Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (42 page)

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Authors: Robert Zimmerman

Tags: #History, #United States, #20th Century, #test

BOOK: Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8
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Page 233
Chapter Thirteen
That Was Then
The Squares
Frank Borman stood on a small wooden platform overlooking a gray, eight-foot-high concrete wall. Beyond the wall he could see an open dirt strip filled with rolls of barbed wire and patrolled by machine gun-toting soldiers. Beyond them were gray abandoned buildings, their windows cemented shut.
Scattered along the near side of the wall were plaques. Each commemorated the place where a refugee had died trying to cross the death strip. By now there were over hundred such plaques. One was for Peter Fechter.
The date was February 11, 1969. Twenty years after he had flown into Berlin on a sack of coal, Frank Borman had finally returned to Europe. No longer an unknown cadet attending West Point, he now brought his wife and family with him. And he came as a famous American hero who had helped take the human race to the stars.
In the six weeks since splashdown a lot had happened to Borman, Lovell, and Anders. Within an hour of landing they had been airlifted by helicopter to the
U.S.S. Yorktown
, where they stepped onto the deck to the

 

Page 234
cheers of hundreds of Navy sailors. For Borman, the personal satisfaction and exultation reached its peak at this moment. "I wish I could describe the feeling of euphoria I felt," he said thirty years later. "It was the greatest feeling in the world."
On board ship they were wined and dined by the captain and crew. President Johnson congratulated them by phone. Then they were flown to Hawaii, where thousands of people flocked to see them. Such celebrations were to be expected after a successful space flight.
Then they landed at Ellington Air Force Base, just south of Houston. Because it was 2:30 in the morning, they only anticipated a small contingent of newsmen, NASA officials, and their families there to greet them.
Instead, the airfield was packed with thousands upon thousands of wellwishers. Many were co-workers at NASA, out to celebrate. Many others were mere strangers, exuberantly cheering the astronauts for what they had done.
Though it was the middle of the night, some neighbors had disassembled the American flag that they had built and set up on the Anderses' lawn in order to reassemble it at the airbase. They plugged it in, bathing the returning astronauts in its red, white, and blue lights.
This was nothing like Gemini 7, thought the Bormans and Lovells. The Anderses were simply astonished at the size of the crowd. The astronauts placed Hawaiian lei's around the necks of their wives, and embraced their families. Alan Anders, eleven, suddenly began crying.
Everywhere the astronauts went they were feted with honors and applause. In the month following splashdown the astronauts and their families went on whirlwind tours of New York, Washington, Miami, Chicago, and Houston, giving speeches and attending parades and parties.
In New York, Governor Rockefeller arranged for them to stay in the penthouse suite of the Waldorf-Astoria. To the Anderses' boys, Alan and Glen, this forty-two-story building seemed the tallest in the world. They amused themselves by flinging grapes out the window, seeing if they could hit pedestrians. "The best part was that we could drink all the soda we wanted," Alan remembered.
Soon the letters and telegrams began pouring in, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. The families didn't know how to answer them all.

 

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One in particular struck Borman as especially poignant. "To the crew of Apollo 8. Thank you. You saved 1968."
1
President Nixon, who had just taken office, asked Borman to go on a goodwill tour of Europe, and Anders to take over as Executive Secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council.
And then came the awards. The three men were given the Distinguished Service Medal from President Johnson, the Hubbard Medal from the National Geographic Society, the Collier Trophy from the National Aeronautic Association, and the Goddard Trophy from the National Space Club, to name just a few.
2
Time
magazine named the three astronauts its "Men of the Year." This honor, announced in the magazine's first issue of 1969, had been given each year since 1927, and was awarded to those individuals who had wielded the most influence on human history in the preceding year, "for better or for worse."
3
Prior to launch, the editors at
Time
thought they would name "The Dissenter" as 1968's "Man of the Year." The demonstrations, the violence, the discord, had dominated almost every day's headlines.
On December 28th, however, they had changed their minds, writing how the flight of Borman, Lovell, and Anders had "overshadowedeven if, in the long view of history, it did not cancel outmany of the most compelling events of the year."
Time
's editors noted that while the utopia the dissenters craved would never be found on the moon,
. . . the moon flight of Apollo 8 shows how that Utopian tomorrow could come about.
For this is what Westernized man can do. He will not turn into a passive, contemplative being; he will not drop out and turn off; he will not seek stability and inner peace in the quest for nirvana. Western man is Faust, and if he knows anything at all, he knows how to challenge nature, how to dare against dangerous odds and even against reason. He knows how to reach for the moon.
4
Not everyone celebrated the journey of Borman, Lovell, and Anders. Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the woman whose court suit had banned prayer in

 

Page 236
the public schools, immediately registered a complaint about the prayers the astronauts had read. "Christianity, you know, is a minor religion," she noted as she announced a letter campaign to ban public prayer in space.
5
Within months she had collected 28,000 signatures on a petition, and went to court demanding a ban on any Bible reading by any U.S. astronaut or any government employee while on duty.
6
The court suit only helped fuel the wave of support for the mission. In the next year NASA received more than 2,500,000 letters and petitions objecting to her suit and supporting the right of American astronauts to exercise their religious beliefs publicly. Eleven months later the court finally agreed, dismissing her suit. "The First Amendment does not require the state to be hostile to religion, but only neutral," said one judge.
7
In the Soviet Union the success of Apollo 8 also met with mixed feelings. The day before Borman, Lovell, and Anders reached lunar orbit, Georgi Petrov, head of the Institute of Space Research of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, wrote in
Pravda
that while he wished the astronauts well, he believed Soviet methods of space exploration were inherently safer.
The Apollo 8 system is distinguished by the fact that the crew apparently plays the main role in controlling the craft. Soviet scientists and designers have been working on systems in which man's control of the spaceship is completely duplicated by automatic devices. . . . It seems to me that such a control system and preliminary testing of the entire flight program by automatic stations before sending off a manned spaceship insures greater safety.
8
While Petrov's description of the Apollo 8 system was naïve, his honest description of the Zond and Soyuz automatic control systems was especially ironic. The Soviet decision to make their spacecraft a technological reflection of their society, in which the ground controller was the centralized authority dictating what the ordinary citizen cosmonaut could do, had helped guarantee that they would lose the race. The complexity of building such an automatic spacecraft made it impossible to get it ready in time.

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