Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

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

Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (43 page)

BOOK: Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8
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Page 237
Petrov also said that the Soviet Union's space goals were to establish permanent orbital stations. Unable to beat the United States to the moon, the Soviets had decided to make believe they had never intended to go. Instead, they now claimed that their efforts had been aimed towards a different objective.
This was a lie. Their aggressive effort to beat the Americans to the moon had filed not only because their spacecraft was unnecessarily complex, but because their increased caution after the death of Komarov had stymied them.
9
The Soviets had insisted that no manned mission to the moon could take place until at least one unmanned robot mission was able to duplicate the flight, without problems. Thus, though both Zond missions in September and November 1968 had been able to send a spacecraft around the moon and return it intact to earth, both flights had failures that prevented them from meeting the mission criteria.
So, despite having scheduled a lunar mission for December 4th with a crew of cosmonauts trained and willing to fly it, Brezhnev's government refused to take the chance. Apollo 8 was therefore able to get to the moon first.
For the Soviet engineers and cosmonauts it was an agonizing experience watching the flight of Apollo 8. "It is a red letter day for all mankind, but for us it is marred by a sense of missed opportunities," wrote Nikolay Kamanin, director of cosmonaut training, in his diaries. "Americans are flying to the moon and we have nothing to counter their exploit. The most dismaying thing is that we cannot tell the truth to our people. We try to write and speak about the reasons for our setbacks, but all our attempts are mired in official bureaucracy."
10
Less than a month after the flight of Apollo 8, the Soviet government canceled all plans to send any cosmonauts to the moon. The race to the moon was officially over. America had won.
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In the United States the celebrations continued. All three families attended the Super Bowl in Miami. The Borman boys, high school football players, were given jobs as ball boys, and the three astronauts led the crowd in the

 

Page 238
Pledge of Allegiance prior to kick-off. They then watched Joe Namath's A.F.L. New York Jets upset Johnny Unitas and the N.F.L.'s Baltimore Colts 16-7.
Bill Anders's picture of that breathtaking first earthrise was placed on a six-cent U.S. stamp. At first the government planned to issue the stamp with no text, but decided to add the words "In the beginning . . ." in response to the thousands of letters that poured into the Post Office.
11
The three astronauts spoke before a joint session of Congress. Borman spoke last and longest, as was his right as commander of the mission. "Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit, and I hope we never forget that," he told a cheering room of legislators.
12
Thomas O. Paine, acting administrator of NASA, couldn't help exulting at Apollo 8's success. "It's the triumph of the squares," he said. "The guys with computers and slide-rules who read the Bible on Christmas Eve."
13
Changes
And yet, did they triumph? In retrospect the great irony of Apollo 8 is that in the three following decades, society decided to draw from this space flight a completely different message, one that the astronauts and the other "squares" that sent them to the moon would not necessarily have endorsed.
Seven months after Apollo 8, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, fulfilling Kennedy's pledge that "whatever mankind must undertake, free men must folly share." Before launch Buzz Aldrin had decided that, like Borman, Lovell, and Anders, he too wanted to give thanks to his God. He had worked out a short ceremony with his local church pastor, who had provided Aldrin with a tiny Communion kit with a silver chalice and wine vial "about the size of the tip of my little finger."
14
But something had changed in the ensuing months. Though Julian Scheer once again told the astronauts they were entirely free to say whatever they wanted, at least one official at NASA actually advised Aldrin against saying his prayers in public.
15
As Aldrin noted many years later, some at the agency wanted to avoid any "adverse publicity from people like [Madalyn]

 

Page 239
O'Hair.''
16
Her complaints and court suit over the astronauts' reading of Genesis seemed to have intimidated the agency.
So, when Aldrin asked a breathless world several hours after the lunar landing "to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way," he was euphemistically telling the world that he was at that moment taking communion. He poured the wine and read silently words from the Book of John.
I am the wine and you are the branches.
Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit;
For you can do nothing without me.
Yet no one, not even Aldrin's wife, knew that he was praying at this particular moment. Astonishingly, the objections of a few Americans had served to muzzle another American's freedom to speak.
17
Even more surprising was how little anyone protested. No one in NASA, including Aldrin, saw anything wrong with an astronaut censoring himself because others disliked the public expression of prayer. While Borman, Anders, and Lovell had assumed they had the freedom to say whatever they wished, Aldrin did not. Something had changed in NASA in the ensuing six months.
In the ensuing decades the social pressure on astronauts to censor themselves only worsened. Today, when philosophical words are spoken in space, they rarely have the same sincere ring of honesty as the words of the Apollo 8 astronauts. Astronauts today all too often toe the party line, fearful that if they speak too boldly, their bosses on earth might ban them from further missions in space.
Instead, the politicians speak, using space as a platform to promote themselves. Prior to Apollo 8 no American President had ever spoken directly to an astronaut while still in orbit, as Khrushchev had done. Such an action seemed too self-serving and propagandistic: the astronauts had dangerous work to do, and it seemed unseemly for a mere politician to insert himself unnecessarily in that work.

