Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon

by Jeffrey Kluger Narrated by Brian Troxell

Overview

This program includes a bonus conversation with Commander Frank Borman plus archival audio from Apollo 8's lunar orbit and from the cockpit during the mission.

The untold story of the historic voyage to the moon that closed out one of our blackest, bloodiest years with a nearly unimaginable triumph


In August 1968, NASA made a bold decision: in just sixteen weeks, the United States would launch humankind's first flight to the moon. Only the year before, three astronauts had burned to death in their spacecraft, and since then the Apollo program had suffered one setback after another. Meanwhile, the Russians were winning the space race, the Cold War was getting hotter by the month, and President Kennedy's promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade seemed sure to be broken. But when Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were summoned to a secret meeting and told of the dangerous mission, they instantly signed on.

Written with all the color and verve of the best narrative non-fiction, Apollo 8 takes us from Mission Control to the astronaut's homes, from the test labs to the launch pad. The race to prepare an untested rocket for an unprecedented journey paves the way for the hair-raising trip to the moon. Then, on Christmas Day, a nation that has suffered a horrendous year of assassinations and war is heartened by an inspiring message from the trio of astronauts in lunar orbit. And when the mission is over-after the first view of the far side of the moon, the first earth-rise, and the first re-entry through the earth's atmosphere following a flight to deep space-the impossible dream of walking on the moon suddenly seems within reach.

The full story of Apollo 8 has never been told, and only Jeffrey Kluger-Jim Lovell's co-author on their bestselling book about Apollo 13-can do it justice. Here is the tale of a mission that was both a calculated risk and a wild crapshoot, a stirring account of how three American heroes forever changed our view of the home planet.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 03/20/2017
In spare yet vivid prose, Kluger (with Jim Lovell, coauthor of Apollo 13), senior writer at Time, captures the nostalgia and excitement of a “space-drunk nation” in this gripping account of the first lunar mission. Beginning years before the 1968 launch, the story revolves around Apollo 8’s crew: Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders. Slated for Apollo 9, they were switched to the first moonshot in an ambitious bid to meet President Kennedy’s timetable. Kluger sets the crew’s personal histories amid the space race, NASA’s early days, and the Gemini 7 program, in which Borman and Lovell orbited Earth in their underwear, eating “lots of fruitcake—packaged like unholy sausage links.” Kluger’s extensive research and relatable analogies show how “the levers of the great American moon machine were being thrown.” Launching a “mass of foil origami” takes a village, and such major players as Chris Kraft as well as the crew’s families are brilliantly sketched. Readers will relish Kluger’s multisensory prose, and the whole gamut of space flight comes alive in the details. Moreover, extensive interviews lend authenticity to the dialogue and character sketches. Kluger’s laudable storytelling novelistically conveys the charged politics of the era while revealing difficult technical concepts. (May)

From the Publisher

"Kluger, a science journalist, previously co-authored the best-selling book turned blockbuster film Apollo 13, and his latest foray into space history overflows with similarly cinematic details. Apollo 8 delivers the definitive story of what is, and always will be, one of humanity's greatest adventures."—Scientific American

"Kluger takes readers inside the capsule.... Every agonizing moment both prior to the mission and the mission itself unfolds in fascinating detail, and Kluger makes the reader more than just an observer while events transpire. Those familiar with the early history of NASA and the Apollo missions will love Apollo 8, and those who were born in later years will discover a full understanding of a tumultuous time and the fascinating people who helped make a dream a reality." —Associated Press

"Compelling.... An engaging tale, delving into the nooks and crannies of physics, space politics, and human dynamics.....Kluger ably resurrects the drama of half a century ago."—Christian Science Monitor

"Kluger has a knack for telling these stories of humans, machines and the cosmos in an engaging, cinematic manner.... Apollo 8 is a worthy addition to the space history catalog.... Kluger excels at recounting missions, seamlessly blending procedures with descriptions of what the astronauts saw and felt."—Dallas Morning News

