MOONWARD BOUND

Since July 1969, Mike Collins has achieved fame as ‘the other one’ on the first lunar landing crew. A year before making that momentous flight, he might have been aboard Frank Borman’s Apollo 9 mission, destined to perform a high-Earth-orbit test of the combined command and service module, complete with the lunar module. That mission changed significantly by the time it finally flew, renamed ‘Apollo 8’, in December 1968. For Collins, though, the most significant change was that he had gone from being the mission’s senior pilot. . . to sitting on the sidelines in Mission Control.

The original line-up for the Apollo lunar effort envisaged a seven-step process, labelled ‘A’ through to ‘G’. First would come unmanned test flights (‘A’) of the command and service module, already achieved by Apollo 4 in November 1967 and Apollo 6 in April 1968. Next, the ‘B’ mission, completed by Apollo 5, would conduct an unmanned test of the lunar module. A manned ‘C’ flight, involving the command and service modules in Earth orbit, was originally assigned to Gus Grissom, but completed by Wally Schirra’s Apollo 7 crew. Final strides towards the Moon focused on four increasingly more complex missions: ‘D’ (a manned demonstration of the entire Apollo system in Earth orbit), ‘E’ (repeating D, albeit in a high elliptical orbit with an apogee of 6,400 km), ‘F’ (a full dress-rehearsal in orbit around the Moon) and ‘G’ (the landing itself).

During the course of 1966, crews were assembled to support the first of these flights. When Wally Schirra removed himself from the original Apollo 2 crew and scuppered the ‘duplicate’ mission, a ‘new’ Apollo 2, destined to complete the D mission, was given to Jim McDivitt, Dave Scott and Rusty Schweickart for the manned lunar module flight in Earth orbit. Years later, Deke Slayton would note that McDivitt had been intimately involved with the lunar module’s development for some considerable time and the rendezvous commitment of the mission necessitated a veteran command module pilot, Dave Scott. The command and service module and lunar module were to be launched on a pair of Saturn 1Bs. The E crew, targeted to fly the Saturn V for the first time on Apollo 3, was named as Frank Borman, Mike Collins and Bill Anders.

Numbering changed in the wake of the Apollo 1 fire, of course, but the crews remained more or less intact. In the months preceding Apollo 7, the McDivitt and Borman crews seemed on track to fly Apollos 8 and 9, which would respectively conduct the lunar module test flight and the high-orbit mission in late 1968 or early 1969. Since Borman’s crew would be the third flight of the Saturn V, they were known internally as ‘Apollo-Saturn 503’ (AS-503). Not only would it be the first manned launch of the behemoth rocket, but also, wrote Collins, the S-IVB ‘‘would be reignited, just as if it were a lunar mission… However, ours would be shut down early, causing us to stay in Earth orbit’’ with a 6,400 km apogee. ‘‘This little detail created all sorts of planning problems,’’ Collins continued, ‘‘because one could only escape from this lopsided orbit at certain prescribed intervals and if one had troubles and was forced to return to Earth prematurely, it was entirely possible to end up landing in Red China.’’

As 1967 ended with the triumphant first flight of the Saturn V, an increased wave of optimism spread through NASA that the lunar landing could be accomplished, to such an extent that by August of the following year – before Apollo 7 had even flown – some managers were talking of expediting Borman’s mission from high Earth orbit to a lunar distance. An already record-breaking apogee of six and a half thousand kilometres would be multiplied to almost three hundred and seventy thousand. Then, abruptly, in July 1968, Mike Collins was removed from the mission. One day, during a game of handball, he became aware that his legs did not seem to be functioning as they should, a phenomenon which progressively worsened: as he walked down stairs, his knees would buckle and he would feel peculiar tingling and numbness.

Eventually, and with a typical pilot’s reluctance, Collins sought the flight surgeon’s advice and was referred to a Houston neurologist. The diagnosis was that a bony growth between his fifth and sixth cervical vertibrae was pushing against his spinal column and relief of the pressure demanded surgery. A few days later, at the Air Force’s Wilford Hall Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, Collins underwent an ‘anterior cervical fusion’ procedure, whereby the offending spur and some adjoining bone was removed and the two vertibrae fused together with a small dowel of bone from the astronaut’s hip. Several months of convalescence followed, during which time Collins’ backup, Jim Lovell, was assigned to his seat on AS-503 … and something else happened. ‘Apollo 9’ would not be known as Apollo 9 anymore, but as ‘Apollo 8’ and, further, its destination had indeed changed: it would not just fly a basic circumlunar jaunt, but would actually go into orbit around the Moon.

A plan had been under consideration by George Low and Chris Kraft since April 1968 as a means of cutting out one of the seven steps and achieving a landing much sooner. They wanted to change the E mission into something called ‘E-prime’, moving from high Earth orbit to the vicinity of the Moon, but this quickly became untenable when it materialised that the lunar module would not be ready in time.

