Space | Air & Space Magazine
Sending Apollo 8 to the moon was a risky mix of cold war politics, bravery, and the faith of one man, George Low, in his engineers.
Apollo 8 crew in training
(NASA)
Michael Klesius
The job was a big one - first humans to the moon - so it looked like they'd have to work the weekend. December 21, 1968, fell on a Saturday. Astronaut Jim Lovell waddled in his spacesuit across an enclosed gantry at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Thirty-six stories above the launch pad, he regarded the open hatch of the Apollo 8 command module. Though the vehicles that would follow had names like Gumdrop, Charlie Brown, and Apollo 11's Columbia, this one was simply CM-103. It had as much living space as a van, and it would be Lovell's home for the next week.
Austrian-born George Low (center, wearing jacket) came up with the idea to send Apollo 8 to the moon. NASA's director of flight operations, Chris Kraft (far left) was the first colleague he approached with the plan.
The Apollo 8 crew, five weeks before their flight. Jim Lovell (left) and Frank Borman (right) had flown together on Gemini 7 in 1965. Bill Anders (center) was a rookie.
No astronauts had launched on the giant Saturn V rocket (pictured on the pad before Apollo 8) until Borman, Lovell, and Anders climbed on top.
The Apollo 8 crew trains for water egress (in a boilerplate capsule) in the Gulf of Mexico, October 25, 1968.
The backup crew for Apollo 8 included the first men to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong (left) and Buzz Aldrin. Fred Haise (right) flew with Jim Lovell on the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission in 1970, which had to return to Earth without landing on the moon after an onboard explosion crippled their spacecraft.
December 17, 1968. Four days before their launch to the moon, the Apollo 8 crew -- (l. to r.) Bill Anders, Frank Borman, and Jim Lovell -- take a break from training in a simulator at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Bill Anders (front, with Jim Lovell behind him) made just one spaceflight -- Apollo 8. The photo was taken during a training session in September 1968.
Among the most famous of all 20th century photos is this view of Earthrise, as seen by the Apollo 8 crew from lunar orbit. Frank Borman noticed it first. Bill Anders took the picture.
An Air Force camera on a KC-135 aircraft at 40,000 feet captured this image of the Apollo 8 command module making its fiery re-entry through the atmosphere.
December 30, 1968. Three days after their return to Earth, the Apollo 8 astronauts recount their journey in a technical debriefing.
A mere seven months after Apollo 8, in July 1969, George Low (center, with brown tie and no cigar) celebrated the first lunar landing.
Forty years after their historic voyage, Borman (left, now 80), Lovell (80) and Anders (75) reminisced during a panel discussion at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Journalist Nick Clooney (far left) was the moderator.
(NASA / Paul Alers)
Photo Gallery It was still dark outside. The great moon rocket, the Saturn V, taller than the Statue of Liberty and heavier than a Navy destroyer, was illuminated from the ground by searchlights. The vehicle was by far the biggest and fastest flying machine ever built, and remains so today. On that cool, clear morning, the first day of winter, no astronaut had ridden the Saturn V. It hummed with electricity and hissed with five and a half million pounds of kerosene, liquid hydrogen, and liquid oxygen, as it waited to throw men for the first time beyond Earth and into orbit around the moon.
Lovell, then 40 and a veteran of two Gemini missions, had more hours in space than any U.S. astronaut. He recently admitted during a Washington, D.C., that at that moment 40 years ago, he paused as he stared into the hatch. Rookie astronaut Bill Anders, 35, was firmly harnessed in the right couch, facing skyward. On the left, mission commander Frank Borman, 40, was also strapped in and ready for launch. "I looked at them," said Lovell, "and I looked down at the ground, and I said, 'These people are really serious. This is not another Earth orbital flight. This is going to the moon.' And that maybe was the time when I said, 'Well, here we go.' "
"We were three explorers doing something entirely different," he continued. "We were going the entire distance, 240,000 miles, and we were going to see the far side of the moon."
Apollo 8 was originally scheduled as another hardware test in Earth orbit. The decision to send it to the moon instead ranks as one of the gutsiest in the history of space exploration. The astronauts themselves believed they might have only a one-in-three chance of success.
"The genius behind the Apollo 8 mission...was a man by the name of George Low," said Borman. Low, who died of cancer in 1984, was the NASA manager in charge of redesigning the three-man command module after the Apollo 1 fire that had killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee in January 1967. "You couldn't get any change in the spacecraft unless [Low] approved it," recalled Borman. And after the redesign "there wasn't a problem in any of the missions with the command module, ever. So it was a tribute to George Low and the people that he put together that made that work."
Early in 1968, a year after the fire, Low came to his own This is it realization that now was the time to get serious about aiming for the moon. Born in Austria in 1926, Low had emigrated from his Nazi-occupied homeland in 1938. He served in the U.S. Army in World War II, earned a master's degree in aeronautical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1950, and joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the precursor to NASA. At 30, he was promoted to chief of the Special Projects Branch, where he was heavily involved in the new fields of orbit calculations and space rendezvous techniques. Two years later, when NASA was established, he was summoned to Washington, D.C., and installed as the chief of manned spaceflight. Throughout the 1960s, Low played a central role in planning the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions.
After the Apollo 1 fire, NASA elevated him to manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program. Borman was the only astronaut on the team that redesigned the craft. If there's a single moment that can be identified as Apollo 8's genesis, it's an April 1968 meeting between Low and Borman, when the astronaut asserted his faith in the redesigned spacecraft. Borman was convinced the problems that had led to the Apollo 1 fire had been solved. The plan at that point was to test the command module and the new lunar module in Earth orbit on the next two flights. But after his meeting with Borman, Low began quietly considering the feasibility of a lunar orbital flight before the end of the year, and wrote a memo about it to his superiors. He told his assistant to consider the memo "007," which meant that after it was read, she was to destroy it, and even refrain from keeping a copy for Low's files.
Spring became summer, and the lunar orbit idea stayed in Low's head as Apollo fell behind schedule, dogged mainly by delays with Grumman's complex lunar lander. Competition with the Soviets also was on his mind.
"I was told that the CIA had intelligence that the Russians were going to try and put a man around [the moon] before the end of the year," recalled Borman at the Newseum event. "And that was the reason for the change in our mission. Because, after all, the Apollo program was just a battle in the cold war."
The Red Album
Weightless Workouts
About Tony Reichhardt Tony Reichhardt is a senior editor at Air & Space.