#426： The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8
Episode Stats
Summary
Robert Korsan joins me to discuss his new book, Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man s First Journey to the Moon: The Story of the First Man on the Moon.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Now, when you think
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of the Apollo program, the first thing that probably comes to mind is Apollo 11 and Neil
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Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepping foot on the moon. But even Armstrong didn't think his moon
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landing was the most important or even daring of all the Apollo missions. For Armstrong, Apollo 8 best
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fits that description. If you're like most people, you probably know very little about Apollo 8,
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let alone the names of the three astronauts who flew on that mission. But after today's episode,
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that's definitely going to change. In fact, you'll likely never forget their stories.
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My guest on the show today is Robert Kurson, who's out with a new book called Rocket Men,
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The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon.
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We begin our conversation discussing the state of America's space program before John F. Kennedy made
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his famous moonshot speech in 1961 and why the Soviets kept beating America in the space race.
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We then discuss the audacious and near impossible plan made in just a few hours in August 1968
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to put men into orbit around the moon by Christmas of that year. Robert then tells about the lives
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of the three men who would be the first human to leave Earth's orbit and the first over the moon
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and why they were the perfect astronauts for this mission. We also discuss the role the wives of
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these astronauts played and why out of all the married astronauts who took part in the Apollo program,
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the astronauts of Apollo 8 were the only ones that never divorced. We end our conversation
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discussing the climactic speech the astronauts made on Christmas Eve from the moon and the life
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lessons Robert learned from writing about and talking with the men of Apollo 8. This is an inspiring and
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truly poignant episode. After it's over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash rocketman.
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I am so honored to be back. Thank you so much for having me.
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So we had you on the show a couple of years ago, talk about your book, Pirate Hunters,
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which is if you haven't, if you have folks haven't listened to that podcast, listen to it and then
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go buy the book. The book's fantastic. Got a new book out instead of the seas of the earth. It's
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about the seas of outer space. It's called Rocketman, the daring odyssey of Apollo 8 and the astronauts
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who made man's first journey to the moon. Just like Pirate Hunters, this book, it read like a movie.
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I was imagining a movie like Apollo 13 as I was reading this. It was so good. I'm curious, what led
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you to this? From talking about pirate hunters, people looking for lost pirate ships, to talking
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about the first manned mission to the moon? This was just a real happy accident for me. And you know,
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the older I get, the more I realize how dependent we are on luck and good fortune. It's kind of an
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unnerving thought actually. But what happened to me was I was at the Museum of Science and Industry
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in Chicago, which is my hometown. And I was showing some friends there, the U-505. It's
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one of only five U-boats that remain in the world. And it happens to be an exact match for
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the U-boat I wrote about in my first book, Shadow Divers. And so I was showing the friends
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around and then I said goodbye and I tried to find my way out of the museum. And one of
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the real nice features of the museum is it's so giant and so complex. It's very hard to find
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your way out. It's kind of fun actually. But I turned left instead of right, or maybe it was
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right instead of left. And I found myself in the Henry Crown Space Center. And there
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in the middle of the space center was a spacecraft that looked at once to have come from the past
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and the future. It was scarred from its journey wherever it had gone, but I had no idea what
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it was. So I went up and I read the placard and it said, this is the command module of Apollo
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8, which was man's first journey to the moon. And I was shocked at that because I fancied
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myself, someone who loved space and astronauts. I certainly paid rapt attention when I was a
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grade schooler, when Apollo was being shown in our classrooms. I had no idea what Apollo 8 was or
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that it was man's first journey to the moon. So I went home and I did, I started doing some research
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and within I'd say 15 or 20 minutes, I knew that I was reading about the single greatest space story
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ever. It was so incredible and full of so much risk and daring and bravery and huge importance.
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I could hardly believe it, but I wasn't the only one. Astronaut after astronaut that I listened to
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and read about felt the same. And that was true, especially of Neil Armstrong, who happened to be
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on the backup crew for Apollo 8. But when Neil Armstrong spoke about Apollo 8, he did it with a
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reverence in his voice that he didn't even seem to use for his own Apollo 11 mission. Everything
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about Apollo 8, he said, was for the first time. He said, by the time we went on Apollo 11, much of
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what we needed to do had been proven doable. But when Apollo 8 went, nobody knew that any of it could
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be done. And one after another of the NASA Apollo astronauts and the NASA managers and legends spoke
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about Apollo 8 that same way, in a different way they spoke, it seemed to me at least, about anything else.
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And when I started to read more and more about what was required and the daring that was required and
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why they did it and how they did it, I thought this is not just, in my mind, the single greatest
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space story of all time. It's one of the great stories in the history of human exploration.
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No, I completely agree. I was the same way. I knew about Apollo 11. I knew about Apollo 13,
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thanks to Tom Hanks. Knew nothing about Apollo 8. And then after I read the story, I was like,
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this is the most amazing story that more people need to know about. So for people to understand
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why this was such a big deal, let's get some background. What was the state of the U.S.
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space program before Apollo 8? And I guess before Kennedy came in and gave his moonshot speech?
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Well, the space race that we talk about, which is this existential battle between the United States
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and the Soviet Union for control of outer space? And there were huge military implications in it,
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as well as implications about which countries' science and technology was better. In fact,
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which countries' politics and way of life was better. It was very much focused on the space race.
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That began in about 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial
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satellite, into orbit. And for a couple of days, it seemed a miracle. People in the United States
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loved it, that there was this artificial satellite. You could actually listen to it on shortwave radio,
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and if you had good binoculars or even good eyes, you could see it in the sky, and they could tell
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you exactly where it would have been. But after a couple of days, it sunk in to the American people
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and the American politicians just how dangerous this was. If the Soviet Union could put an artificial
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satellite wherever it wanted around the Earth, they could also drop bombs or even put soldiers in space
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from wherever they wanted. And that really began the space race. And for several years,
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the Soviets seemed way ahead of us, which was almost unbelievable. They could hardly build a good car
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at the time. They'd suffered devastating losses in World War II, and yet here they were ahead of us
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in the most complicated and important technology in the world. And they just seemed to keep beating us
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and beating us. They got the first man into, not just into space, but into orbit. The first
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dog, the first woman into space. It was just one victory after another for the Soviets. And
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by 1961, President Kennedy realized that America needed to do something not just great, but nearly
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impossible to overtake the Soviets. But we were so far behind at the time, he needed to do something
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that was far enough out in the future that it was possible that we might catch up to them. And the
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idea became, and he made this announcement in 1961, that by the end of the decade, the United States would
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land a man on the moon and bring him home safely. And the announcement stunned Congress. I mean,
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you could hear it. If you listen to a broadcast or watch it on YouTube, there's like silence when he
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says it. It's so outrageous and so impossible, people couldn't believe what they were hearing.
