Apollo 8 was launched as planned on 21 December 1968 crewed by astronauts Jim Lovell, Bill Anders and Commander Frank Borman. The lift-off of the first manned Saturn V rocket went perfectly, roaring into space with it's millions of horsepower. The experience was so powerful and deafening that the astronauts on board were sure the rocket had exploded and their last hour had come.
It all went perfectly though, and for the first time Mankind left the Cradle of Earth. For the first time human beings saw Earth from space, and the astronauts recounted the vertiginous and almost unreal experience of watching Earth's horizon through the window as it curved away and Earth became what looked like an enormous, bright blue marble.
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| Only the 24 men that traveled to the Moon 1968-1972 have seen this view with their own eyes. Apollo 8 was the first time. Borman said to himself, "This must be what God sees. I was absolutely awe struck."[5] |
Commander Frank Borman had been told by NASA to prepare a televised Christmas Eve message to the entire world on the part of the crew, and the only instructions he had been given was "do whatever's appropriate." No PR departments or worried political bureaucrats were breathing down his neck then as they undoubtedly would have been today.
Borman already had his hands full with an intensive training program and quickly realized he had been given a task for which he had neither the time, the training, nor perhaps the ability to perform as it deserved. What do you tell the people on Earth on Christmas Eve the first time human beings reach another world? He needed help so he called his friend Si Bourgin, a science advisor at the United States Information Agency, who had often advised Borman previously.
Bourgin wracked his brains trying to get around the problem, but "it just didn't sound right" so he passed it on to his friend, Joe Laitin, newspaperman and public affairs official, who assured him it was a piece of cake and he would have it ready within the 24 hour deadline.
Joseph Laitin quickly realized that this was far from a piece of cake. In the Laitin family's modest home the children had been put to bed and Joseph, working in the kitchen, was struggling with the theme "peace on earth", but simply couldn't get it right. In 1968, the US was deeply involved in a bloody conflict in Vietnam. At home there was constant violence arising from race riots, leftist students protests, assassination attempts as well as the assassinations of well-known political leaders such as Robert Kennedy and Reverend Martin Luther King. Laitin was fully aware that opponents of American policies could easily rip a peace-on-earth speech to shreds, calling it hypocritical, cynical propaganda.
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| In 1968, the US was deeply involved in a bloody conflict in Vietnam. At home there was constant violence arising from race riots, leftist students protests, assassination attempts as well as the assassinations of well-known political leaders such as Robert Kennedy, and Reverend Martin Luther King. Laitin was fully aware that opponents of American policies could easily rip a peace-on-earth speech to shreds, calling it hypocritical, cynical propaganda. |
Something more compelling was needed. Later that evening Laitin got out his bible and began to feel better. He threw himself into the New Testament, jotting down a number of notes from different places, but as the minutes and hours ticked by and it still didn't fall into place, he began to panic.
In the small hours Christine, his wife, made her way downstairs into the kitchen. She found her husband in despair surrounded by mountains of scraps of paper on which he had scribbled quotations from the bible. "My God, Joseph, what have you done?" she exclaimed. The fear that her husband had unexpectedly committed a crime lay in her voice. He quickly reassured her, however, and explained the great task. He wouldn't find what he was looking for in the New Testament, she told him immediately, it would be in the Old Testament.
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| "That night in the airport lounge, as the astronauts read from Genesis, there wasn't a single word spoken. Not one." Joseph Laitin. Picture taken from Watkins [5]. ("Joseph and Christine Laitin" has no relevant hits at Google images - The Laitins are truly unsung heroes.) |
Joseph burst out despairingly that it was already 3.30 a.m. and he had no idea where to begin in the long and weighty book. "Why not begin at the beginning?" suggested Christine Laitin. He opened the book to the first page and immediately realized that this was it.
The crew approved, and when the great moment arrived, the three Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders started reading from the book of Genesis:
In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth.And the Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep...
Taking turns, the three astronauts read the first 10 verses during the 2-3 minutes breathtaking Christmas television broadcast and all across the globe, people were deeply affected and moved by the event.
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| Linking the story of the creation of the universe to the awe-inspiring present was brilliant. An arc was drawn from the beginning of all things to the wonderful present. The arc connected mankind to God. |
"It's very difficult to explain to generations today what that mission and television broadcast meant...Just look at America today; People talking on cell phones as they're walking down the street, as they're riding in buses. There's so much noise, we can't hear ourselves anymore. That night in the airport lounge, as the astronauts read from Genesis, there wasn't a single word spoken. Not one." (Joseph Laitin, who, together with his wife Christine got the idea of the mighty Genesis reading [1])
This fantastic video-clip is taken from one of my favorite documentaries "Failure is Not an Option". Directed by Rushmore DeNooyer and Kirk Wolfinger from 2003.
Commander Frank Borman stated later that he had the feeling that reading aloud from the Book of Genesis on Christmas Eve, the first day human beings had left Earth for another world, may have been predestined.
