Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (46 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 254
that the best he could hope for was to watch the others go down and land while he remained in lunar orbit. It didn't seem worth the risk to go back to the moon, merely to go around it again.
Furthermore, President Nixon had offered him a position in government as executive secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council. There he would have the ability to directly influence future space policy. Anders took it, and before too long was immersed in the political world of Washington. In 1973 he was appointed a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, and shortly thereafter became the first chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Later he served as ambassador to Norway.
Then he entered the private sector, working for a variety of companies in the military and airplane construction industry. Eventually he moved up the corporate ladder to become C.E.O. of General Dynamics, trimming that company's overhead and selling off many of its non-profitable divisions.
Today Bill Anders is retired, and spends his free time flying airplanes for fun. And if asked, he would go to the moon in a heartbeat. Indeed, he has applied to NASA to follow John Glenn back into orbit.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Frank Borman, however, has absolutely no interest in going back in space. After the flight of Apollo 8 he was quite content to do work that was less dangerous and put less stress on his wife.
For a while he flirted with the idea of joining the political world, going on a trip to the Soviet Union in conjunction with President Nixon's policy of detente. Then he decided, like the other two astronauts, that the challenges of the corporate world were more interesting. He joined Eastern Airlines' management team, and eventually took over as its C.E.O., trying to shepherd that company through the de-regulation of the airline industry.
It was the only challenge in his life Frank Borman failed to meet. Eastern's union wages were too high. For four years he managed to get the unions to go along with reduced wages and profit-sharing, while simultaneously straightening out the company's finances. When deregulation hit the industry in 1978, however, one union backed out of the deal, causing the

 

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Susan and Frank Borman, about to go flying together, 1997.
Credit: Borman
whole profit-sharing arrangement to collapse. When that same union next made demands that exceeded the ability of the airline to pay, Borman was faced with either acquiescing to the demands or going bankrupt during a strike. He chose to avoid a strike, hoping he could get the union to reconsider.
The union refused, and in fact increased its demands. Eventually, Eastern was sold, and Borman was forced to step down. On the day he lost the company, this tough no-nonsense test pilot came home and cried in his wife's arms.
But a worse upheaval had earlier struck the Borman family. By the early 1970's both Fred and Ed were attending West Point, and Susan Borman found herself for the first time alone at home without a family to raise. The doubts and fears that she had experienced during Apollo 8 had continued to haunt her, and she increasingly resented her earlier willingness to bury herself entirely in the life of her husband. Even though he no longer had a life-threatening occupation, he was still obsessed with it, and put in endless hours at Eastern. With her two children now grown, Susan felt trapped by Frank Borman's life.

 

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Frank Borman with grandchildren, 1983.
Credit: Borman
She began to drink. She eventually had a nervous breakdown. For a time Susan hated her husband, her life, and her existence. Similarly, Frank felt a terrible remorse and shame for always putting Susan second and his career first. After a period of therapy and intense soul-searching, however, they began rebuilding their lives together.
Today, they live in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where Frank owns and operates a major car dealership as well as a number of other businesses. No longer does he do work that could get him killed. No longer does he work so hard that he ignores the needs of his wife.
Susan, meanwhile, has learned to live her own life, without abandoning her deep abiding love for Frank. And she has become significantly more religious.

 

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Even now, thirty years after Frank's return from the moon, she still cannot believe that the mission succeeded. To her, the odds had been too great. Divine intervention must have played its part. As she told me, "I honestly to this day believe, with every cell in my body, that [Apollo 8] was a miracle."
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In the end, the thought that defines these three families is that of a promise kept and an oath fulfilled. These six men and women accepted their oath of marriage as a bond to be honored, making a lie of the modern myth that enduring marriages are impossible. These were partnerships for life, and each partner had a task to make the marriage work. In the end, everything they did, they did for each other.
Earth
Fred Gregory held on for dear life. Once again his body was shaking like crazy, but unlike his helicopter experience in Vietnam, this time he knew what was happening. Below him roared a spaceship weighing four-and-a-half million pounds, its engines firing almost six-and-a-half million pounds of thrust. In mere minutes he was traveling more than a dozen times faster than he had ever flown in a jet.
Fred Gregory, a man who had had absolutely no interest in space exploration when Borman, Lovell, and Anders had gone to the moon, was now on his way into earth orbit. The date was April 29, 1985, and Fred was pilot of the space shuttle
Challenger
.
Much had happened since he had flown that helicopter in the jungles of Vietnam. By 1973 the United States's armies had withdrawn, after more than 50,000 American and many more Vietnamese casualties. By 1975, North Vietnam had overrun the South and won the war.
Gregory finished his tour of duty in 1967 and came home looking for new and challenging aviation work. He went to the library to research what

