space – and once he did that on Apollo 8, that was it," says Robert Kurson, author of Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon.


The spacesuit-clad trio of Apollo 8 astronauts (L-R) Frank Borman, William A. AndersNASA/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

As Borman predicted, the Soviets ceased their Zond lunar missions after Apollo 8's success. "When I was told that Apollo 8 was going to go to the moon, the first thing they mentioned was that the CIA had instructed NASA that the Russians would send a man around the moon by the end of the year," he says. "That had a lot to do with going in December."

Apollo 8 was originally supposed to go only to low Earth orbit. Just 16 weeks before it was due to launch, it was swapped to being a moon mission.

"The Russian's progress with Zond influenced us," says Borman. The pressure on everyone at NASA was intense, but Borman knew the decision was the right one. "There was pressure to meet the goals, but during my eight years at NASA I never once saw safety compromised in the interests of schedules." What about having to ride on top of a Saturn V rocket that had only been tested twice, the most recent occasion demonstrating engine problems. "When they said they were ready, I believed them," says Borman about rocket scientist Wernher von Braun's team. "They were really confident people." Kurson sees it slightly differently. "If you talk to many astronauts of the time, many of them will tell you that Apollo 8 was the single most important daring and dangerous mission NASA ever flew."


Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman (R), James A. Lovell Jr. (C) and William A. Anders (L) sitting inside dummy capsule onboard NASA Retriever boat during egress training. (Photo by Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)RALPH MORSE/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

How Apollo 8 risked Christmas

There was also a more philosophical risk around the timing of the Apollo 8 mission plan. “It called for them to be in lunar orbit on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and when the head of NASA, James Webb, heard about that, he thought the planners were out of their minds,” says Kurson. As well as the technical risks, Webb pointed out that if anything happened to these three men at the moon, no one would ever look at the moon in the same way again.

“The same was true Christmas – Christmas and the moon were at risk if this mission failed,” says Kurson. “That's why when you talk to experts or other Apollo Astronauts who were around they speak in reverential tones about Apollo 8 – the risk was almost incalculable.”

The space race is lost … or is it?

The tension of the space race is now hard to fathom, but at the time, it was overwhelming. Many were sure that the Soviets were on the cusp of putting a man around the moon, so much so that they regarded the rushed upgrading of Apollo 8 to a moon mission to be both pointless and dangerous. One critic was Sir Bernard Lovell, the English radio astronomer radio astronomer, who on November 10, 1968, had tracked the Soviet Union's Zond 6 probe travel around the moon – with a mannequin inside – before returning safely to Earth. It was presumed to be a precursor to an imminent crewed flight around the moon.


Apollo 8 blasting-off on top of a Saturn V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

"Lovell thought that the Soviets were certain to get men to the Moon before Apollo 8, and he begged NASA to stand down and not to risk the lives of the three brave men since the space race had already been won by the Soviets," says Kurson. "Newspaper editorials warned of the same – it really did look like the U.S. was going to lose out even a few weeks before the launch of Apollo 8."

In reality, the Soviets weren't ready to risk putting a man on a Zond spacecraft and did not believe that Apollo 8 was actually going to go to the moon. Then December 21 arrived, and it was happening. Apollo 8 was on its way to the moon. "Once they realized it was actually happening, and that they were about to be beaten to the moon, there was heartbreak and devastation," says Kurson. "Apollo 8 was the death blow to the Soviets and the space race, and they still haven't been to the moon."

A Homeric story

Kurson's book, a gripping story of the entire mission that underscores the tension, reads like a Hollywood script. "When I discovered the story of Apollo 8, quite accidentally about three years ago, I was blown away by it," says Kurson. "It seemed to me truly Homeric in scope – it was the first time human beings had ever left home, and the first time we'd ever arrived at a new world, our most ancient companion, the moon. Yet I knew almost nothing about Apollo 8."

"Apollo 8 is one of the great stories of exploration in all of human history," says Kurson.


