Free Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 by Robert Zimmerman

rockets, and flying Navy jets in routine patrols was no longer getting him closer to that dream. Pax River, as the test pilots called it, was one of the places he might get a chance to do so. He and Marilyn packed up their two kids, four-year-old Barbara and two-year-old Jay, and set off across the country for the coast of Maryland.
For the same reasons and at the same moment, Bill Anders also applied to the Air Force test pilots' school at Edwards. He had watched the momentum build in the space race and realized that human beings would soon be flying into space. "That's what I'd like to do," he told Valerie. 38 Unfortunately, because he lacked an advanced degree, Edwards Air Force Base rejected his application. Undeterred, he immediately enrolled in the Air Force Institute of Technology in Dayton, Ohio, and began two years of study in nuclear engineering and aeronautics.
Whether they knew it or not, all three men were putting themselves on the front lines of the Cold War, a war that was about to enter its hottest and most violent years. 39
     

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Chapter Three
"That Earth is Sure Looking Small."
To everyone on earth, the giant Saturn rocket and its Apollo 8 command module had now been reduced to three trebly voices on the radio.
To the astronauts, the earth had become a giant ball in space, shrinking from them at a startling rate. Its surface was a blue and white swirl of clouds and ocean, with some brown patches peeking out underneath the white. Only forty minutes after leaving earth orbit they were more than 20,000 miles from home.
With the earth still close by, Anders focused on getting 16mm movie and 70mm still shots of its retreating disk. He set the movie camera on its bracket, turned it on, then aimed a still camera out the window at the S4B engine. As he stared at the earth the spacecraft slowly shifted position, tilting so that the earth's globe moved from the bottom of the window to the top, Anders could see one of the third stage panels dropping away from them as it drifted out into space. The whole image reminded him of several scenes from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, playing in the theaters at that very moment.
Only here, it was real.
     

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Other incongruities between that film and real life stood out. In 2001 , the spaceships floated through space to the melodic harmonies of Strauss and Stravinsky. Apollo 8's astronauts were serenaded by pop music, mostly records that Anders had given mission control prior to leaving Houston. At that moment the ground was piping up Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass,
The spaceships in 2001 were large, sophisticated, and designed to make space travel seem as ordinary as possible. Stewardesses brought passengers meals. Payphones were available to make private phone calls to family and friends. Everyone traveled in street clothes, and were provided magnetic soles for their shoes so that they could "walk" from one part of the ship to another.
Nothing on Apollo 8 was comparable. Apollo 8 was a small, experimental spacecraft, being tested with human occupants for only the second time. For its trip to the moon, it had two sections, the small mini-van-sized command module where the astronauts lived, and the service module, which held the main engine, power supply, and life support systems.
The command module was shaped like a very wide-mouthed ice cream cone, about twelve feet high with a round base about thirteen feet across. Its entire white surface was covered with a honeycomb made of fiberglass and
     

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injected with epoxy resin. When the spacecraft finally reentered the earth's atmosphere on its way home, this resin would burn off, taking the intense heat with it, and thereby protecting the three men inside.
Five windows had been built into that surface, two for Borman on the left, two for Anders on the right, and the round hatch window for Lovell in the center. Also built into that surface were two independent sets of six small thruster engines, each jet