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But that was true also of the NASA managers. When I spoke to them and they told me about hearing it,
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they said, what's he talking about? We have no idea how to do that. Nonetheless,
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the president made that promise in 1961 with the idea that we needed to do something so spectacular
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and so almost impossible that it would overtake the Soviet Union and prove to the world, not just
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that we could control space, which was essential in the modern age of nuclear weapons and everything,
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but that our system of government and of life was superior to theirs. So that's really when it
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started. And we really were way behind at that point.
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Well, why were we way behind? Because I mean, as you said, like the Soviet Union could barely put
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together a good car. Like we developed the nuclear bomb first, nuclear technology. What were the
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Russians doing or the Soviet Union? What were they doing that we weren't doing?
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Well, I think they were not as certain as we were that they were going to be ahead. So they were
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working very, very furiously, but they were also taking huge risks. And that's something I don't
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think we understood quite at the time, even though they kept doing these space spectaculars and doing
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these one first after another, after another in space, they also were taking the kinds of risks
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that the United States was not willing to take. We didn't know that at the time. So it seemed
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baffling why they should be so far ahead. And they also had brilliant scientists, rocket scientists and
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other experts who were giving everything they could. And they devoted a huge amount of their
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budget to the space program because they viewed it as we did as an existential proposition
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that the country that could control space ultimately can control the military and possibly the world.
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So it was very important to them. And they were willing to risk whatever it took to get them
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Okay. So Kennedy makes the moonshot speech. What did NASA have to do to make that happen? I mean,
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they couldn't just immediately go put someone on the moon. They had to do this in stages
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so they can learn things. So what was their first goal as part of the Apollo program?
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Well, they first had to figure out how to get to the moon, trajectory calculations. They had to build
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software and computers to do it. I mean, we could go on for hours and hours about the technical
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requirements. The most interesting thing to me though, when I asked those questions of people at
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NASA was their answer that we really didn't know how to do much of any of this. We had eight and a half
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years and we had to really go figure it out. And at that time, it looked like the Soviets were way
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ahead of us in the idea of getting a man on the moon. And that was really the end goal of the space
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race. It was really kind of believed on both sides that the country that could land a man on the moon
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first and bring him back safely really had just about won the space race. So all kinds of things
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had to happen. And when I asked the, the, some of these legends at NASA, what did you need to do
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first? They just laughed and they said, we need to do everything.
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So, I mean, at this point before the moonshot speed, the Gemini program had been in, this is
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like men orbiting the earth, right? That had already happened.
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Well, no, Mercury was first. Gemini is where we really started to catch up to the Soviets. We were
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behind for years, but Gemini, which is really the, the program we're going to learn how to do a lot of
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the things that need to be done on lunar flights. That's when that's perfected. And that's when the
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the tides really start to turn in the Americans battle against the Soviets in space.
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Well, you're looking at, when we're talking about Apollo 8, we're talking about 1968.
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So up to about 1967, late 1966, that's when Gemini is, is going. And that's when we overtake
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the Soviets and it looks pretty good for us at that point.
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All right. So let's talk about Apollo 1, which was the first mission part of the Apollo program.
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What was its mission? And then what happened to that, that flight?
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Right. So the Apollo program itself is the program that's going to land, deliver men to the moon,
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land them on the moon and bring them back. So Apollo 1 is scheduled to be the first manned
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flight of the Apollo program. And it's supposed to be a low earth orbital test of the command and
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service modules. To land a man on the moon, you need three modules. You need the command module,
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which is where the astronauts exist and live and operate. The service module, which is what the home to
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all the technology and electronics or much of it. And then you have a lunar module, which is for the
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landing part. Apollo 1 is supposed to go without the lunar module and supposed to just test out the
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command and service modules in a low earth orbit. And that's planned for January or early for,
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maybe it's planned for February of 1967. But in January, late January of 1967, they're doing a test,
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just a test. They're not going to launch the launch pad. And there's a disaster. There's a fire in the
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cockpit in the command module. And the three astronauts perish in the accident. It's a terrible,
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awful accident. There's recordings of the astronauts struggling. It's a terrible thing to listen to and to
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think about. But it was a disaster at the very moment when it looked like we were really going to
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take the lead and perhaps win this space race. And how did that affect NASA and everyone involved
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with this program? Well, it was a grave threat, not just to the Apollo program, but perhaps to NASA
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itself. There were congressional investigations and many people worried for the very existence of the
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American space program. NASA launched a huge investigation into the causes of the accident. And
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the primary astronaut they put in charge of investigating and also fixing the problems was
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Frank Borman, who was considered one of the finest astronauts NASA had. And Frank Borman was the first
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astronaut who went inside the charred remains of the Apollo 1 command module. But he also was sent by
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NASA to speak to Congress. And he did it in a very direct, very no-nonsense way. He even was stern with
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them and told them, let's stop the witch hunt and get on with this. We have faith in ourselves. Do you have
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faith in us? And there seemed there wasn't a person at NASA from the astronauts down to the janitors who
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cleaned up at night who didn't cheer him on. Borman was so widely respected and such a serious, no-nonsense
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person. He was the perfect person to put before Congress. And despite the objections of some in Congress, NASA
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was allowed to continue and the Apollo program was allowed to continue. So it was kind of a narrow
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escape. It was a terrible disaster and things had to be redesigned. But Apollo was still alive at that
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point. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of debate going on then that you're seeing now. Like, you know,
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today you're saying like, well, there's no point in putting humans on the moon because we can just send
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robots to do that. People were saying that too. It's like, what's the point of putting humans when we can
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send, you know, some sort of robot to do that for us? Right. And they also made the argument that it
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was extraordinarily expensive and extraordinarily dangerous. And the disaster with Apollo 1 on its
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test was just proof to many of these people that this was just too dangerous a proposition for a
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civilized country. But there was so much to be gained by doing it and so much to prove, not just to
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your own country, but to humanity. This was probably the single hardest thing human beings would ever try.
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And so there was something in American DNA, I believe, and in human DNA that pushes us to
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explore and especially to explore the unknown and maybe the unreachable. And so Apollo was still
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going and certainly the Soviets were still going. And there were good arguments to be made that you
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could not allow your existential enemy, the only other superpower in the world, to beat you onto what
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many believed was the ultimate battlefield in the universe, outer space. Okay. So we'll talk about
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Frank Borman here in detail a bit because this guy is a true American badass. Like I, this is like
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my, one of my new heroes now after learning about him. But so Apollo 1, the disaster happened, he goes
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before Congress, saves NASA basically. What happened after that? Did they, what was the next mission and
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what was, where were the Russians at in their, their race to the moon at this point?