The Apollo 8 crew: William Anders between James Lovell (l) and Frank Borman (r) in front of Launch Pad 39A in Cape Canaveral (Photo by Astro-Graphs/ullstein bild via Getty Images)ASTRO-GRAPHS/ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES

One of the worst years in America's history

Apollo 11, man's first lunar landing, and Apollo 13, where the crew almost didn't make it back after an explosion in an oxygen tank near the moon, occupy the two biggest slots in the history books. "The more I looked into it, the more miraculous it seemed – it happened on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, in 1968 after one of the worst years in America's history." Earlier that year in the U.S., Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, followed by Robert F. Kennedy, against a backdrop of the Vietnam War and anti-war protests. Apollo 8 brought hope to many people around the world," says Kurson. "So I thought that people really should know the story, they deserve to hear the story."

The story behind Apollo 8's Earthrise photograph

Wha Kurson calls the "the most powerful and profound photograph ever taken" was not intended. "Bill was taking a lot of pictures of the moon, but not one had been allocated of the Earth," says Borman. Apollo 8 orbited the moon 10 times over 20 hours, but don't think they saw Earthrise over and again. They did not. "We saw it more than twice, but during the first two orbits we never even saw the Earth," says Borman. "It was only coming over on the seventh or eighth orbit when the spacecraft was positioned so that we could see it. Most of the time we were looking at the lunar surface, looking for landing sites and geological features."

Borman knows that the Earthrise photo is his mission's popular legacy. "Apollo 8 will probably be remembered as much for Bill's picture as anything else because it shows the fragility of our Earth, the beauty of the Earth, and just how so insignificantly small we are in the Universe," says Borman. "I don't have it hanging up in my house," says Borman. "I have it in my mind."


(24 Dec. 1968 – The rising Earth is about five degrees above the lunar horizon in this telephoto view taken from the Apollo 8 spacecraft near 110 degrees east longitude. On Earth 240,000 statute miles away the sunset terminator crosses Africa. The crew took the photo around 10:40 a.m. Houston time on the morning of Dec. 24, and that would make it 15:40 GMT on the same day. The South Pole is in the white area near the left end of the terminator. North and South America are under the clouds.NASA

The story behind Apollo 8's Christmas Eve message

"It was a stunning and stirring moment that sent shockwaves through the through the world," says Kurson. "It was delivered on Christmas Eve, and it was a message of unity – they spoke to the entire world as one from the first lines of the first book of the Bible. It was an origin story about how we got here, it didn't talk about tribes or rivalries, it was about all of us." However, it wasn't spontaneous. "It was on the flight plan, it was scripted," says Borman. "If I had any say in it, I would have said it all that way."

Apollo 8's accomplishments

"Before Apollo 8 went, nobody knew that any of this could be done, and when you listen to the other astronauts who made moon landings, they'll tell you that by the time they went, so much of what they needed to know had already been proven doable by Apollo 8," says Kurson. "They were first … and then you start to look into the list of firsts that Apollo 8 accomplished, and it doesn't seem to end."

So here they are. The Apollo 8 astronauts were the first humans to:

    travel on top of the Saturn V rocket
    see the Earth as a full sphere
    send back pictures of Earth from deep space
    see the far side of the moon
    leave Earth's gravitational influence
    be captured by another celestial body
    send back live TV pictures of the lunar surface
    travel at 24,200 mph, a new world speed record
    That's a lot of firsts.


Mission control during Apollo 8 blastoff, Dec. 21, 1968. (AP Photo)NASA

The return to Earth

Upon their return, the crew of Apollo 8 were global icons. "There were no three bigger men at the time than Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders," says Kurson. "They were very much household names when they returned from Apollo 8, there were ticker-tape parades around the country for them for which millions of people turned out."

When Apollo 8 launched on December 21, 1968, Time Magazine had already named 'the dissenter' as its man of the year in recognition of all the violence and division in the U.S. that year. When Apollo 8 splashed down in the North Pacific Ocean on December 27, it changed its selection to the crew of Apollo 8. "That is an honor that the magazine did not even bestow on Apollo 11," says Kurson. "Apollo 8 meant so much to America, and to the world, at the time."

