TWINS?

‘‘I had pointed Frank Borman at one of the Gemini long-duration missions from the very begininng,’’ Deke Slayton wrote in his autobiography, ‘‘because of his tenacity.” That tenacity, some argued, had also led to his removal from the right – hand pilot’s seat, alongside Gus Grissom, on the original Gemini V. It has been speculated that the two men’s strong personalities might have made them incompatible as a commander-pilot duo and the no-nonsense, decisive Borman was instead directed to lead Gemini VII. Some astronauts regarded him as obnoxious and Gene Cernan labelled him a “tight-assed son-of-a-bitch’’, but none questioned his abilities or impeccable leadership skills. Indeed, he remains one of only five American astronauts to have commanded a crew on his very first mission. One day, in the not too distant future after Gemini VII, his talent and credentials would also lead him to command the first human expedition to the Moon.

Frank Frederick Borman II was born in Gary, Indiana, on 14 March 1928. As a child, he suffered from numerous sinus problems, caused by the cold and damp weather, so his father moved the family to the better climate of Tucson, Arizona, which became Borman’s hometown. Like many future astronauts, he could trace his fascination with aviation from an early age and began flying at the age of 15. From Tucson High School, Borman studied for a bachelor’s degree at the Military Academy in West Point, followed by a master’s in aeronautical engineering from the California Institute of Technology.

After graduation from West Point in 1950, ranking eighth in his class, he entered the Air Force, serving as a fighter pilot in the Philippines and later as an instructor attached to various squadrons across the United States. During one practice dive­bombing run, he ruptured an eardrum, leading him to fear that he may never fly again. However, Borman recovered. Before coming to NASA in September 1962, he also graduated from the Air Force’s Aerospace Pilot School as an experimental test flier and served for a time as an assistant professor of thermodynamics and fluid dynamics at West Point. At the time of his selection, he had more experience in jet aircraft – some 3,600 hours – than any of the others in the New Nine.

Clearly, even among the Nine, Borman stood out. During the selection process, his absolute devotion to the West Point military code of Duty-Honour-Country and his unwavering commitment to whatever mission he was assigned led some psychologists to shake their heads in disbelief. Surely nobody could be that uncomplicated, they thought. Yet that was Borman. Like Gus Grissom, he did not dabble in small talk and, in true military fashion, made whatever decisions needed to be made, stuck by them and told his crew afterwards.

In many ways, James Arthur Lovell Jr – whom Pete Conrad had nicknamed ‘Shaky’ for his bubbling stores of nervous energy – was virtually Borman’s twin. Both were born within two weeks of each other, both held equivalent ranks within different services, both were fair-haired and blue-eyed and both were selected as astronaut candidates together. Lovell was born on 25 March 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio and his fascination with rockets, like Borman’s with aviation, manifested itself at a young age. In his book on the Apollo 13 mission, co-authored with Jeffrey Kluger, Lovell recounted sheepishly visiting a chemical supplier in Chicago one day in the spring of 1945 to buy chemicals with which he and two school friends could build a rocket for their science project. Despite the boys’ admonitions over wanting to create a liquid-fuelled device, like those of Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth,

their teacher guided them instead towards a solid-propelled one, loaded with potassium nitrate, sulphur and charcoal. Days later, after packing the gunpowder ingredients into a shell of cardboard tubes, a wooden nosecone and a set of fins, the boys took their rocket into a field, lit the fuse and ran like hell.

“Crouching with his friends,” Lovell wrote in third-person narrative about his exploits, “he watched agape as the rocket he had just ignited smouldered for an instant, hissed promisingly and, to the astonishment of the three boys, leapt from the ground. Trailing smoke, it zigzagged into the air, climbing about 80 feet before it wobbled ominously, took a sharp and surprising turn, and with a loud crack exploded in a splendid suicide.”

Lovell’s interest in the workings and possibilities of such projectiles eclipsed that of his two friends, who regarded this as little more than a lark, but his family situation made it unrealistic to hope that a career in rocketry was within his grasp. The Lovells had moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when he was a young boy and his father’s death in a 1940 car accident placed enormous pressure on his mother to make ends meet. The military and, in particular, the Navy, seemed an attractive alternative. (Lovell’s uncle, in fact, had been one of world’s earliest naval aviators during the First World War.) He was accepted, eventually, into the Navy, which offered to pay for two years of an undergraduate degree, provide initial flight

training and six months of active sea duty. Lovell jumped at the chance and, within months, was registered as an engineering student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He would complete his studies in 1952, receiving a bachelor’s degree from the Naval Academy at Annapolis.

Whilst at the academy, he met Marilyn Gerlach, whom he married barely three hours after his graduation ceremony… and who had typed up his carefully – prepared thesis on liquid-fuelled rocketry. Flight training consumed much of the next two years, after which Lovell was attached to Composite Squadron Three, based in San Francisco, whose speciality included nighttime takeoffs and landings on aircraft carriers at the height of the Korean conflict. Several months later, he was flying F-2H Banshee jets from the Shangri-La aircraft carrier over the Sea of Japan, routinely swooping in to land on its deck. On one occasion, however, a routine flight went seriously wrong. Moreover, the flight was his first mission in darkness.

The only means of determining where the carrier was at night, Lovell wrote, was a beamed, 518-kilocycle signal from the Shangri-La, which allowed the Banshee’s automatic direction finders to guide him home. However, poor weather forced the ship to cancel the mission of Lovell, his teammates Bill Knutson and Daren Hillery and their group leader Dan Klinger; in fact, Klinger had not even left the deck of the Shangri-La when the flight was terminated. Unfortunately for Lovell, his direction finder had picked up the signal of a tracking station on the Japanese coast – which also happened to be transmitting at 518 kilocycles – and, far from guiding him back to the Shangri-La, was actually taking him further away. Around him, he saw nothing but a “bowl of blackness’’.

Perhaps the homing frequencies had changed, Lovell thought. At once, he turned to the list of frequencies on his kneeboard, but upon switching on his small, jury – rigged reading light, “there was a brilliant flicker – the unmistakable sign of an overloaded circuit shorting itself out – and instantly, every bulb on the instrument panel and in the cockpit went dead’’. His options seemed dire: ask the Shangri-La to switch its lights on, which was hardly advisable and would prove hugely embarrassing, or ditch in the icy sea. Then, in a story repeated by Tom Hanks, who played Lovell in the 1995 movie ‘Apollo 13’, he saw a faint greenish glow, like a vast ‘carpet’, stretching out below and ahead of him. It was the phosphorescent algae churned up in the Shangri-La’s wake and it guided him back to the company of his two wingmen, Knutson and Hillery, and a safe, though hard, landing which he later described as ‘‘a spine-compressing thud’’.

For his efforts, the sweat-drenched Lovell was given a small bottle of brandy, downed in a single gulp, and the opportunity to fly his next nocturnal mission. . . the very next night. This time, thankfully, his automatic direction finder behaved flawlessly. Eventually, he accumulated no fewer than 107 carrier landings and became an instructor in the FJ-4 Fury, F-8U Crusader and F-3H Demon jets, before moving to the Navy’s Test Pilot School at Patuxent River. He graduated first in his class, ahead of Wally Schirra and Pete Conrad. Less than two years later, in early 1959, he was one of 110 military test pilots ordered to attend a classified briefing in Washington, DC. Like Conrad, he would be turned down for Project Mercury, but secured admission into the exalted ranks of NASA’s astronaut corps, together with Frank Borman, in September 1962.