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Well, the Russians look like they're really doing great. They are sending, in the process of sending
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unmanned, but human size spacecraft around the moon, not landing on the moon, but they're ready to send
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missions around the moon in preparation for a manned flight. In the meantime, NASA has to test
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the Saturn V rocket. It's the only machine powerful enough to deliver human beings to the moon. By the
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way, think about this as we sit here in 2018 to this day, 50 years later, the Saturn V rocket is
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still the most powerful machine ever built by humans. 50 years later, think about technology's
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obsolete in months. Sometimes now, 50 years later, this rocket is still the most powerful machine ever
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built, but they needed to test it. It had never flown before. And so it was tested first in Apollo 4
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unmanned, just the rocket. And it had a very good success. Wonderful to listen to Walter Cronkite's
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description of it on YouTube, by the way. He's just overwhelmed by the majesty and the sheer power
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of the thing. But Apollo 6 is its next test, and that fails spectacularly. That's only the second
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test of the Saturn V, but it has got huge problems. And so that's just another issue for the Apollo
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program. In the meantime, the Soviets looked like they're getting closer and closer to sending
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human around the moon. They're not ready to land, nor are we in 1968, but they're getting close to
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getting the first men to the moon. And that, in the minds of many people at NASA, would be nothing
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short of a disaster. All right. So Apollo 6, disaster, didn't go as planned. But then someone
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had this cockamamie idea, we're going to put a man around the moon in four months. So this was going
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to be Apollo 8. So what was the origin of that plan? How'd that all happen?
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Well, here's what's happening. In August of 1968, in early August, there's a very big problem at NASA.
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And the problem is with the lunar module. That's the spidery landing craft that two of the three
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astronauts are going to ride from the orbiting command module down to the surface of the moon
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and back up to the orbiting command module. That's what you need to land man on the moon.
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But problems in production and design have caused the lunar module to fall way behind schedule.
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And that means Apollo is falling way behind schedule. At the very same time, a top secret
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memo comes in from the CIA warning NASA that the Soviet Union looks ready to send the first men in
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history around the moon as early as late 1968. So NASA has a very big problem on its hands. If the lunar
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module is plagued by design and production problems and is slowing everything down, that means Apollo
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is slowing down, which is very expensive, and they have to wait for this thing. It means that
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President Kennedy's promise to the nation is in severe jeopardy because if they can't test this
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lunar module and get it going, they're never going to land men on the moon by the end of the decade.
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And it means that the Soviet Union looks primed to get the first men around the moon.
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And there's a brilliant, brilliant man named George Lowe, who's in charge of the Apollo spacecraft,
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who's thinking about these problems nonstop in the summer of 1968. And in early August of that year,
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he has an epiphany. It's one of the most brilliant insights, I think, that's ever occurred at NASA.
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NASA. He thinks, why don't we, instead of waiting for the lunar module to be ready and just standing
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down, why don't we send Apollo 8, which was really just scheduled to be a low-Earth orbital test
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of the command and service modules, why don't we send that all the way to the moon? And not just
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around the moon, like the Soviet Union is planning to do, but in orbit around the moon, which is
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magnitudes more complicated. It seemed a perfect plan. It meant that they did not have to wait for
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the lunar module, but if they could send a crew around the moon, they would learn so much about
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what it took to go to the moon, except for the landing itself. But they would learn everything
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about the trajectories, about how the software worked, communications between the spacecraft and
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Earth, and so much more. So much about the lunar mission itself could be learned. They could scout
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landing sites for the future first landing, and all kinds of other things. They could get that all
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done without stalling the program. They could keep President Kennedy's promise alive, and it'd have an
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outside shot if they went in late December of beating the Soviets to the moon and getting the first men to
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the moon ever. So in that respect, it seemed like this brilliant insight, a real epiphany. The problem was
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it would require huge risk, the kind NASA had never even contemplated before. The mission would have to be
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planned, trained for, and executed in four months' time. Not the usual 12 to 18 months that a space
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mission took for planning and training, but just four months. They would have to fly the Saturn V rocket
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in only its third flight. And remember, in just its second test flight, it had failed spectacularly. But
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this time it would be going with three men who had families, wives, and children. And it wouldn't be
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going just into low Earth orbit, 100 miles over the Earth, or even 853 miles above Earth, which at the
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time was the world altitude record. It would be going 240,000 miles away to the moon, to this ancient
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companion that had called to human beings for eternity. And it would be going without the lunar
00:22:35.080
module. Now remember, they weren't planning to land Apollo 8, but the lunar module served a secondary
00:22:39.540
function. And that was as a backup engine in case the primary engine at the moon failed.
00:22:46.100
That meant if Apollo 8 went into orbit and that primary engine didn't fire, or it fired improperly,
00:22:52.160
or anything went wrong, the astronauts would crash into the lunar surface, or fly off into solar
00:22:57.000
eternal orbit, or any other number of fatal results that one engine had to work perfectly, or they weren't
00:23:04.140
coming home. And then there were all kinds of other risks in the idea that we weren't ready to do it
00:23:09.660
yet. NASA had to build software very quickly. They had to calculate the trajectories. Everything had to
00:23:14.480
be rushed and compressed into this very tiny time frame. But if they could do it, if they could really
00:23:20.160
pull off a miracle to do something close to impossible, they could keep President Kennedy's
00:23:25.780
promise alive, keep the Apollo program moving, and they had this outside chance to become the first
00:23:31.640
human beings ever to reach the moon and to really beat the Soviets in the space race. And it was
00:23:35.920
decided right there in very early August by George Lowe and then Chris Kraft, who was another legend at
00:23:41.480
NASA and the mastermind of mission control, was decided in a matter of minutes, basically, maybe a
00:23:46.740
couple hours, this is what we're going to do. And the plan was off and running. Now they had to find a
00:23:51.520
crew. Yeah, I mean, that's, I mean, I think people need to like understand, like, there's so much they
00:23:55.000
had to like do. They've never done it before. They had to do it in four months, and they had to do it
00:23:59.200
perfectly the first time without ever having any practice runs, really, like in real life.
00:24:03.940
That's what makes it so crazy. And that's what Neil Armstrong spoke about when you hear him in
00:24:07.780
doing interviews, like everything they did, everything NASA did was for the first time.
00:24:12.980
And it was just almost unthinkable that they could do it so fast and so suddenly, and yet they all
00:24:19.040
committed to do it. Yeah, that's, to me, like that moment, like super inspiring. It's just like, it's just
00:24:23.000
the moxie, the guts, the grit that, I mean, it just, it's super inspiring that, you know, we had that at one
00:24:28.320
time and people just like- Yeah, and Brett, and think about this. When they went, when Lowe and
00:24:33.240
the others went to the head of NASA, James Webb, with the plan and explained it to him as we just
00:24:38.660
discussed it ourselves, Webb heard them through, he was in Vienna at a conference and they called him
00:24:44.000
on a secure line because they couldn't afford to have the Soviets pick up on any of this. Webb heard
00:24:49.520
out this plan and he said, quote, are you out of your minds? And he went through the risks and the
00:24:56.960
challenges, the impossibility of the whole thing, but then he reminded them of something they hadn't
00:25:02.360
considered. He said, if anything happens to these three men, no one, lovers, poets, no one will ever
00:25:10.620
look at the moon the same way again. But that was also true of Christmas because Lowe and Kraft's plan
00:25:18.060
called for Apollo 8 to be in lunar orbit on Christmas Eve and Christmas day of 1968. So if
00:25:26.280
anything happened, no one's going to look at the moon or Christmas the same way again. It could not
00:25:30.900
have been riskier. Yeah. That, that point was really, I didn't, I never thought about that, but it's true.
