There was no established way for a man to tell his wife he was going to the moon. A man could tell his wife he was going to sea or going to war; men had been doing that for millennia. But the moon? It was a whole new conversation.
I recently watched Ryan Gosling’s First Man and, while it was beautifully shot, I could understand why it was largely left out of the award show chatter. What is glossed over in the story of Neil Armstrong is the story of the men who made it possible for Neil to be the first human to walk on the surface of the moon. Jeffery Kluger shines the light on those men in Apollo 8; Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were given sixteen weeks to train for the first mission into lunar orbit where they spent Christmas 1968 on the far side of the moon.
The beginning of our story focuses largely on Borman and his path to NASA but as the space race heats up we are introduced to several early astronauts including the late Ed White, Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee of the ill fated Apollo 1. Borman, who along with Jim Lovell, began his astronaut career with the Gemini 7 mission which went from a much maligned two week stay in an orbiting tin can to the first experiment with a space rendezvous between two space crafts. I didn’t know much about the Gemini missions prior to Apollo 8 and there is a lot of detail about the various missions that collected the data necessary for the Apollo missions and eventually the space program we have today.
There is also commentary about the Cold War and its importance in fueling the space race as well as the successes of the space program helping to overshadow some of the harsher realities of the political climate in the late sixties- namely the Vietnam War.
“But Borman does remember one telegram—from a sender he didn’t know—and he still likes to talk about it. The telegram said, simply, “Thank you, Apollo 8. You saved 1968.” That, Borman realized, made him feel happier than gazing up at the moon ever did.”
If you’re even remotely interested in the space travel this is one of the better space books I’ve read and, for some reason, I’ve read a lot of books about space for someone who barely eked out a C in her college Astronomy class.