"Relying on extensive interviews with all three NASA astronauts and former NASA officials, agency documents and the mission audio archive, the author paints an unforgettable picture of the dramatic, wildly successful lunar mission.... [Kluger] informs us in vivid, crisply written prose exactly how the United States recovered from its despairing doldrums and regained national pride.... Revealing and alive, Apollo 8 is a wonderful, fascinating read." —Tampa Bay Times

"An emotion-filled, inspiring retelling of a remarkable achievement.... Kluger superbly recounts this epic event. He stays close to the facts and, in easy-to-understand explanations, delves into the physics, politics and human dynamics of this space venture.... Primary resources add a key dimension to the thrill and the authenticity of the story."—The Missourian

“In spare yet vivid prose, Kluger…captures the nostalgia and excitement of a‘space-drunk nation’ in this gripping account of the first lunar mission…. Kluger’s laudable storytelling novelistically conveys the charged politics of the era…. Readers will relish Kluger’s multisensory prose, and the whole gamut of space flight comes alive in the details.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Compelling.... The Apollo 8 mission [was] at least as audacious as anything NASA has done before or since.... A detailed, and entertaining, account." —The Space Review

"There is plenty of Apollo information and narrative out there for the interested reader, but it needs the discerning eye of a Kluger, who knows how to sift through it all to the essential detail and tell it accessibly. His style never underplays the spectacle and achievement of the moon shots, but he laces his descriptions with reminders that the endeavour was delivered by human ingenuity, labour and passion."—NewScientist.com

“The lead-up to the mission — the selection of astronauts, the testing of equipment, the training — is just as compelling as the flight itself…. Comprehensively detailed, and written with the sure hand of someone who knows his material inside and out, the book is guaranteed to be a hit with armchair astronauts, space-program veterans, and all readers in between.” —Booklist

“An enjoyable retelling of one of the momentous American achievements that made moon landing possible.” —Kirkus Reviews

"Readers will enjoy the vicarious thrill of that flight to the Moon in the stellar company of Borman, Anders and Lovell."—Nature

"Kluger paints a detailed picture of a dangerous journey…. His access to NASA mission transcripts…proves particularly useful in bringing the reader inside the capsule. On the ground, Kluger expertly captures the intensity of the flight controllers and the anxiety of the astronauts' families watching from suburban Houston. For a book about science and exploration, there's plenty of emotion."—BookPage Online

"No matter how many times you return to the Apollo missions, you never exhaust their thrilling seat-of-your-pants suspense. But here, in the superbly capable hands of Jeffrey Kluger, the little known story of Apollo 8 bursts vividly to life. I couldn't put it down." —Ken Burns, Director of more than two dozen films, including ‘The Civil War,’ ‘Baseball’ and ‘Jackie Robinson’

“Drawing on historical transcripts and documents and his own extensive interviews with the leading players, Jeffrey Kluger paints a portrait of the U.S. space program and the first manned expedition to the moon so vivid that we feel ourselves riding in the hurtling rocket with the astronauts, taut with the thrill, the danger, and the cosmic meaning of the mission. Apollo 8 is storytelling at its best.”—Alan Lightman, MIT professor of humanities, and best-selling author of The Accidental Universe

“This irresistible tale is full of rocketry and space science, all of it elegantly explained, but it’s the extraordinary cast of characters that remains with you, as human as they are heroic and each portrayed with wit and empathy by a master story-teller.”—Geoffrey C. Ward, author of A First-Class Temperament

"It was refreshing to read about my friends Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders and follow their record setting trip to the moon. Jeffrey has got it all exactly straightand I enjoyed reading it very much.” —Michael Collins, Command Module Pilot, Apollo 11

"One of our greatest accomplishments – people truly leaving our planet for the first time – finally gets its due. Jeffrey Kluger colorfully captures the time, the people, and the mission of Apollo 8 with an entertaining and informative account of the stories of this historic adventure. This book let me relive my little boy inspiration to explore space." —Mike Massimino, shuttle astronaut and best-selling author of ‘Spaceman’