00:25:36.020
This mission failed. Next time you look up at the moon, you would just think there's three guys dead
00:25:41.060
floating around the moon. So this had to be a success or would just ruin the romance of the moon.
00:25:45.940
All right. So you say, okay, they got this plan. They got to come with the crew. Let's talk about
00:25:49.900
the crew here. First person, the commander of this mission was the guy who was the investigator of
00:25:55.720
the Apollo 1 disaster, Frank Borman. Tell us about Frank Borman because I never knew, I didn't know
00:26:01.100
anything about this guy, but after reading about it, I was like, man, this guy, he's, he's awesome. So
00:26:05.440
tell us about Frank. He really is awesome. He was universally respected by his fellow astronauts
00:26:10.280
astronauts and by all the NASA managers. Not everyone liked him equally, but everyone respected
00:26:16.680
him profoundly. He was a completely no nonsense, all business kind of person. While most of the
00:26:22.460
astronauts drove sports cars, a lot of Corvettes, Borman drove an old pickup truck. He didn't go in
00:26:27.920
for any of the fast living that any of the astronauts did. He was there for a single reason,
00:26:33.300
one reason only, and that was to beat the Soviets to the moon. He was a true cold warrior.
00:26:37.680
And his only interest in being at NASA was to fight the cold war on the ultimate battlefield,
00:26:42.960
outer space. That's where he believed he could do the most good. He had very little interest in
00:26:47.120
exploration or the romance of the moon. He was there to protect America, which he believed was
00:26:52.840
the greatest country in the world, loved America, and to defeat the Soviet Union, America's greatest
00:26:58.540
threat. And so that's why he was an astronaut. He, as I said, commanded the respect of everybody.
00:27:05.720
And he was training to be the commander of Apollo 9. But when it came time to change Apollo 8's
00:27:12.560
mission, they called Frank Borman in from California, where he was working to improve
00:27:17.260
the command module and laid it out for him very clearly. They said, Frank, we have a top secret
00:27:23.060
memo from the CIA warning that the Soviet Union can make it to the moon with men before the end of
00:27:30.160
the year. Do you want to go to the moon? And without consulting his wife or his family or even
00:27:36.200
his two crewmates, Borman said, we'll go. And that's how it started.
00:27:41.000
That's how it started. I love that. So the next guy was Jim Lovell. And if people have seen Apollo 13,
00:27:46.120
they know about this guy. But why was Jim picked to be a part of this mission?
00:27:50.680
Well, Lovell was part of the Borman's crew. He had replaced Mike Collins, who would ultimately end
00:27:55.780
up on Apollo 11 when Mike Collins had a medical problem. So Lovell had been working with Borman's
00:28:01.260
crew. And he was kind of the polar opposite of Borman. He was as nice and warm and friendly a
00:28:07.420
guy as you could ever meet. By the way, Borman is as nice and friendly and warm a guy as you could
00:28:11.140
ever meet. You just got to get to know him. But on the outside, Lovell was very warm and approachable
00:28:15.960
and universally really loved by his fellow astronauts and the people at NASA. He had grown up very poor kid
00:28:23.780
in Milwaukee. He had lost his dad in a car accident very early on, grew up really poor in Milwaukee.
00:28:29.760
But he, unlike Borman, always had dreamed of space, at least since he was in high school, I should say.
00:28:34.400
He was mesmerized by rockets and the idea of space travel and pushing into the unknown and exploring.
00:28:41.000
And he had even built and launched a rocket in high school. He had wrote his thesis at Naval Academy,
00:28:46.860
not on ancient battle tactics or dry subjects like that, but about the possibilities of
00:28:51.860
rocket travel in space. And so you would have thought that Borman and Lovell maybe could not
00:28:58.440
have been more opposite. And yet they had been paired together on Gemini 7, which was a two-week,
00:29:04.120
believe it or not, 14-day mission in a capsule no larger than the front half of a Volkswagen Beetle.
00:29:10.840
They spent 14 days together. And even though they seemed different from each other,
00:29:14.380
they could not have meshed better. They got along beautifully. They sang together. They really
00:29:18.600
liked each other. I'd go so far as to say they loved each other. And when they splashed down and
00:29:22.600
finally came out after this 14 days on the recovery ship, Lovell said, I'd like to announce our
00:29:27.580
engagement. And no one laughed harder at that than Borman. So they had flown together in space
00:29:32.840
before, longest space mission ever, manned space mission. And so they were naturals together.
00:29:38.800
And then they had a third crew member who seemed to be this uncanny combination of the both of them.
00:29:43.900
His name was Bill Anders. He was younger than Lovell and Borman by five years and had never made
00:29:50.000
a space flight before. But he loved the science of it. He loved the idea of exploration, but he was
00:29:55.920
also a true believer in the Cold War and the importance of America's mission in beating the
00:30:01.000
Soviets and understood that to be the true purpose of this push to the moon. And so this crew really had
00:30:08.240
meshed so beautifully. And when Borman was called in that day, he knew that his crew would be ready
00:30:14.400
to go. And so he answered for them and indeed they were ready. We're going to take a quick break for
00:30:18.840
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00:32:28.360
The other thing I think we need to point out is oftentimes when we think about these astronauts,
00:32:31.720
think of like sort of like these risk-taking guys, you know, riding, driving Corvettes,
00:32:36.000
fighter pilots. A lot of them were fighter pilots or test pilots. But the other thing you forget,
00:32:41.160
like these guys were incredibly, incredibly smart. I mean, they had advanced degrees,
00:32:45.220
rocketry, nuclear physics, et cetera. I mean, they were like the whole complete package.
00:32:50.960
They were. They're almost impossible to believe how well-rounded they were. Anders was a nuclear
00:32:56.300
engineer. Borman held his own against the top science students in the world when he was getting
00:33:01.800
his master's and same for Lovell. So these guys were as smart as they were brilliant pilots.
00:33:08.040
They really were the best of the best. There is no other way to say it than to say
00:33:12.160
they had the right stuff. They really did. But the thing that impressed me most, and you know,
00:33:17.360
I worked with all three of these guys in person for countless hours writing the book and got to
00:33:23.600
know them really well and their families. The thing that struck me most was just what regular guys they
00:33:29.620
were. Because when you read about them and how accomplished they were academically and in airplanes
00:33:34.200
and in spacecraft, they seem almost of a different species. But at least for these three guys,
00:33:38.980
Borman, Lovell, and Anders, I don't know that I've met three nicer, more regular guys. I think NASA
00:33:44.800
just really, really knew what it was doing when they picked these early astronauts.