 

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jobs were available to skilled military pilots, and learned that there were military schools where he could train to become a test pilot, flying experimental jets in the most dangerous circumstances. He applied, was accepted, and completed the test pilot course at the Naval Test Pilot School at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station.
By 1970 he was an engineering test pilot at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, flying both helicopters and jets in the craziest of situations. For example, Fred cheerfully volunteered to pilot a jet into thunderstorms so that meteorologists could study their violent and deadly wind and electric patterns. He did this more than fifty times, letting the winds buffet and shake his airplane so hard that many times it was almost torn apart.
When NASA announced in 1976 that it was looking for pilots for its new space shuttle, Fred was intrigued by the idea of flying this new kind of radical "airplane." Unlike the space capsules of the 1960's, this looked like something he could pilot.
Almost a decade after Apollo 8 he still knew little and cared less about the space program. In fact, though his wife Barbara insists that they watched the reading of Genesis in his parents' home on Christmas Eve, 1968, Gregory today doesn't remember this moment at all.
His interest in the shuttle program and the exploration of space finally came alive one day when he was home watching television. Nichelle Nichols, who had played Lt. Uhura on the science fiction television show
Star Trek
, was spokeswoman on a NASA public service announcement calling for new astronaut applicants. She looked into the camera and said, "We want
you!
"
Fred looked back at her in shock. He felt almost as if she were talking directly to him. He sent in his application, and by 1978 he was in the program.
Now it was 1985, and Fred Gregory was flying his first mission in space. Once in orbit, the crew settled down to routine business. This mission was the second Spacelab mission to fly, and in the cargo hold a crew of five scientists conducted experiments on materials processing, atmospheric physics, astronomy, fluid behavior and life sciences.
As pilot, however, Gregory had little to do with the experiments. Instead, he and his commander, Robert Overmyer, alternated twelve hour

 

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shifts, sitting alone in the cockpit, monitoring the shuttle's performance as it orbited the earth time after time.
For seven days Fred circled the earth. Though he didn't know it, his experience was remarkably similar to that of Borman, Lovell and Anders. At one point the parallels were uncanny. Though the mission itself went smoothly, the life sciences experiments involved two monkeys and two dozen white rats. Unfortunately, the cages were not well sealed, and before too long floating animal feces and dried food particles drifted throughout the shuttle. Like the Apollo 8 astronauts decades before, Fred spent a good portion of his free time trying to scoop floating feces out of the air.
In other, more significant ways, Gregory's experience was very different from that of the astronauts on Apollo 8. The shuttle was large, more closely resembling the spaceships in the movie
2001: A Space Odyssey
than the Apollo 8 capsule. The shuttle had three separate decks, and could accomodate eight astronauts comfortably, and ten in an emergency. Its atmosphere was a mixture of twenty percent oxygen and eighty percent nitrogen, rather than pure oxygen. The kitchen area on the middeck included an oven for reheating food packages, color-coded utensils and food packs for each astronaut, and condiments such as salt, pepper, taco sauce, hot pepper sauce, catsup, mayonnaise and mustard. Its cargo bay was so large that four Apollo 8 capsules could fit within it. Rather than splashing down in the ocean, the shuttle landed on a runway like an airplane. And above all, it was
reusable
.
These were the engineering differences. Other disparities were far more profound. When Gregory stared down at the blue, white, and brown planet below him, he did not see a fragile, delicate Christmas ornament as did Borman, Lovell, and Anders. Instead, he saw something incredibly robust and sturdy, a grand and tough planet that actually seemed capable of healing itself repeatedly despite any and all forms of injury.
This impression was further strengthened on Gregory's final shuttle flight before he retired from active duty. On November 25, 1991 he took off as commander of the shuttle
Atlantis
on a seven-day mission. Besides putting a military surveillance satellite into orbit, the crew spent most of its time conducting earth observation experiments.

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