A hero's welcome ... in Russia

After Apollo 8's incredible success, Borman was assigned to the White House as a liaison guy for NASA. "My family and I were sent on a tour of Europe, we met the Queen, and we went to Russia before the Apollo landings," he says. "They were very gracious, we were well received and we enjoyed meeting the Russian cosmonauts."

Unexpectedly, Borman arrived in Russia a hero. "They showed him great kindness, warmth and deference," says Kurson. "They were generous and greeted him with open arms because they understood what he had done, and what he had risked, and what America had risked because they were on the precipice of risking the same. They saw him as a brother."

"It was a big kind of gesture of peace between the two superpowers at a time when there was a lot of tension."

Apollo 8 was home, the space race was over, and the Cold War had thawed. "I like to think that President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger were interested in using space as a means of détente," says Borman. "I know we advanced that agenda – we started the process of ending the Cold War."

The boost in morale that Apollo 8 gave the U.S. after a tumultuous 1968 is often discussed, but few recall how it warmed-up the Cold War, or remember its seasonal significance.

Apollo 8, the crew that risked everything – even Christmas – for all of us, all of us on the good Earth.

Source: Apollo 8 Astronaut On How Crew Saw The Earth Rise, Won The Space Race And Saved Christmas Forever

[Orionid]

Reflecting on Earthrise 50 years on
21 December 2018 [ESA]


Earthrise image captured by NASA astronaut William Anders

Monday 24 December marks 50 years since Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders snapped an iconic image of Earth rising above the lunar surface.

The image, known as Earthrise, has been credited with sparking an environmental movement. Now, head of ESA’s Astronaut Centre in Cologne Germany Frank De Winne shares his perspective on our planet seen from space.

Though Frank does not recall the Earthrise photo from childhood, he remembers the Moon landing clearly.


Frank De Winne in the Soyuz-TMA spacecraft

“My parents woke me up to watch it. Having to get up in the middle of the night to watch television was very impressive,” he says.

Little did he know one day he would be among the ranks of those who fly to space, spending 198 non-consecutive days orbiting Earth and gaining a whole new outlook on the planet we call home.

Frank says every experience in life has an impact, but the fragility of our planet, the thinness of our atmosphere and the immense nature of the universe strikes you when you fly into space.

“The other part of course is that in space there are no borders,” he explains. “You can look as much as you want, but you cannot see a border between Germany and Poland and Poland and Ukraine. We have spent thousands of years fighting over imaginary lines on a map that are simply not evident from orbit.”

Author Frank White calls this shift in awareness the “overview effect” and says, while the ideas Frank De Winne and many other astronauts describe are known to us intellectually, it is the direct experience that makes them so powerful.

“Some of the astronauts I interviewed talked about going to the Grand Canyon in the United States – you can describe it, you can talk about it, you can try to explain it to people, but that is not the experience,” he explains.


Image of Earth taken by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst

Despite this, he believes the Earthrise image, and imagery captured by astronauts like ESA’s Alexander Gerst, does play a vital role in helping us better understand our place in the universe and the need for global thinking.

“Earthrise amplified the environmental movement here on Earth. It is a good example of how, by sharing their experiences with people who may not have the opportunity to travel to space, astronauts can influence our thinking and behaviour.”

For Frank De Winne, the overview effect remains ever-present, but these days he looks to the Moon.

“We have come a long way since this photo was taken,” he says. “We landed on the Moon six times. ESA’s Rosetta orbiter landed on a comet, probes and rovers have landed on Mars, we are working together with five international partners and many more countries on the International Space Station.

“Now it is time to take the next step and go forward to the Moon – not to plant a flag and be first, but to truly explore as an international community for the benefit of Earth. That is our vision for Europe.”