00:33:50.200
So not only you talk about what's going on with these men, we'll talk about their mission here in a
00:33:53.980
bit, but their wives, each of all of them were married. None of them were bachelors. They all had
00:33:58.720
families, but their wives played a big role in this story as well. So, I mean, tell us about
00:34:02.200
these women. There's always that phrase, you know, behind every strong man or important man,
00:34:06.460
there's a strong woman. So, I mean, in this case, it really was true with these three guys.
00:34:10.100
It was so true. And something that I'm a little ashamed to say, I didn't really expect going in.
00:34:14.200
I was so focused on the flight itself and the astronauts themselves that it didn't occur to me
00:34:19.680
how important these women were. But it took me all of a few minutes in the presence of each of these men
00:34:25.020
to realize that their wives were every bit as important to the flight of Apollo 8, every bit as
00:34:31.060
courageous and every bit as heroic. Without them, I don't think this would have happened.
00:34:34.560
And these women endured incredible stress. They knew that on any given moment, and they knew this
00:34:41.080
back into the test pilot and fighter pilot days, that a black car could pull up to their driveway
00:34:45.760
and give them some terrible news. It happened to their friends all the time. But the idea that
00:34:50.300
these three would be the first ever to go to the moon was extremely stressful, especially on Susan
00:34:57.080
Borman. Susan Borman had been very close friends with Pat White, who is the wife of Ed White,
00:35:02.800
one of the three astronauts who perished aboard the Apollo 1 test. And Susan saw what the tragedy had
00:35:11.060
done to her friend, Pat White, who had started to drink and whose life began to fall apart.
00:35:16.260
And when Susan saw that and had endured already so much stress from watching Frank in a very high
00:35:22.280
stress and high risk occupation, she started to drink a bit herself and then a bit more and even more.
00:35:27.860
When Frank came home that day and told her about the change in mission and that he would be
00:35:32.840
commanding the first manned flight ever to the moon, she smiled and hugged him and told him how
00:35:38.620
proud she was, how much she loved him. And then she went into another room. And when Frank was out of
00:35:44.080
earshot, she kicked the door over and over and was dying inside. She felt certain from that moment
00:35:50.420
forward. And I mean certain, not probably, not more likely than not, but certain that Frank was going to
00:35:55.300
die aboard the mission. But Susan, like many of the other astronaut wives, considered it her duty,
00:36:00.820
not just to her husband, but to her country, never to betray the stress she was under, never to show
00:36:06.500
her husband a moment's doubt about the security of his home. His job was to pay attention to flying
00:36:13.600
the spacecraft and her job was to make his home as stress-free as possible. So Frank had no idea
00:36:18.840
of the suffering Susan was enduring and really started to endure when this mission became a lunar one.
00:36:23.920
Yeah. I mean, that was the big point that hit home to me that you did a good job is all three
00:36:27.660
women. It wasn't just about, oh, this is so great. My husband's doing this or like, it's a, or I'm
00:36:31.700
afraid for my husband. They all three of them, like these three guys, they had, it was very mission
00:36:37.020
oriented. It was something bigger than themselves and that they were behind it 1% because it was,
00:36:41.880
it was a way we could defeat that existential threat of the Soviets.
00:36:45.560
Exactly. And they also believed in it because their husbands believed in it was important to their
00:36:49.740
husbands and it was important to them. And so they made very happy homes for their husbands
00:36:56.000
and trusted that their husbands knew what they were doing. Marilyn Lovell and Valerie Anders believed
00:37:02.420
that things were going to be okay. Susan did not. Although it's so interesting when Bill Anders came
00:37:08.500
home that night and told Valerie about it, she asked, what do you think the chances are of success?
00:37:14.340
Yes. And Bill knew that Valerie didn't want to hear any BS and he never BSed with her anyway.
00:37:20.840
So he thought about it and he calculated and he said, I think these are the odds of success for
00:37:25.860
Apollo 8. I think there's a one third chance that we come home and have a successful mission.
00:37:31.740
There's a one third chance that we have an unsuccessful mission, but we somehow make it back home.
00:37:36.820
And there's a one third chance we never come back. And Valerie was delighted with those odds.
00:37:42.060
She would have calculated them to be even riskier. She was the daughter of a California highway
00:37:46.580
patrolman. So she understood what it meant to know that there's a chance that someone very
00:37:50.700
important to you might not come home that night. So this is what these women were made of. They're
00:37:54.840
incredible women. And I spent a lot of time with Marilyn and Valerie. Susan Borman, by the time I met her,
00:38:02.020
was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's and really couldn't communicate. But I certainly understood
00:38:06.460
what she meant to Frank. It seemed difficult for him to answer any questions without
00:38:10.320
saying how much he loved his wife and what she meant to him. And I saw it in person over and
00:38:15.300
over. So this was unbeknownst to me when I began work on this, a real love story and a story of
00:38:22.300
relationships and families like I've never come across before. It was a wonderful bonus to me.
00:38:29.360
And I tried to make it a very important part of the book because it was a very important part of this
00:38:33.400
mission. Yeah, you did a great job with that. Well, getting into the mission, I thought this is
00:38:37.180
interesting. Hitting to that point that these guys are just regular guys. You talk about what
00:38:41.780
they did before they headed over to the Kennedy Space Center. I guess that's in Florida, right?
00:38:47.020
Or is that in Houston? Yes. Yeah, Florida. They're going to launch from Florida. Yeah,
00:38:51.220
they launched from Florida. Frank, he's cleaning out the garage. He was washing the car. It was like
00:38:58.560
any other Saturday. And then he's like, I'm going to be at the moon here in a week. But it's just
00:39:04.180
like a normal day. Yeah. If anything, he's saying, you know, don't open my presents. Wait for me to
00:39:08.700
come back because they're going at Christmas. And they are balancing checkbooks. They're painting. I
00:39:14.000
think Jim Lovell did a little bit of painting of the house. But, you know, think about it. These
00:39:21.080
guys have to be, by DNA, a little bit different from the rest of us in order to think about climbing
00:39:25.780
on a 363-foot-tall rocket that has flown only twice and failed in its second flight, really,
00:39:32.360
and go to the moon where no one's ever gone before. And so, in a certain way, it makes sense
00:39:37.280
that they're so even keeled about this, so close to launch. All right. So, let's talk about the
00:39:42.320
mission itself. Successful launch. And everyone, again, this is the first time. So, no one was sure
00:39:46.860
how things were going to go. It could have just exploded off the launch pad. But there was a
00:39:50.980
successful launch. Did everything pretty much go according to what they planned getting to the
00:39:55.600
moon and starting that orbit? Well, let's talk about the launch for just one second. For the four
00:39:59.960
months that the astronauts were training, they were almost nonstop in simulators. And these were
00:40:03.480
the greatest simulators ever built. And they were supposed to be able to approximate almost anything
00:40:07.940
that could have occurred on their launch. Within a second or two of the launch, Bill Anders believed
00:40:13.980
that the rocket's fins were being shorn off by the launch tower. It was so much more violent and so much
00:40:20.500
more crazy and terribly shaking than anything the simulator could ever reproduce that he believed
00:40:28.320
something was going wrong. It was so violent, the astronauts could not see their instruments.
