FTV: Behind the Scenes of Apollo 8
One of the boldest decisions made in the Apollo Moon landing program was the decision to send the Apollo 8 spacecraft to the Moon in December of 1968. Apollo 8 was originally supposed to be a shakedown flight of the integrated Command Service Module (CSM) and the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM, later shortened to LM). When the LM was not ready to fly, NASA’s core group of mission planners did a couple of things very much out of character for their organization. First, the mission planners put their collective heads together and discussed rearranging the flight schedule. Secondly, they did all of this while the agency’s head, Jim Webb, and his deputy George Mueller were at a conference in Vienna. I can not say for sure if they drew straws to decide who got to run this idea past the two senior administrators, but when George Low pitched the idea, he got just the answer they expected from Mueller: “Can’t do that! That’s craziness!” Webb’s reaction was even more severe: “You try to change the entire direction of the program when I am out of the country?”
What was this radical idea? The Apollo 8 crew of Jim McDivitt, Dave Scott, and Rusty Schweickart had already spent a good deal of time training to fly the LM. When it was not ready to test in orbit, they were reassigned to the Apollo 9 mission. The original Apollo 9 crew of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders were moved up as the Apollo 8 crew. Rather than repeat the Apollo 7 shake down flight that was scheduled to test the CSM in Earth orbit, planners said, “What if we have them actually fly to the Moon and test the critical systems on an actual Lunar mission, minus a landing attempt?” The first idea was a simple Lunar flyby or circumlunar flight. The controllers who were asked to evaluate the possibility of this mission surprised their bosses when they studied the mission outline and then asked, “If we are going to fly all the way to the Moon, why shouldn’t we make it a true test of the systems and go into orbit around the Moon?”
When Webb and Mueller got back to the States, they came to Houston ready to hear about this crazy idea. They were not convinced they would approve it, but they also had not said ‘NO!’ With time to absorb what they had been told, they began to see the logic of the idea. It was hard to argue the planning team’s point of view when they explained their reasoning: “The craft was designed to fly to the Moon so why would actually flying to the Moon (as opposed to doing another extended mission orbiting the Earth) be such a radical idea? The Saturn V rocket needed to be fully tested and so did the CSM – what better way to test the whole system besides flying to the Moon? If we are going to commit to flying to the Moon, why not test the system fully by going into orbit around the Moon instead of just looping around it once before heading home?”
One of the most critical pieces of hardware on the CSM was its SPS engine. It would need to be fired to put the craft into orbit and then fired again to send the craft home. This was the second critical part of the mission that would have to perform flawlessly or the craft and crew would be left without any way to break lunar orbit. Apollo 13’s crew survived the explosion that crippled their main engine on the way to the Moon because they had the LM to use a lifeboat. The Apollo 13 LM served as their emergency rocket motor and a back up to critical systems like power and oxygen. Apollo 8 would be traveling to the Moon without a LM for backup.
The first critical element in the plan was the Saturn V rocket that would send them on their way to begin the mission. It was a 363 foot tall behemoth of a rocket that had never been flown with a crew. It weighed 6.5 million pounds fully fueled (a third of the weight of a Navy destroyer) and the five massive engines on the first stage would burn through three tons of kerosene and liquid oxygen fuel per second during its 168 second lifespan. The plan to switch the flight order and test such critical systems on a true lunar mission was, if nothing else, bold and very out of character for the NASA brass. The more they examined the new Apollo 8 mission profile, however, the more convinced the NASA team became that it could be done.
There was one qualifier in the go-no go Apollo 8 decision: The Earth orbit shake down flight of Apollo 7 would have to show there were no additional problems lurking. The crew of Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walt Cunningham were assigned the maiden orbital voyage of an Apollo capsule. All of the mission parameters that they needed to hit to green light Apollo 8 were nailed. It is too bad that the crew did not get the credit they deserved. Wally was always the jokester of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, but two things hindered his crew on this flight. After the Apollo 1 fire, Schirra had replaced his happy-go-lucky persona with a dead serious Wally. He was quick to take anyone to task at the North American Aviation factory whom he felt was not getting the new capsule ready in a manner that would not repeat the mistakes made on Apollo 1. Wally had already announced that this would be his last flight. As late as their final preflight press conference, he was still needling the NASA brass and the contractors about how they were conducting their business back at the factory.
