Apollo 8

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

The three men circling the Moon, the first men in history to do so, recited these opening lines from the book of Genesis in what, in today’s post-Christian world, seem unthinkable. But what better way to respond to the void, to Creation itself, as humanity took its first halting steps out of the cradle, to voyage, as has been said elsewhere, where no man has gone before?

It was not originally intended to be so.

Apollo 8’s scheduled mission was to be the first manned test of the lunar module in earth orbit. Two things changed this and made Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders the first humans to step into the translunar space, the vast emptiness between Earth orbit and the Moon, 238,000 miles away.

On a smaller, more practical note, lunar module deliveries were two months behind schedule.

From a larger, geo-political angle, the C.I.A. had credible intelligence that the Soviet Union was planning to throw a last-ditch effort into what looked like a United States victory in the space race: a manned circumlunar flight with a Soyuz space capsule. Seeing an opportunity for a major propaganda coup, NASA announced, on November 12, 1968, that Apollo 8 would be the first spacecraft to send men to orbit the Moon.

Mission objectives were rewritten:

   - Put Apollo’s navigation systems to the test

   - Prove out long-test communication and tracking systems

   - Photograph potential lunar landing sites

   - Obtain additional data on gravitational anomalies for future landings

Apollo 8 launched on December 21, 1968 at 7:51 am. Eleven minutes later the third stage entered Earth orbit. After three revolutions around the globe, and after everything checked out from NASA and within the capsule, the third stage ignited for trans-lunar injection, a never-before done feat.

For 66 hours the command module (there was no lunar module on this flight) crossed the silent vacuum of translunar space, cruising at something like 3,500 miles an hour if my own rough calculations are correct. Then the lonely spacecraft orbited the Moon a leisurely ten times, at an altitude of some 70 miles above the gray silicate surface, and the astronauts read from the Word of God.

Three days after Apollo 8 splashed down into the Pacific and was rescued by the U.S.S. Yorktown. The first manned orbit of the Moon was complete; the flight time was 147 hours and 42 seconds, a couple hours over six days.