00:40:33.220
They could not communicate with mission control. They couldn't control their limbs. The only thing
00:40:38.400
Anders really could see was Bormann take his hand off the abort handle. Bormann told me he would
00:40:44.240
rather have died than abort by mistake. And he means that literally. And so, for about eight or 10 seconds,
00:40:50.860
Anders thinks, this is so much more terrible and violent than anything we experienced in simulation.
00:40:55.400
Something has to be going wrong. But 10 or 12 seconds after launch, that Saturn V has cleared
00:41:00.580
the launch tower and they all realize we are actually on our way. And indeed they were. And
00:41:05.680
the Saturn V delivers them first into Earth orbit and it does it perfectly. They're in Earth orbit for
00:41:11.920
about, I don't know, 90 minutes or two hours to make sure everything's okay and checking out. And then
00:41:17.440
it comes time to do a maneuver called translunar injection, TLI. And this is something that's never been
00:41:23.820
done in the history of the world. This is when they have to relight the third stage engine and set
00:41:30.160
course for the moon. And as the countdown happens to that, Chris Kraft, who's in charge of mission
00:41:35.660
control, is watching this. And he sees the engine light and he sees the green blip on the screen in
00:41:43.220
mission control go from an orbit around Earth outbound now. And this is the first time human beings have
00:41:51.600
ever left home and ever set out in search of another world. And Kraft, who's made the rules
00:41:58.200
for mission control, is overwhelmed as are so many others in mission control. There are tears.
00:42:03.220
And Kraft, one of Kraft's rule is nobody talks to the astronauts, but another astronaut who's called
00:42:07.560
a Capcom. But Kraft is so overwhelmed by the moment, he has to say something. He knows he can't get on the
00:42:12.860
radio to the astronauts. He made that rule. So he says out loud into mission control to everyone and
00:42:18.020
to no one all at once, he says, you're on your way. You're really on your way now. And in fact,
00:42:23.580
that was true. For the first time in our existence, mankind had left home and set course for another
00:42:29.800
world. I think it's important to point out too, at this point, the Russians hadn't sent that mission.
00:42:34.700
They had a chance like early December to do it, but nothing happened. And that's when they realized,
00:42:39.920
the Americans realized, we're going to be the first ones there if this goes according to plan.
00:42:44.620
I'm so glad you reminded me of the Soviet launch window was December 6th, 15 days before the launch
00:42:50.780
of Apollo 8. And people in mission control were watching by the minute to see what was going to
00:42:56.520
happen. They were certain it was going to happen because the Soviets had what at least appeared to
00:43:00.680
be two perfectly successful launches unmanned around the moon before that. But nothing happened on
00:43:07.180
December 6th or December 7th. And pretty soon it became clear to the Americans that they had the
00:43:13.220
chance with Apollo 8 to send the first human beings to the moon. It turns out the Soviets likely had a
00:43:20.620
crew at the launch pad in Kazakhstan and a fueled rocket there. But because there were problems on their
00:43:27.940
two previous launches that they never let the world know about, the decision was made not to send
00:43:33.120
them. It was viewed as too risky. But they didn't worry too much about it. Because even in December, just a
00:43:37.960
couple weeks before Apollo 8 was scheduled to launch, many people in the Soviet space program did not believe
00:43:43.080
the Americans, no matter what they were saying about Apollo 8, would be crazy enough to actually do it.
00:43:47.820
That was so dangerous and so risky to send people with four months of training so suddenly, many of the Soviets
00:43:54.900
didn't believe Apollo 8 could possibly happen. And even when it was in flight, in its first hour, some people in the
00:44:00.620
Soviet Union still didn't believe it. That's how crazy they viewed it.
00:44:03.960
So they passed that point where the Earth's gravity no longer has an effect on the module and the moon's
00:44:12.040
gravity. And that was a big deal. What happens as they get closer and closer to the moon? Any other
00:44:16.800
problems? Or are things just going according to plan? All the calculations they put in the software
00:44:22.560
Everything's working great. Frank Borman, however, gets very sick on the way to the moon. And it's a total
00:44:28.260
mystery. He thinks it's because he took a sleeping pill. He'd never taken any kind of medications
00:44:33.600
before. But for whatever reason, he's very sick. And there's vomit and there's diarrhea in the cabin.
00:44:39.760
Bill Anders described it. I know this sounds crazy, but he described it with such poetry and beauty to
00:44:44.640
me about how things looked. And that even though it was terrible to see these things floating in the
00:44:49.820
cabin, there were wondrous examples of Newton's laws of physics. But it was a very big problem.
00:44:55.320
We probably don't have time to go into it, but it very nearly turned this flight around.
00:44:59.720
No one understood why Borman was sick. And he'd never, since he started taking flight lessons when
00:45:04.420
he was 15 years old, had ever been sick in an airplane or a fighter jet or a test aircraft or even a
00:45:10.440
spacecraft. And here he was deathly sick. And NASA had to figure out what to do because if he had
00:45:16.780
something contagious, I mean, 30,000 people were going to die that year from the Hong Kong flu.
00:45:21.580
If he had the Hong Kong flu or any other contagious disease or sickness, his crewmates were going to
00:45:26.820
get it soon enough. And it would be hard enough with one sick person. But three, they came very
00:45:30.640
close to turning this around, but finally decided to let it continue. Other than that, the flight is
00:45:36.480
going beautifully, except that even as the flight approaches the moon, Lovell makes a very strange
00:45:42.160
broadcast to mission control. And he says, you know, as a matter of interest, we have yet to see the
00:45:47.060
moon. The way they are positioned in the aircraft, they're looking back at earth. And by the way,
00:45:51.240
of the many, many firsts that occur on Apollo 8, here's another one. These are the first three
00:45:56.940
human beings ever to see the earth as a complete sphere. And by the time they're closing in on the
00:46:02.160
moon, the entire earth fits behind Lovell's thumbnail, but they still haven't seen the moon.
00:46:10.380
And that's when they got into orbit. That's when they went behind the moon. They were the first humans
00:46:13.680
to go behind the moon and see what we call the dark side of the moon.