Soon after the Apollo 7 mission was in orbit, Schirra came down with a bad head cold. He consulted with the NASA doctors at Mission Control and they prescribed antihistamines to lessen his symptoms. In the capsule’s close environment where the crew shared recirculated atmosphere, it was not long before all of them were ill. Their ill-health also made them ill-humored and some of the exchanges they had with the ground controllers were, at best, prickly. The final straw came when Schirra refused to wear his helmet upon re-entry as NASA rules dictated. As an old Navy man, Wally wanted to be able to clear his ear canals as the pressure changes took place in the capsule, something he could not do with his helmet on.
When he refused a direct order to wear his helmet as Mission Control directed, they became the first crew to a) openly defy the ground controller’s orders and b) the first crew to fly during re-entry without helmets on.
The ‘helmets on’ policy was a precaution in case the capsule depressurized on the way back to Earth. After Apollo 7, the policy was changed as the capsule’s reliability showed it was unnecessary. There wasn’t much they could do about Schirra leading a near mutiny during a flight as he was already retiring. Cunningham and Eisele, however, paid the price and never flew for NASA again. Schirra went on to earn a CLIO award for a commercial he later did for the brand of antihistamine he took during the flight. In the ad, he held up a space helmet and asked, “Can you imagine sneezing while wearing one of these?”
Apollo 7 crew problems aside, the successful flight paved the way for the new Apollo 8 mission plan to proceed. On the morning of December 21, 1968, the crew was strapped in and ready to fly. When the fuel system pumps came alive, Borman and Lovell were not concerned with the churning, glugging sound they heard as they had experienced the same on their Gemini flight. Lovell gave Anders, the rookie, a nod reassuring him that this was all normal. When ignition and lift off came a few minutes later, none of them was prepared for the sheer power of the full Saturn V stack.
As Kluger described it, “The noise inside the cockpit was like nothing the astronaut’s simulator training had remotely been able to reproduce. For at least ten seconds – to Anders it felt like the better part of a minute – the crewmates had no way to communicate with one another. This meant that each man would effectively be on his own in the event of an emergency. The g-forces were lighter than they’d been on the Titan, just over four g’s, compared to the seven or eight Borman and Lovell had endured during the Gemini liftoff. But to Anders, the first-timer, the Saturn V’s four g’s felt like twice that number. The engines at the bottom of the booster were mounted on gimbals, allowing them to pivot one way or the other to keep the whole stack flying in the proper direction. But such minor motion at the base of the 363-foot spire translated to violent thrashing at the top. Anders felt like a bug on the end of a whip. The vibration in the cockpit was dramatically more severe than it had been on the Titan. Borman had the responsibility to turn the abort handle if something went wrong and he was required to keep his gloved hand above the handle at all times during the launch. He was mindful to not accidentally trigger the abort with the violent shaking which would have ended their Moon mission a few miles above the Atlantic Ocean.”
Once they achieved orbit, they had two and one half revolutions of the Earth to prepare for TLI, or Trans Lunar Injection. When they fired the third stage, they would accelerate to the speed needed to send them on their way before it too would be jettisoned. After separation, Borman was concerned about the proximity of this spent booster and asked permission to use the CSM thrusters to put some distance between Apollo 8 and the now depleted third stage. Once this was done, the spent stage was sent into a waste-disposal orbit around the Sun while the Apollo 8 craft sped toward the Moon. At more than 24,000 mph, it was the fastest humans had ever flown. Earth’s gravity would keep tugging on them so they would continue to slow down until they reached the point where the Moon’s gravity would begin speeding them up again.