Library Journal

04/01/2017
A generation of Americans watched the adventures of astronauts in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs, including the moment in 1969 when Neil Armstrong first stood on the moon as part of Apollo 11. But it took years of trial and error for NASA to achieve this feat. Kluger (senior editor, Time) applies his impressive narrative skills to describe in detail how the Apollo 8 mission achieved its goal of being the first to travel to the moon and return safely to Earth in December 1968. Kluger's tale is sprightly written and profiles members of the crew such as Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders as they carried out their arduous training schedule to meet a launch date that took place only a few weeks after Apollo 7 had concluded. VERDICT An excellent book told with spirit and verve and enough spaceflight details to satisfy even the most dedicated student of the program. [Prepub Alert, 11/1/16.]—Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames

Kirkus Reviews

2017-04-02
How NASA defeated the Soviets in the space race by becoming the first country to send three astronauts on a flight to the moon despite what might have been a disastrous setback.Time science editor and senior writer Kluger (The Narcissist Next Door: Understanding the Monster in Your Family, in Your Office, in your Bed—in Your World, 2014 etc.) begins in 1968 with the daring decision to push the flight schedule for Apollo 9 forward and change its itinerary from simply orbiting the Earth to a flight to the moon and back. The author explains that the context for the decision was the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and President John F. Kennedy's promise to land an American on the moon by 1970. The decision went through despite the fact that only 18 months earlier, three astronauts had been killed in a tragic fire during tests of Apollo 7. Faulty wiring proved to be the cause of the fire, likely as a result of the pressure to meet deadlines. "To the pilots [testing the ship], the Apollo felt like a slapdash machine," writes Kluger. "It was temperamental, error-prone, and impossible to work with for more than a little while before something broke down." Nonetheless, morale remained high, and the original plan was scrapped. Rather than delay the mission, Apollo 9 would become Apollo 8. The author was fortunate to be able to interview the three astronauts who flew the Apollo 8 mission: Cpt. Jim Lovell, with whom he co-authored the bestseller, Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 (1994); Col. Frank Borman; and Maj. Gen. Bill Anders. Kluger also had access to NASA's Oral History Project, which contains transcripts of conversations during the flight, both inside the spacecraft and between the astronauts and ground control. An enjoyable retelling of one of the momentous American achievements that made the moon landing possible.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171867065
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	05/16/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Mid-1961

Frank Borman wasn't fearless — no good pilot was. But most of the fear he had started out with was shaken out of him on the day in 1961 when he nearly died in the skies over Edwards Air Force Base, in southern California. Death while flying was not Borman's plan, any more than it was the plan of the pilots who did die that way in that place at around that time. But in the business of test-flying jets, it was inevitable that every now and then one of them would fly straight into disaster, tumble out of the sky, and, to use the no-big-deal phrasing preferred by test pilots, make a hole in the ground.

Borman knew the odds as well as anyone, but he had been angling for Edwards for a long time, ever since his West Point graduation in 1950. Like most of the men flying here, he had not traveled a direct route to the skillet of the California desert. He had jumped from post to post — Nevada, Georgia, Ohio, the Philippines — all with his young wife, Susan, by his side. She had agreed to marry him straight out of the military academy and had known in advance the peripatetic life of a young Air Force pilot, though she hadn't fully understood that it would be quite that peripatetic.

Still, Edwards was what Borman wanted, and so Edwards was what Susan wanted. When he had applied for the transfer from the Philippines to California in 1960, he'd known he would be up against ferocious competition, with no guarantee that he'd even make it to the top tier of applicants, much less become one of the fliers selected. When he did get the transfer, he was thrilled at the news, though it wouldn't serve him well to look thrilled when he arrived in California. The man who made the Edwards flight assignments was Chuck Yeager, the thirty-seven-year-old lieutenant colonel and World War II fighter pilot who had long caused military fliers to feel equal measures of inspiration and terror.

Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier, in a Bell X-1 rocket plane in 1947, had been famous even before achieving that long-elusive feat. Shot down over France in 1944 during his eighth combat mission, he was taken prisoner and placed in a POW camp. He escaped just two months later, quickly rejoined his squadron in England, and, six months after that, scored the fighter pilot's coveted ace-in-a-day distinction, shooting down five enemy planes in a single mission. There wasn't much the young hot dogs he had brought to Edwards could do to impress him.

"There's no such thing as a natural-born pilot," he would tell the men who believed they were exactly that. "If you can walk away from a landing, it's a good landing. If you can use the airplane the next day, it's an outstanding landing." Keep it simple, Yeager told them, and you may stay alive.

Borman reckoned he could do more than that. In the years before getting to Edwards, he had flown the F-89 and the T33 and the T-6 and the F-84 and even the F-104. He had flown just about every plane he could get his hands on, and not one of them had been too much for him.

One morning soon after getting to Edwards, Borman hopped into an F-104, intent on trying out a maneuver of his own invention. He called it a zoom flight, a nod to the extreme altitude and trajectory the exercise would involve. Both the plane and the new maneuver were their own kinds of trouble. Together, they were a two-headed beast.

The F-104 was a relatively new plane; test-flown for the first time just five years earlier, it had been certified fit to fly only three years back. The jet was designed to be extremely lightweight and to fly at extremely high speeds. Just fifty-five feet long, it had a wingspan of less than twenty-one feet and an airframe made of such light aluminum that, for practical purposes, the whole assembly was little more than an engine with a chair on the front. The F-104's wings were positioned so far back on the body that the man in the cockpit could not see them without a rearview mirror. And the leading edges of the wings were so fine — just .016 of an inch thick, or about the same as a razor blade — that ground crews took to covering them with protective strips lest they brush past one and cut themselves.

All of these innovations made it possible for the plane to achieve a reliable speed of Mach 2.2 — or more than twice the speed of sound — with the right altitude and wind conditions. The aircraft's design, however, did not deliver much in the way of maneuverability. Supersonic speed means a wide turning radius, and a streaking jet is a little like an ocean liner that swings hard to port but doesn't actually complete its turn until miles later. One pilot who had flown the F-104 and not cared for its handling described steering the plane as "banking with intent to turn." That was funny enough in the skies over Edwards Air Force Base, but the humor would be lost in a dogfight with a Soviet MiG. You might win the fight if it was merely a chase in the flat, though it would turn ugly once the MiG began to weave.

There were no MiGs over California, however, and Borman's zoom flight didn't call for any weaving. Instead, it would begin as an ordinary climb to 40,000 feet, nearly eight miles above the desert floor. At that point, he would light the afterburner, which would slam him back into his seat and punch the plane up to 90,000 feet.

That kind of altitude presents very particular challenges. Once you get there, neither the afterburner nor the engine work anymore, both of them strangled by the thin atmosphere. Even if you could light your engine, it would be a very risky move. The F-104's engine was air-cooled, and with little air available, an engine that was lit up might also blow up.

So now you are seventeen miles above the desert with no working form of propulsion. Climb any higher and those stubby wings on your plane are going to become useless too, since the few wisps of effective atmosphere that remained at 90,000 feet would be gone. Instead, you arc over, plunge back down, relight your engine at 70,000 feet, and come on in.

The zoom flight was a fine way to test the mettle of both the plane and the pilot. And if you had the guts to try it, it was an awful lot of fun.

Borman had flown the zoom several times before, always without incident. But this morning would be different. No sooner had he reached 40,000 feet on his upward climb than the engine did what engines are never supposed to do: it exploded. The bang was audible, the jolt was considerable, and the red fire light on the instrument panel confirmed that both the aircraft and the pilot were in mortal trouble.