00:46:17.100
Right. Remember that we always see the same side of the moon from earth. No humans had ever seen
00:46:22.900
the far side of the moon before Apollo 8 approached. And Bill Anders is looking out the window and he
00:46:28.280
sees millions of stars. It seems like millions of them. But he's not seen the moon yet. And all of a
00:46:35.540
sudden, out his small window, it goes black. And he thinks, oh, right when we're getting close,
00:46:41.820
there's an oil spill or oil drippage across my window and I can't see. And then he told me that's
00:46:47.720
when the hairs on the back of his neck stood up because he realized that was not oil. Those were
00:46:52.120
the mountains on the far side of the moon. These three men had now become the first human beings
00:46:57.860
ever to arrive at the moon and the first human eyes ever to see the far side of the moon.
00:47:03.780
I mean, Lovell was romantic. Was Borman, did that experience elicit any type of emotional
00:47:12.920
response in him? Or was he still kind of all business? Like, all right, we got to get back to
00:47:17.620
No, he was every bit as human as the others because he had told them in their training,
00:47:22.580
in their flight planning, when we get there, I don't want anybody looking out the window.
00:47:26.380
We have to stick straight to the flight plan. We have to do everything by the book.
00:47:29.480
But Lovell told me when they got there, the three of them had their faces pressed up against the
00:47:33.500
window, like three kids looking into a candy store. They were overwhelmed. It was beyond
00:47:38.920
anything they could have imagined. Here they were at the moon and they had made it.
00:47:44.800
So not only were they just going to go behind the moon, they were going to actually get in orbit.
00:47:48.140
So they were going around the moon. How many times did they go around, orbit the moon on that mission?
00:47:52.620
The flight plan calls for 10 orbits over 20 hours. So about two hours each orbit.
00:47:56.960
Okay. And I guess on one of their final orbits, it's on Christmas Eve and there was going to be
00:48:01.820
a special broadcast to the entire world. And this is something people don't realize that NASA just
00:48:08.260
said, you guys can say whatever you want. And I can imagine the pressure of you have this televised
00:48:14.000
audience. The whole world is watching. You're up at the moon. There's this momentous occasion.
00:48:17.860
Humans have reached the moon. What do you say? What did these guys end up saying at this special?
00:48:23.420
It was Christmas Eve, correct? Am I getting that right? It's Christmas Eve. They're on their ninth
00:48:27.780
revolution of 10. And all they'd been told by NASA was say something appropriate. There will be more
00:48:32.660
people listening to you than have ever listened to a single voice ever. Nearly a third of the world's
00:48:37.680
population that was estimated would be tuned in. And all the direction they were given is say
00:48:41.480
something appropriate. And now Borman, who has the greatest laugh you've ever heard. He's such a
00:48:45.280
wonderful laugh. He laughs every time he tells me the story. He said, can you imagine today leaving that
00:48:49.520
kind of thing up to three astronauts? Now there would be 14 committees and 16 focus groups and ad
00:48:54.260
agencies, but they did leave it to the astronauts. The astronauts couldn't figure out something
00:48:58.300
appropriate for the moment. So Borman turned it over to a literary insensitive friend he had and asked
00:49:04.120
for advice as the flight was closing in. That friend couldn't help. So he gave it to another friend
00:49:08.960
and that friend was stymied. But at 2.30 in the morning in that second friend's bedroom,
00:49:14.640
that man's wife walked in and saw all kinds of crumpled up paper on the ground and said,
00:49:18.360
what's going on here? And the guy confided in her, this is what the astronauts need. It was top
00:49:22.880
secret. She said, oh, I know exactly what they should say. She told her husband. He thought that
00:49:27.060
was perfect. He reported it to Borman, who thought it was perfect. The astronauts wrote it down on a
00:49:32.180
fireproof paper, put it in their flight plan, never told anyone, didn't tell their wives, didn't tell
00:49:36.020
NASA, didn't tell George Lowe or Chris Kraft. They just went. So here they are on Christmas Eve on the
00:49:41.560
ninth orbit. Now they've already done something amazing. They've taken a picture on their fourth orbit
00:49:45.860
of the earth rising over the lunar horizon. This is a photograph called Earthrise, which I argue is
00:49:52.140
maybe the single most powerful and important photograph ever taken. We're looking back on
00:49:57.280
ourselves. So they've done something incredible. But here the whole world is tuning in. It's not just
00:50:02.860
the three of them. And so they're giving a tour of the moon. It's being broadcast live to much of the
00:50:08.480
world. And right at the end, when they have a couple minutes left, Borman announces that they have a
00:50:13.500
message for the people of the world. And he turns it over to Anders. And Anders begins to read the
00:50:20.200
first lines from the book of Genesis in the beginning. And people in mission control immediately
00:50:27.600
break into tears. This is a message for everyone. This is a message to the entire world at the end
00:50:34.040
of one of the worst, most divisive, violent, and destructive years in American history, a year that saw
00:50:41.460
the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, in which there's violence in the streets
00:50:45.760
all over, including in my hometown of Chicago, in which 15,000 Americans would die in Vietnam and so
00:50:52.380
much else had gone wrong. Here the men are speaking an origin story, a story for everyone, one that so
00:50:59.200
many of us can relate to about how we got here and how we are all of one. And it's exactly about what
00:51:05.700
they'd seen shooting that Earthrise picture. There are no continents or countries, I should say.
00:51:11.380
There's just a single blue marble hanging in an infinity of space. And they are reading
00:51:16.320
from the book of Genesis. And Anders reads his lines, and Lovell reads his lines, and Borman finishes
00:51:22.340
with his lines. And by the time Borman's done, people around the world are in tears. And Borman says he
00:51:29.360
wants to wish everybody on Earth a Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas to the people on the good Earth.
00:51:34.220
And the broadcast goes dark. That moment, they lose their transmission. And around the world,
00:51:40.680
there are reports around the world of people streaming out of their homes, out of buildings,
00:51:45.740
out of taverns, out of apartments, looking skyward to try to catch a glimpse of these three men in
00:51:52.160
their tiny spacecraft who had spoken to so many of them, spoken so inspirationally, knowing it's
00:51:57.720
impossible to catch a glimpse of them, but looking for them nonetheless. It was an incredibly emotional,
00:52:03.140
important moment at the end of this most terrible of years.
00:52:07.200
Yeah, that moment, I got teary-eyed when you were describing it. I mean, it's just super powerful.
00:52:11.980
So they finished the orbit. They head back home. And this was fraught with potentials of disaster.
00:52:18.520
And things could go, like, they weren't out of the woods yet. Things could go wrong here. But
00:52:22.560
did everything pretty much go according to plan when they were getting back to Earth?
00:52:26.080
Well, it didn't look like it right away. They needed to get out of lunar orbit. And in order
00:52:30.860
to do that, they have to light that single engine, that engine that has no backup because they have
00:52:34.980
not taken a lunar module. And that has to be done precisely. And NASA knows that they're going to get
00:52:40.420
a call from the astronauts if everything went well at this precise moment. And that call does not come
00:52:45.340
in. And it doesn't come in five seconds later. It doesn't come in 10 seconds or even a minute later.