 

Page 240
By the Apollo 11 landing on the moon, however, that changed. Richard Nixon, who had done almost nothing to conceive, design, build, and fly the American space program, spent two minutes on the phone with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they stood on the moon, mouthing empty platitudes while these men's lives were at risk. Nor has Nixon been the only one to do this. Practically every President since Nixon has thought it acceptable to use space as his own personal bully pulpit.
18
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Other changes were as fast and as immediate. In January, 1969, the
New Republic
published a short article by Ralph Lapp noting that no one knew exactly what would follow a lunar landing. "Slum-dwellers, awed by Apollo 8 and subsequent flights, may conclude that they should receive space age benefits. If the United States can accomplish such wonders, they may reason, can't we have decent housing, good schools, and a better life?"
Then in March Tom Wicker wrote on the
New York Times
op-ed page:
The vision, skill, courage and intelligence that have gone into the space program ought to shame mankindand Americans in particular. Because if men can do what the astronauts and their earthbound colleagueshuman beings allhave done, why cannot we build the houses we need? Why must our cities be choked in traffic and the polluted air it produces? . . . Why does every effort to remove slums and rebuild cities bog down in red tape and red ink?
19
Neither Wicker nor Lapp were asking that the space program be replaced by other government programs. Yet others took their words and came to that very conclusion. On May 20th, even as Apollo 10 and its three astronauts were halfway to the moon on the last dress rehearsal for the planned landing of Apollo 11 in July, Edward Kennedy stood up at the dedication of the $5.4 million Robert Goddard Library at Clark University to declare that Americans should slow their exploration of space, diverting the money instead to earth-based social programs.
20

 

Page 241
Nor was Kennedy alone in his demand. In the months following the Apollo 8 mission, the calls to reduce the American space program were incessant and many. For example, when the American Association for the Advancement of Science held a panel discussion on the space program at its December 1969 meeting, more than one hundred demonstrators also gathered to protest what they called a "moondoggle" and "our twisted national priorities."
21
The organizers of the protest later referred to NASA as a place ''where the most outrageous forms of waste for profit are perpetuated . . . and used to divert attention from the obvious neglect of peoples' needs."
22
Frank Borman himself got a personal up-front look at this groundswell of hostility. That spring President Nixon asked him to visit a number of colleges and universities to explain what the space program was about. In writing about that college tour years later, Borman bluntly described it as "a disaster." Astronaut Borman, a former test pilot and military man, found himself the target for the student anger at the continuing Vietnam War. Often students refused to let him speak, drowning him out with boos and catcalls. At Columbia, birthplace of violent student protest, the audience threw marshmallows at him, while others climbed onto the stage in gorilla costumes.
To Borman, one night at Cornell was particularly painful. "I wanted to talk about space, not an unpopular war, yet I ended up becoming almost an apologist for the military-industrial complex in the eyes of my radical-minded audiences who didn't want to hear about space."
23
Almost all the students Borman met, many of whom belonged to the S.D.S., seemed to reject the idea of exploration. "'How can you spend all this money going to the moon when there are so many poor, so many economic inequities, so much poverty?'" they asked Borman.
24
Rejecting the space program, the students, many of whom admired communism, instead wished to use the government to re-shape society, thereby solving other national problems that they considered more important. As former S.D.S. President Todd Gitlin wrote, "Much of the New Left . . . scorned the 1969 moon landing as a techno-irrelevancy if not an exercise in imperial distraction and space colonialism."
25
Ironically, the United States had entered the space race to prove that in the competition between the totalitarian Soviet Union and the free and capitalist United States, individual responsibility and private enterpise could do it better.
BOOK: Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8
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