When it became evident that the first lunar module would not be available until early 1969, George Low came up with a radical idea: in place of the E mission would be a flight known as ‘C-prime’, which aimed to send a command and service module, without the lunar module, around the Moon in December 1968. Low knew from Rocco Petrone, director of launch operations at Cape Kennedy, that the lunar module would not be ready for December, but at a meeting in Bob Gilruth’s office on 9 August it was felt that the navigation and trajectory teams, together with the astronauts and their training staff, could be ready for a Moon shot. The additional risk of actually entering lunar orbit would be beneficial in that it would provide empirical data on orbital mechanics and the formulation of better gravitational models.

Since Jim Webb and George Mueller were at a conference in Vienna at the time, it was left to Deputy Administrator Tom Paine, still sceptical after the Apollo 6 pogo problems and uncertain as to the reliability of the SPS engine, to conditionally approve it. Mueller, with some reluctance, also agreed, but Webb vehemently opposed the idea. He had been particularly lambasted after the Apollo 1 fire and did not want to be hauled over the coals if the Moon shot failed, particularly as the spacecraft had not even been tested with a human crew. On the other hand, of course, he intended to resign from NASA and was finally won over, with reservations, on 16 August. A few weeks later, Webb visited Lyndon Johnson in Washington to announce his resignation. With Webb gone, the prospects for C – prime brightened.

The plan was officially set in motion by NASA on 19 August by Sam Phillips, although some managers remained nervous about making such a bold move before Wally Schirra’s shakedown flight of the command and service module. Officially, until that mission had flown successfully, the ‘new’ Apollo 8 would represent “an expansion of Apollo 7’’, but that ‘‘the exact content… had not been decided’’. The content of the mission may not have been decided, but the crew certainly had been. On 10 August, Deke Slayton told Jim McDivitt that the flight order was being switched: that his D mission with the lunar module would now become Apollo 9, preceded by Borman’s C – prime expedition around the Moon. ‘‘Over the years,’’ McDivitt recounted in Slayton’s autobiography, ‘‘this story has grown to the point where people think I was offered the flight around the Moon, but turned it down. Not quite. I believe that if I’d thrown myself on the floor and begged to fly the C-prime mission, Deke would have let us have it. But it was never really offered.’’ Offered or not, McDivitt acquiesced, he, Scott and Schweickart had been training for so long on the lunar module that they were the best-prepared and wanted to fly its maiden mission.

Privately, Frank Borman was pleased with his lot when he received command of C-prime. McDivitt’s D mission ‘‘was a test-piloting bonanza,’’ wrote Andrew Chaikin, ‘‘and Borman would have gladly traded places.’’ Borman was at North American’s Downey plant, working on tests of Spacecraft 104 – the command module for the E mission – when he was summoned to take a call from Deke Slayton. Shortly afterwards, he was back in Houston, in Slayton’s office, hearing about the C-prime plan, together with disturbing CIA reports that the Soviets might be only weeks away from staging their own manned circumlunar flight. When Slayton asked Borman if he would command Apollo 8 to the Moon, it was essentially a question with only one answer.

Also pleased with the decision was Jim Lovell, Borman’s senior pilot, who had been drafted in only weeks earlier to replace Mike Collins. The pair had, of course, already flown together on Gemini VII and were a good match. Lovell had been planning to take his family – his wife Marilyn and their three children – to Acapulco for Christmas 1968, but was now forced to tell her instead that his yuletide destination had a somewhat different, more exotic and far more extraterrestrial flavour. One evening, flying cross-country with Borman in a T-38 jet, he had sketched a design for Apollo 8’s crew patch onto his kneeboard: a figure-eight emblem, with Earth in one circle and the Moon in the other. With Borman in command, it would be Lovell’s job as senior pilot to oversee Apollo 8’s navigation system, using the command module’s sextant to make star sightings, verify their trajectory and track lunar landmarks. Lovell would be Apollo’s final senior pilot. The next mission, Apollo 9, would feature a lunar module in addition to its command and service modules and the moniker of ‘senior pilot’ would be effectively superseded by that of ‘command module pilot’ (CMP). During subsequent Moon

landing missions, the CMP would fly solo in lunar orbit, requiring them to have previous spaceflight experience. The ‘pilot’ position, in turn, would be replaced by that of ‘lunar module pilot’ (LMP), the man who would accompany the commander down to the Moon’s surface.

One astronaut who was unhappy about the Apollo 9/8 change, though, was Dave Scott. As command module pilot of the D mission, he had nursed Spacecraft 103 — ‘his’ original ship — through testing and preparation at North American and was now being swapped for another vehicle, Spacecraft 104. On the opposite side of the coin, Bill Anders, on Borman’s crew, was also unhappy. Since the beginning of 1968, he had been immersed in lunar module training and would tell Andrew Chaikin years later that he felt he had an 80 per cent chance of a seat on a landing crew. Now, with the change to their flight, the elimination of the E mission and the creation of C – prime, without a lunar module, Anders knew that he had gained the first circumlunar mission, at the expense of probably losing the chance to someday walk on the Moon.