Source: Reflecting on Earthrise 50 years on

[Orionid]

Looking at Apollo 8 from below:
 the story of cameras 37 and 39
by Anthony M. Rutkowski — December 20, 2018 [SpaceNews]


The famous 'Earthrise' photo from Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon. The crew entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, 1968. That evening, the astronauts held a live broadcast, showing pictures of the Earth and moon as seen from their spacecraft. (Credit: NASA)

Dec. 21 marks the 50th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 8 – the first Saturn 5 to carry astronauts. The Saturn 5 was Werner von Braun’s mega-rocket for carrying out President John F. Kennedy’s promise for a moon landing. The astronauts circumnavigated the moon at Christmas in what was a remarkable achievement seen around the world.


Camera #39 live at ignition (courtesy of the author)

Ever so briefly, the millions of people watching the launch that December morning had a unique view never seen before on television — the five huge F-1 first stage engines starting up. The images had the numbers 37 and 39 carved into them looking up from both sides of the flame trench. They became a feature of every subsequent Apollo launch.

The cameras have their own story as to how they came about to help ensure a safe launch. The F-1 engines were huge – each nearly 20 feet high with nozzles 12 feet in diameter. Each burned 5,000 pounds of fuel and liquid oxygen per second – emitting a plasma of 6,000 degrees with a force of almost 1000 pounds per square inch. Getting them started and up to full thrust required a complicated system that required nearly nine seconds during which much could go wrong.

So, for the first manned launch of Saturn 5, carrying Frank Borman, James Lovell, and Bill Anders in their historic orbit around the moon, von Braun and his team who designed the engines wanted to watch the startup from below. In theory, there was 8.9 seconds to abort the launch if something went wrong with the engines. The project was handed through a chain of command that landed on the desk of a young engineer on General Electric’s Apollo Systems team responsible for launch systems at Kennedy Space Center Complex 39.

 
Camera #39 post launch (courtesy of the author)

The challenge of placing cameras under the F-1 engines was a team effort. It included special help from Corning Glass to produce a port that would survive conditions worse than being on the sun. A thick cylinder of steel bolted into the Pad A concrete reinforcement was also built to hold the cameras. The project was accomplished successfully in a few weeks with only one problem: the ports had to be replaced for every launch. The black ceramic on the adjacent flame deflector vaporized and coated the surface – after they had done their job of providing a view like no other.

This all occurred a half-century ago during difficult times; but the event raised the spirits of the nation and the world.

 Anthony M. Rutkowski was the lead engineer for this project at General Electric’s Apollo Systems division and was part of the Apollo 8 and subsequent Saturn 5 launch teams. The Apollo 8 portals have adorned his desks for the past 50 years.

Source: Looking at Apollo 8 from below:
 the story of cameras 37 and 39


Apollo 8’s Earthrise: The Shot Seen Round the World
By Dennis Overbye Dec. 21, 2018 [NYT]

Half a century ago today, a photograph from the moon helped humans rediscover Earth.


The iconic image was taken by astronaut William A. Anders on Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve in 1968. He was tasked with photographing the lunar landscape for a suitable spot for an eventual Apollo mission to land.Credit...NASA

This is where we live. In space. On a marble fortified against bottomless blackness by a shell of air and color, fragile and miraculous as a soap bubble.

In 1968, we Earthlings knew that already, sort of. But that abstract notion became visceral on Christmas Eve of that year. While scouting landing spots on the moon, the astronauts of Apollo 8 — Frank Borman, William A. Anders and James A. Lovell, Jr. — spied the shiny blue Earth rising over the ash-colored lunar mountains like a cosmic smiley face. That image, transmitted from space, went on to capture the imagination of the world: Earthrise.

Major Anders had the job of photographing the lunar landscape. When Earth rose, a robot would have kept on clicking off pictures of the craters. Indeed the astronauts briefly joked about whether they should break off and aim their cameras up. “Hey don’t take that, it’s not scheduled,” Commander Borman said. Then, like good humans, they grabbed cameras and clicked away.