What the book called for at a moment like this was cutting the engine — or whatever was left of it — to reduce the risk of fire. What the book definitely did not call for was ejecting. Yes, staying in the plane might be deadly, but hitting the air when ejecting at supersonic speeds would be akin to hitting the side of a building. Dead-sticking, or gliding without power down to the runway, was a theoretical possibility, but dead-sticking from 40,000 feet while traveling at Mach velocity was not even worth attempting.

With no even remotely good options, Borman was left to choose the least awful course of action, which was to try to restart the engine. The plane's half-wrecked piece of machinery might or might not have the wherewithal to function as it should; it most surely, however, had the power to explode again, pulling the plane apart entirely this time.

His decision made, Borman hit the ignition. The engine banged but burned. The fire light came back on, and the plane clanged and shook. Still, the engine ran for three full minutes, enough to bring the dry lake bed into view. At this point, Borman could have ejected — indeed, he knew he should have ejected — but he had brought the plane this far, and by now it was a matter of principle to land it on the runway in one sorry, faithless piece. Maybe the engineers could take it apart and see how and why it had gone wrong.

Borman did land the smoldering aircraft, and then, as soon as he quit taxiing, he hopped from the cockpit and abided by one more iron rule of piloting: he ran as fast and as far as he could from the plane. The fire trucks, which were already converging, would deal with the rest.

Once he was safely out of harm's way and in the base office, Borman picked up the phone and, fulfilling his part of the flier's marital bargain, called his wife. Susan was well aware of how risky her husband's work was; recently, in fact, she had witnessed a collision over Edwards between an F-89 and a T-33. She knew that Frank flew both planes, so she had dashed to the scene of the wreck to see if he was one of the pilots. She was stopped well before she got there by a military sentry, who told her she had to go home. She went instead to the home of a neighbor, a woman married to an officer and someone who had been through this terror before. The neighbor took her in and calmed her down and explained the Edwards rules to her. "That isn't how it's done," she said. "You have to sit and wait."

Frank had not been in either plane that time, but absorbing the lesson of that morning had not been easy for Susan. So he had promised her that in the future, whenever an accident happened, he would contact her as fast as he possibly could, and he did so today.

"You're going to hear about a problem, and you might have seen the fire trucks go out," he told her as soon as she answered the phone. "It was me. And I'm fine."

Susan, now practiced in the protocols, said that she was relieved to hear it, that she always trusted that he would bring his planes in safely, and that she was very glad to know he was all right. What she didn't do was give voice to the words that usually came into the minds of test pilots' wives in such moments: "This time."

*
Borman's abiding love of flight began in childhood, but his career in the air almost came to an early end. And it was his well-loved Air Force that tried to ground him.

Born in 1928, the only child of Edwin and Marjorie Borman, Frank was supposed to grow up in Gary, Indiana, where his father ran a successful garage business, a point of pride in the early years of the Great Depression, when so many other families were struggling. But the trick to living happily in Gary was overlooking the persistent chill and leaden dampness that often settled on the area. Though most Indianans could tolerate the weather, young Frank couldn't. Sinus problems, repeated colds, and mastoid infections kept him out of school so regularly that the family's doctor warned his parents that if the boy didn't get somewhere dry and warm fast, he might grow up with no hearing at all.

So the family abandoned their life in Gary and moved to Tucson, Arizona. Frank promptly got well, thrived in school, and took to building and flying model airplanes, then more model airplanes, and then many more still. When he was a senior in high school, the year after the end of World War II — a conflict in which airpower played a major role — he decided that flying real airplanes was what he wanted to do with his life. The best route to the best planes, he knew, was to get himself accepted to West Point, and from there to make his way to the Air Force.

By the time Borman decided to apply to the military academy, however, it was too late in the year to submit his application and get the necessary recommendation to West Point from his congressman. While trying to decide what to do next, he was approached by a local judge who knew him from the neighborhood. The judge had a son younger than Borman who was turning out to be something of a wild child, always on the brink of getting into trouble with the law. Impressed by Borman's straight-arrow ways, the judge wondered if he might teach his son a wholesome hobby like model-airplane building, and get him interested enough to keep him off the streets.