The roomier Apollo capsule allowed the astronauts more room to move around than the cramped Gemini capsule had. As soon as Lovell unstrapped and drifted down to the equipment bay, he felt lightheaded as his stomach churned. We warned Borman and Anders: “Be very careful getting out of your seat. Look straight ahead for a while.” With all three resisting the initial feelings of motion sickness while still orbiting the Earth, they had plenty to do before they fired the engine for TLI. It was sound advice, but not long after thrusting the craft away from the third stage, Borman became ill. For the better part of twelve hours, he alternated between being nauseous, vomiting, and acute digestive distress. Add the lack of indoor plumbing and intermittent episodes of loose bowels, it was an uncomfortable situation for the whole crew. While Borman’s voice betrayed none of this to the ground controllers, he knew that if he could not keep food down, his performance as commander would suffer, possibly to the point of having the mission aborted.
The crew and ground utilized a system of taped communications that could be recorded and then heard without anyone else outside of the crew or mission control hearing them. Using this system, Apollo 8 was able to alert the NASA medical team and get some advice on how to deal with Borman’s illness. They were irked he had not reported it earlier but Borman did not want to give them an excuse to cancel the mission. He recovered before it came to that but the general public following the mission was none the wiser.
One of the critical steps Christ Kraft wanted to test before they arrived at the Moon was the SPS engine. Unlike a conventional rocket motor that required an ignition source, the SPS motor burned what is known as ‘hypergolic fuels’. Instead of kerosene and liquid oxygen, the CSM motor mixed hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. When they came into contact with each other, they would ignite. Kraft got his way and a minor course correction on the way to the Moon satisfied his desire to make sure the SPS worked. The next time it was used was for the braking maneuver that took place behind the Moon. No one at NASA actually knew if it had done the job until Apollo 8 made contact with Earth again. Had it not worked, Lunar gravity would have swung them around on a free return trajectory to Earth without them achieving orbit.
During their ten laps and about twenty hours of time orbiting the Moon, the crew did more than just sightsee. Anders was charged with taking as many photos as he could of areas that NASA was interested in seeing close up as potential landing sites. The one photograph that everyone remembers is a dramatic shot that would become known as ‘Earthrise’. At one point, the spacecraft emerged from behind the Moon and they were greeted by a nearly ‘full Earth’ rising above the stark Lunar surface. It would be made into posters, stamps, t-shirts, and other memorabilia. Both Time and Life magazines rated ‘Earthrise’ as one of the hundred most iconic photographs of all time. It stirred strong feelings on the human homeworld because there were no borders or countries to be seen. There, on one fragile blue and brown sphere, stood everything and everyone who has ever existed in human history. Environmentalists especially are drawn to the image even today as a reminder of how limited our resources are.
The mission plan executed by Apollo 8 would serve as a template for all the future Moon landing missions. Though most of the logistics had been practiced in Earth orbit during Project Gemini, there was one that had not been outside of computer simulations. Traveling at 25,000 mph as it returned home, the 11 foot tall Apollo capsule containing the crew (all that was left from the original 363 foot tall Saturn V at launch) needed to hit a very narrow corridor in the Earth’s atmosphere to make it home safely. If the Moon was the size of a tennis ball and was placed 17 feet from a basketball sized Earth, the margins of their entry profile would be the thickness of a sheet of paper. In order to bleed off their excess velocity without burning up,
the capsule would enter the thickening air while the crew experienced 6.8 g’s. Borman fired the thrusters occasionally to keep the craft trim and when they hit their max g’s, the spaceship angled up like a roller coaster ride which lessened the pull of gravity to 4g’s and brought the heat shield temperatures down a bit. “Quite a ride, huh?” Borman asked.
The final dive would be much like their first dip into the atmosphere. They hit things right on line and did not skip back into space like a stone on a pond or dive steeply enough to incinerate the ship. At 24,000 feet, two thirteen foot diameter drogue chutes deployed which jerked on the astronauts but only slowed them to a still lethal 200 mph. When the three 83.5 foot main chutes deployed at 10,000 feet, their speed was dropped to a tolerable 21 mph. To cushion their landing further, the struts on their three couches were designed to collapse on impact with the ocean’s surface.
Apollo 8 proved to be the stepping stone needed to keep NASA on track to reach President Kennedy’s promise of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. Anders and Borman would not fly again but Lovell’s path would propel him back to the Moon aboard the mission that would become known as ‘a successful failure’: Apollo 13.
Top Piece Video: Live 8 from Austin in 2003 – R.E.M. perform Man In The Moon