“Earthrise” did not start environmentalism, but it became the movement’s icon, a gift of perspective at the end of a long, dark year. If you were young, 1968 was the best of times and the worst of times. The Beatles were still together, and “Star Trek” was on TV. You could get high and watch “2001: A Space Odyssey” at the movies. These cultural facets were products of a decade when technological optimism had reigned: you could wage war against communists in Southeast Asia and against poverty and discrimination at home, and conquer space on the side.

But by the end of the decade, pessimism was ascendant. There was no peace or end in sight in Vietnam, nor on the streets at home, roiling with protests, assassinations and riots. In space, the United States trailed the Soviet Union in a peaceful but symbolic technological competition.

The launch of Sputnik, the first Earth-orbiting satellite, startled the world in 1957, and America had been struggling to catch up ever since. President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to landing on the moon before the end of the 1960s, but in January of 1967 a fire in an Apollo capsule killed three astronauts, delaying the project and threatening the deadline.


One of the photographs taken from Apollo 8 as it circled the moon.Credit...NASA/Johnson Space Center

In the meantime, the Soviets had begun sending uncrewed spaceships around the moon. In April of 1968, intelligence agencies warned that the enemy was gearing up to try to send a man around the moon as early as that autumn.

But by the end of 1968, the United States had pulled even and taken the lead in the race to land humans on the moon. That goal was achieved by Apollo 11 on July 20 of the following year — an event that will be widely celebrated on its 50th anniversary in 2019. But a proper observance begins with Apollo 8’s Christmas Eve loop around the moon: the first indication that the Americans might get there first.

(This event, too, is being widely celebrated, in books such as Robert Kurson’s “Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon,” and the Nova documentary “Apollo’s Daring Mission,” which airs Dec. 26 on PBS.)

Apollo 8’s original mission was to carry a crew of three around Earth, in a command module that had been redesigned and rebuilt since one of its predecessors burned up on the launchpad in 1967. The mission, slotted for December, would mark the first crewed flight of the mighty Saturn 5 rocket.


Major Anders on Apollo 8.Credit...NASA/Johnson Space Center

In those days, NASA’s leaders were still willing to gamble — and so, in August, the plan changed. Historians disagree whether the agency truly feared being beaten to the moon that year or was just keen to get back on schedule. In either case, Commander Borman was called into a closed-door meeting: Would he like to go around the moon in December? It was an offer no astronaut could refuse, never mind that no one had flown on a Saturn 5 yet.

Within weeks the prospective mission had morphed further, from simply looping around the moon to braking and completing an orbit around it. This was a far riskier venture: if the command module rocket failed to fire and break them out of orbit, the astronauts would never come home.

In September, while NASA pondered the mission, the Soviets kept busy, launching a rocket, Zond 5, around the moon and safely returning its crew of worms and tortoises. The Apollo 8 flight was not approved until October, after a crewed flight of Apollo 7 had tested the newly rebuilt command module. On Nov. 11, NASA publicly announced that it would be shooting for the moon the following month.

By then, Zond 6 was on its way — uncrewed, but who knew what might be next. “The September Zond flight scared NASA that the Russians might one-up them one more time by doing it again just before Apollo 8, this time with a cosmonaut aboard,” Roger Launius, NASA’s former chief historian, said recently in an email. (Zond 6 crashed on returning to Earth.)


The Earthrise image beamed from Apollo 8, 176,000 miles away, to the Mission Operations Control Room in Houston.Credit...NASA/Johnson Space Center

Apollo 8 blasted off on Dec. 21. Things did not go smoothly at first. On the way to the moon, Commander Borman became terribly sick, forcing his crewmates to dodge specks of vomit and other bodily excretions, according to Mr. Kurson’s book. They chose not to tell Mission Control about it until he had improved, fearing that the mission would be aborted. All of Earth held its breath when the spacecraft went out of view around the moon, entering radio silence, for the engine burn that would put it into lunar orbit.

