Apollo 8 astronauts discuss mission

Event part of LBJ Library commemoration of NASA's 50th anniversary.

By Jimmie Collins
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, April 24, 2009

Apollo wasn't a program of science; it was another battle in the Cold War, said William Anders, an astronaut who flew in the Apollo 8 mission.

"Sure we picked up rocks and took pictures. ... But if it hadn't been another competition with the Russians, we wouldn't have had the backup of the taxpayers to beat those dirty Commies," he quipped.

Anders and his Apollo 8 companions, Frank Borman and James Lovell, visited the University of Texas on Thursday for a panel discussion about the U.S. space program and an Apollo 8 reunion. More than 30 of the ground control crew members also attended the reunion. The discussion was related to an exhibit at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, "To the Moon: The American Space Program in the 1960s," which celebrates NASA's 50th anniversary.

In 1968, the three NASA astronauts became the first to leave the Earth's orbit and circumnavigate the moon. The Apollo 8 mission took seven days and included 10 orbits around the moon. The Apollo program was designed to land humans on the moon and bring them safely back to Earth; Apollo 8 is touted as setting the foundation for the Apollo 11 lunar landing.

"I just want to get this out there right now: I got motion sick and puked," announced Borman, who was mission commander. Nausea would usually be a cause to cancel a mission, but the three joked that if NASA had told them to turn around, they would have turned off the radio transmitter.

"We weren't going to cancel," Lovell said.

Borman, Lovell and Anders were the first people to see the far side of the moon and the Earth in its entirety. They sent back pictures of the Earth, which were transmitted via television. Anders is responsible for the famous earthrise photos taken when the spacecraft emerged from behind the moon.

He said Borman took the first shot of the earthrise, "but he didn't have the color film and the long lens," Anders said with a smirk.

Borman said he quickly told Anders to take the picture but that Anders replied, "Well, that's not on the flight plan."

The mission's overall objectives were to check equipment performance between the Earth and the moon and in lunar orbit, to observe the effects of a lunar-orbit environment on a crew, to demonstrate communication and tracking at lunar distances, and to obtain photos of possible lunar landing sites for future missions.

As for the future of the space program, Lovell said he thinks there is less support for returning to the moon and that he doesn't think a human will step foot on Mars in his lifetime or the next generation's.

"The Cold War was a major stimulus for Apollo; I don't think we have the same groundswell of taxpayer support for it," Lovell said. "I would hope that when we finally figure out how to go to Mars, and that may be considerably longer than I've heard, I hope that we could do it, not as Americans beating the Chinese or some silly thing like that, but we could do it as humans going from our home planet to the next planet."

jcollins@statesman.com; 445-3812