"I'll try, sir," Borman said simply.

"That's all I can ask," the judge responded. "It'll be to your credit if you succeed, but no one will blame you if you don't."

As it turned out, he did succeed — love of flight being a pretty easy disease to catch in 1946, and Borman being a very infectious carrier. He and the judge's son spent most of their after-school and weekend hours working together on their planes, which slowly brought the younger boy to heel.

The judge, who knew of Borman's West Point ambitions, offered to show his appreciation by contacting the local congressman himself — a veteran politician named Dick Harless — and asking him to write the needed letter of recommendation. Harless agreed, but no congressman could change the fact that it was now very late in the West Point application process, and the best the military academy could offer Borman was a third-alternate slot: three boys who had already been accepted would have to decline the academy's offer. Improbably, the long shot came in, as, one after another, the potential cadets decided that maybe they weren't West Point material after all. Borman, to his own amazement, took his place as a shaven-headed plebe in the class of 1950.

As he'd suspected he would, Borman loved every single thing about West Point. His family's survival during the Depression had depended on his father's inexhaustible dedication to his work; Borman had absorbed that lesson, applied it in high school, and now did so again at the academy. He loved West Point's head-cracking academics and ferocious discipline and the deep camaraderie that came from standing on the lowest rung of an exceedingly hierarchical system.

Unlike a lot of the other plebes, Borman even learned to appreciate the self-control that came from tolerating the hazing at the hands of more senior cadets, though that part was not easy. There was the business of eating in silence in a full-brace, straight-backed, eyes-ahead position, and complying uncomplainingly when an upperclassman would unmake a perfectly made bed and have him remake it. And he learned, too, a subversive secret about West Point: occasionally there were moments — well considered, precisely chosen — when it paid greater dividends not to comply.

Early in his first year, as Borman stood in ranks, an upperclassman known as a relentless bully was inspecting the plebes, paying particular attention to their shined shoes. When he reached Borman, he stopped. "Mr. Borman, those shoes don't look good," he declared.

"Yes, sir," Borman answered, staring straight ahead and, as he'd been trained, avoiding eye contact.

"But now they're going to look worse."

With that, he lifted his foot and slammed the heel of his own shoe on top of Borman's.

Borman remained standing, ignoring the blaze of pain that ran through the fine bones on the top of his foot. Then he hissed quietly, "You son of a bitch. If you ever do that again, I'll kill you."

Silence came from the upperclassman, as well as from the plebes nearby, who had heard what Borman said but dared not acknowledge it. Such insubordination could wreck a West Point career before it even got started, and everyone knew it. The upperclassman stood and glared — and then moved on. Borman's defiant bet paid off; as best he was ever able to piece it together, his tormentor already had a reputation for abusive hazing and could no more afford a reported incident than could Borman himself.

Borman's rise at the military academy was swift in every respect save one: sports, specifically football, which at West Point was pretty much the only sport that counted. He might have had the grit for the game, but at just five foot seven and 155 pounds, he definitely did not have the size. Bantamweight was good for a pilot, not a lineman. Nevertheless, Borman joined the team anyway, in the only capacity in which they would have him — as manager, which effectively meant equipment boy, albeit with some organizational and scheduling responsibilities.

All the same, he thrived in the job. Partly that was because he got to work with the likes of head coach Earl Blaik — equal parts man and monument in college football — and a young offensive-line coach named Vince Lombardi. Both were tactically brilliant, though Blaik maintained a rigorous cool while Lombardi was a man of raw emotion. Borman saw himself in Blaik, but he also admired the happy madness that was Lombardi. Most of all, however, he liked the simple yet vital work the job of manager required him to do. Although he could not contribute on the field, he could bring a necessary order to the entire enterprise, without which everything else would come to ruin.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Apollo 8"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Jeffrey Kluger.
Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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