Seventeen hours later, on Christmas Eve, what NASA has described as the biggest broadcast audience in history was listening when the opening lines of Genesis came crackling down from the heavens.

“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth,” Major Anders began.

“And God saw that it was good,” Commander Borman said.

I had tears in my eyes when I heard that. At Mission Control, the rocket engineers all began to cry, according to Mr. Kurson’s book. Like I said, it had been a long year.

It would take a little while longer for the world to realize that Apollo 8’s greatest legacy would be a single photograph of home. The residents of the only known inhabited planet in the universe would “know the place for the first time” (to borrow from T.S. Eliot). Sent to examine the Moon, Major Anders later said, humans instead discovered Earth.

A holiday present for the ages. Alas, it didn’t come with an instruction manual; we’re still working on that.


Another, not-quite-so iconic, image of Earth taken from Apollo 8.Credit...NASA/Johnson Space Center

A correction was made on Dec. 21, 2018: Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article incorrectly described what happened to an Apollo command module in 1967. It burned up on the launchpad; it did not burn up during re-entry. The article also misstated the number of crew aboard the Apollo 7 spacecraft. There were three astronauts aboard; it was not uncrewed. The article also misstated the date on which a Nova documentary will air on PBS. It will air on Dec. 26, not Dec. 28.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/science/earthrise-moon-apollo-nasa.html


55 Years Ago, Apollo 8 Astronauts Deliver Christmas Eve Message of Unity
By Jack Daleo December 22, 2023

December 24 marks the anniversary of a broadcast reading of the Book of Genesis by the mission’s crew, which reached 1 in 4 people on Earth.

(...) The broadcast—which consisted of each astronaut reading a passage of the biblical creation story from the Book of Genesis—would go on to become the most-viewed TV program ever at the time. Upon returning to Earth, the three astronauts were named Time’s “Men of the Year” for 1968, in part due to the impact their words had on the world.

The Mission

Apollo 8 was a bit of improvisation on the part of then-President John F. Kennedy, who sought to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade.

On the other side of the world, the Soviets were making headway on their Zond lunar missions, putting immense pressure on the U.S.

“The Russians’ progress with Zond influenced us,” Borman told Forbes in 2018. “There was pressure to meet the goals.”

Fearing Soviet victory in the space race, Kennedy made a game-time decision. Originally, Apollo 8 was planned as a test of the Apollo lunar module, remaining in low-Earth orbit. But delays with the module threatened to put the mission behind schedule. So, NASA decided to scrap the module and fly astronauts straight to the moon instead.

Flying during Christmastime, however, was viewed as incredibly risky. Doing so would make a failure all the more consequential in the eyes of Americans.

“Christmas and the moon were at risk if this mission failed,” Robert Kurson, author of a book on the astronauts’ journey, told Forbes. “That’s why when you talk to experts or other Apollo astronauts who were around, they speak in reverential tones about Apollo 8—the risk was almost incalculable.”

Despite the gamble, Apollo 8 launched from Kennedy Space Center on December 21, 1968. But before that, Borman had some extracurricular work to do.

“We were told that on Christmas Eve we would have the largest audience that had ever listened to a human voice,” recounted Borman during the mission’s 40th anniversary celebration in 2008. “And the only instructions that we got from NASA was to do something appropriate.”

Borman reached out to his friend, U.S. Information Agency science adviser Simon Bourgin. With a little help from Bourgin, his friend, assistant to the director of the Bureau of the Budget Joe Laitin, and Laitin’s wife, Christine, an idea was hatched: to begin the broadcast with the Genesis reading.

“The first 10 verses of Genesis is [sic] the foundation of many of the world’s religions, not just the Christian religion,” said Lovell. “There are more people in other religions than the Christian religion around the world, and so this would be appropriate to that and so that’s how it came to pass.” (...)
https://www.flyingmag.com/55-years-ago-apollo-8-astronauts-deliver-christmas-eve-message-of-unity/