Apollo 8 Reads Genesis From the Moon

The countdown clock in the Mission Operations Control Room read seconds, and I had my hand flat on the console edge, the way you brace yourself before a car crash you can see coming but cannot stop. Outside, in Florida, it was still dark. On the screen in front of me the Saturn V stood lit up white against the pad lights, taller than anything I had ever watched breathe fire. December 21, 1968. Seven-fifty-one in the morning, Eastern time. I felt the room hold its breath with me.

The year behind us had been a wound that would not close. Two assassinations. Cities on fire. A war that ate boys my age by the thousand. Nobody in that room said any of it out loud that morning, but it sat behind every headset and every cup of cold coffee, and I think all of us understood, without saying so, that we needed this thing to go right more than we needed almost anything else that year.

They had never meant to send Borman, Lovell, and Anders all the way to the Moon, not on this flight. The lunar module wasn't ready. It was behind, badly behind, and somebody at the top decided that instead of waiting on a piece of hardware that wasn't finished, they would send three men and a command module alone, on the first manned ride of a rocket that had never carried a human being before, out past Earth orbit entirely, out to loop around another world and come home. It was the kind of decision that sounds obvious only after it works.

Then the engines lit, five of them, and the sound reached us on the feed a half-beat behind the picture, and the whole tower of metal began to rise so slowly it seemed impossible it would ever clear the gantry. It cleared it. My chest was doing something strange, half cheer, half prayer. Frank Borman was in the left seat, Jim Lovell in the center, Bill Anders on the right, and within minutes they were higher and faster than any of the men who had flown before them, and by the end of that day they were headed somewhere no human being had ever been sent.

Two days out, we got our first look inside the can. Borman had fought against carrying a television camera at all — twelve pounds felt like twelve pounds too many to him, when they were stripping ounces off the food packs to save weight — and NASA overruled him, and it turned out NASA was right, because that camera was about to hand the whole world a window. We watched Borman at the controls, calm as a man reading a gauge on his own porch. We watched Lovell sighting stars, then floating a spoonful of chocolate pudding across the cabin like it was the funniest thing he'd ever done. We watched Anders wrestling his toothbrush in zero gravity like it had a mind of its own. Lovell turned to the lens and wished his mother, Blanche, seventy-three years old that day, a happy birthday, and I remember somebody in the row behind me laughing out loud at the sight of it.

Not everyone back on Earth wanted the interruption. CBS had cut into the Vikings-Colts playoff game to carry the broadcast, and the switchboard lit up with people who wanted their football back more than they wanted to see three men floating between the stars. Borman laughed about it later — maybe, he said, they should have thrown a football around up there instead. But by the second transmission, when the crew turned the camera around and showed the Earth a picture of itself, hanging small and round and alone in the black, I noticed the room around me had gone quiet in a different way. Nobody complained about that one.

Christmas Eve came, and with it the maneuver that mattered more than any camera trick. To slip into orbit around the Moon, the spacecraft had to fire its engine at exactly the right moment while flying behind the far side, where no radio signal from Earth could reach it. If the burn ran long, they'd crash. If it ran short, they'd sail past into the dark forever. There was no lunar module to rescue them if something went wrong. There was only the burn, and the silence, and us.

We lost them at the appointed second, right on schedule, and the room held that silence for what felt like the longest thirty-some minutes of my life. Nobody spoke much. Somebody's pen kept clicking. Then the signal came back, on time, on trajectory, and the voice on the loop confirmed it: Apollo 8 was the first crewed spacecraft in history to leave the gravity of its home world and fall into orbit around another one. Ten times they would circle that gray, pitted, silent ball before they were done, and somewhere in that room a controller who'd been rigid for half an hour let his shoulders finally drop.

We had been told, days before, that this Christmas Eve broadcast would draw the largest audience that had ever listened to a single human voice — more people, all at once, than had ever heard anyone speak. Borman had asked the obvious question of NASA's public affairs chief, Julian Scheer: what exactly did they want the crew to say. The answer that came back gave him nothing and everything at once. Do something appropriate. That was all. No script, no committee line, no talking points. Just three men, a hundred thousand miles from anyone who could help them, and an instruction with no bottom to it.