00:52:50.040
Several minutes pass and they don't hear anything. They think there's every chance that this crew
00:52:54.560
might have been lost. But that ends up being an antenna problem. So he did actually light that
00:52:59.140
engine and get out of lunar orbit. Now they need to cruise home. And on the way, there is a very
00:53:04.780
dangerous episode in which a mistake by Jim Lovell instructs the spacecraft itself that it's back on
00:53:12.880
the launch pad in Florida. And that disorients the entire spacecraft. And it's such a dramatic
00:53:18.400
development. And the astronauts and NASA have to work so brilliantly to correct the
00:53:24.520
mistake. But Lovell told me later that he learned so much from that mistake and from correcting the
00:53:31.240
mistake that would help him later on Apollo 13 when the spacecraft was in real trouble itself.
00:53:37.820
So this is a really dramatic return home. And then the reentry into Earth's atmosphere
00:53:42.780
had never been done from lunar distance at that kind of speed. And that's just an unbelievable
00:53:50.720
Yeah. And then they're home. And, you know, jubilation and that kind of that they were the
00:53:55.160
first to make it to the moon. That led on to pole 11 landing on the moon. I'm curious, like what
00:54:00.300
happened to the Russian, the Soviet space program after the U.S. beat them to the moon? Did it kind
00:54:07.940
Yeah. Well, they never, they never did make it to the moon. And I think what they did is refocus
00:54:11.700
their energies on space stations. Some were something that was realistic, more realistic
00:54:16.440
in which they could take a lead. I think this flight was devastating to them. If you talk to
00:54:21.080
cosmonauts or read interviews with cosmonauts, you'll see that this was devastating. When they
00:54:25.700
realized that this actually was occurring and this was not a propaganda broadcast, this was real.
00:54:31.480
It was devastating to them. They truly believed they could have done it first and should have done
00:54:35.200
it first, but they gave all due credit. You have to say they really respected the astronauts and NASA
00:54:41.320
and what they'd done and really gave them their due. And they viewed it as the United States had
00:54:45.320
just won the space race. When the astronauts return, there are ticker tape parades for them
00:54:50.540
everywhere. This is a victory unlike any other. And there are millions of people show up in major
00:54:57.200
cities across the country in New York, Chicago, and Houston. The astronauts are celebrated. Tens of
00:55:03.120
thousands of cards and letters and telegrams pour in. And of course, the astronauts can only read a
00:55:08.400
small fraction of them. But Frank Borman got one that he told me he remembered, knew he would
00:55:15.220
remember forever. It had come from an anonymous person in the Midwest, and it was only four words
00:55:20.880
long. And it said, thanks, you saved 1968. And that's how so many people felt. When Apollo 8 launched
00:55:29.120
on December 21st, 1968, Time Magazine had already decided on the dissenter as its man of the year. And of
00:55:37.360
course, that made sense in this most terrible of all years. By the time these first three humans who
00:55:42.400
had ever left home and visited another world in return, by the time they came back, Time Magazine
00:55:47.820
had changed its man of the year to the crew of Apollo 8. That's an honor they wouldn't even bestow on the
00:55:54.060
crew of Apollo 11, the first landing mission, which gives you an idea of what this mission, Apollo 8,
00:55:58.980
meant to the United States and to the world at the time.
00:56:01.460
I'm curious, Robert, as you get to talk to these men, the crew, the people involved with this
00:56:08.000
mission, I mean, I imagine you couldn't walk away interacting with these people without taking
00:56:15.120
away some life lessons. I mean, how are you changed in learning about this mission and writing about it?
00:56:21.540
Well, one of the things that changed me profoundly was the belief now that even things that appear
00:56:28.840
absolutely impossible are possible if you believe in them enough and it means enough to you. This
00:56:35.320
flight really should have been impossible under the circumstances. But because we viewed the mission
00:56:42.620
as so important and because we viewed it in an existential way that we really, it was part of our
00:56:47.140
survival in many ways. And because nobody had the sensibility enough to understand that this was
00:56:55.160
impossible, we went ahead with it anyway, and it happened. And that's remained incredibly inspiring
00:57:00.840
to me. It made me very proud of our country and very proud of what it meant to just think we were
00:57:07.120
going to do it, even if it is impossible. That just is going to stay with me forever. The other thing
00:57:13.080
that really affected me was the astronauts' relationships with their wives and their families.
00:57:19.440
Apollo 8 was the only crew for any of the Gemini flights or the Apollo flights, which were the
00:57:23.840
multi-manned cruise, in which all the marriages survived. And marriage was a very difficult thing
00:57:30.180
for astronauts. They were away from home all the time. Bill Anders told me once he'd calculated
00:57:33.580
around the time of Apollo 8 that he was able to spend an average of 11 minutes with each of his
00:57:39.880
five kids each week. That's all he could. And the astronauts are away from home. They're
00:57:44.560
magnitudes more celebrated than rock stars even. They are beyond rock stars. They're wanted by
00:57:50.900
everybody. There's a lot of temptations. They're on the road all the time. But these three men
00:57:54.280
married childhood sweethearts. And these women were incredibly important to them. And that was
00:57:59.820
really inspiring to me as well. And the other thing is, as I mentioned before, just how regular
00:58:04.640
nice guys these were. You'd figure guys who were so brilliant academically and such accomplished
00:58:10.160
fighter pilots and test pilots and devoted their lives to the military were somehow a different
00:58:14.860
species. But in fact, there were so much ordinary nice guys, regular guys, that that seems to have
00:58:22.800
stayed with me all this time as well. Well, Robert, this has been a great conversation.
00:58:27.180
And I encourage everyone who's listening, go get the book because it's a fantastic read. Even though
00:58:31.160
you know how the story ends, you're not going to want to put this down. Where can people go to learn
00:58:35.600
more about the book? Oh, you can go to my website. It's just my name, Robert Kurson,
00:58:39.480
K-U-R-S-O-N, RobertKurson.com. Robert Kurson, thank you so much for your time. It's been an
00:58:44.900
absolute pleasure. A total pleasure for me, Brett. Thank you so much for having me.
00:58:48.280
My guest today was Robert Kurson. He's the author of the book, Rocket Men. It's available
00:58:51.360
on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about his work at
00:58:55.200
RobertKurson.com. That's K-U-R-S-O-N. Also check out our show notes at AOM.IS slash Rocket Men,
00:59:01.100
where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:59:09.480
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and
00:59:19.700
advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. And if you enjoyed
00:59:23.400
the podcast, you've gotten something out of it, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give
00:59:26.540
this review on iTunes or Stitcher. It helps out a lot. As always, thank you for your continued support.
00:59:30.440
Until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.