"I had an enormous feeling that there had to be a power greater than any of us, that there was a God, that there was indeed a beginning, and that maybe even our choosing to read from Genesis wasn't a half-assed thing - that maybe it has been ordained some way." (Frank Borman [3])
This highly inspired recording of the full reading (2m:49s) gives a sense of the monumental scale of the Apollo 8 Christmas Eve moment - I find it very moving indeed:
The Christmas Eve coincidence
And this blog, of course, will not overlook the coincidence of this great moment in history taking place on a Christmas Eve. One could say that man arrived at the Moon, on the same night that God arrived at the Earth! But Apollo 8 was definitely not planned by NASA to be a Christmas event. It was dictated by two major objective facts:
1) The Americans wanted to reach the Moon as soon as possible, to avoid being upstaged by the Soviet competitors, whom the CIA (rightly) believed were planning their own mission to Moon.
2) They wanted to reach a 6-Day Moon, to gather as much photos as possible of the planned Apollo 11 landing spot, The See of Tranquility, in the right sun-angle (approximately 11 degrees).
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| The phase of the Moon had to be similar to that of the planned Apollo 11 landing 20th of July 1969. That was the objective reason why mankind reached the Moon on a Christmas eve. |
"...and it had nothing to do - we weren't trying to plot for Christmas Eve. It's just the way the launch window fell out that we would be circling the Moon with Frank Borman on Christmas Eve." (Flight Director Gene Kranz [2])
The homecoming - "a very, very, very religious experience"
The first return journey from the Moon went without any major problems. The engines work perfectly and after falling toward Earth for three days the Command Module slammed into the atmosphere at a speed of almost 25,000 mph. If the heat shield failed or the Command Module was turned with the wrong side facing the direction of flight, both the vessel and the astronauts would be vaporized into plasma gas within seconds.
The vessel had to decelerate from 25,000 mph down to some 25 mph in only three minutes. For three minutes the astronauts were subjected to a brutal deceleration up to 7.5 G. For purposes of comparison, imagine braking in a car from 140 mph to 0 mph in a single second, and then continuing to brake for another 180 seconds. A deceleration of this magnitude and duration was almost unbearable even for seasoned test pilots lying in the optimal position for re-entry, with their backs facing the direction of deceleration. Many people considered the approach the most dangerous maneuver of the entire mission, and with good reason.
But everything went smoothly and shortly before dawn on 27 December 1968 Apollo 8, gently swaying under three giant parachutes, floated safely down onto the warm Pacific Ocean. Inside the capsule Borman, Lovell and Anders were strapped upside down, but were relieved and jubilant at having completed the mission. The astronauts were picked up at dawn and taken by helicopter to a real heroes' welcome on board the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown.
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| "…we beat the Russians to the moon…I had a feeling almost of euphoria, I was so pleased, I was so thankful. Because let's face it, God must have been looking after us or we wouldn't have made it! So it was a very, very, very religious experience for me." (Apollo 8 Commander Frank Borman [4]) |
Lovell and Anders were US naval pilots whereas Frank Borman was in the Air Force. This was the first time he found himself on the deck of an aircraft carrier. It was a beautiful, warm day with 3,000 sailors cheering and singing at the top of their lungs while the ship's band played and the flags waved triumphantly in the Pacific morning breeze. Borman describes the moment as the high-point of his life:
"…we beat the Russians to the moon…I had a feeling almost of euphoria, I was so pleased, I was so thankful. Because let's face it, God must have been looking after us or we wouldn't have made it! So it was a very, very, very religious experience for me."(Frank Borman [4])
Later the crew went on a triumphal tour of the world meeting celebrities, government leaders and heads of state. They gave press conferences over the entire world and the subject of the Christmas Eve reading from Genesis often came up. One journalist asked the crew what they thought about Gagarin's comment (falsely reported by the Soviet propaganda, Gagarin was a Christian believer!) that he hadn't seen God in space. Frank Borman answered with characteristic frankness:
"I can't comment on what he didn't see, but I saw evidence that God lives. I had a chance to see the lunar surface, a vast, lonely, forbidding and expansive nothing, and at the same time compare it to the creation of the earth with its oceans and continents and eventually man. Reading from Genesis gave us a new meaning, a new grasp of the miracle of creation."[5]
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| "I saw evidence that God lives... Reading from Genesis gave us a new meaning, a new grasp of the miracle of creation." (Apollo 8 Commander Frank Borman [5]) |
Borman also visited Rome and had a private audience with Pope Paul VI who expressed his deep appreciation for the astronauts' having "brought God into their mission", and presented Borman with a rare bible in gratitude. Frank Borman recalls the Pope, in a gentle voice saying "For that particular moment of time, the world was at peace"[5]
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| Frank Borman recalls Pope Paul the sixth, in a gentle voice saying "For that particular moment of time, the world was at peace". (Picture & quote taken from from Borman's autobiography "Countdown" [5]) |
An arc of 1632 years...
Let's finish with an odd observation for the reader of faith. If you do believe in God, and further: if you do believe it was God's plan that "we would be circling the Moon with Frank Borman on Christmas Eve", then you may also see the Apollo 8 adventure as God's blessing of the date first known to be celebrated as the birthday of Jesus in the year 336 A.D. The night between the 24th and 25th of December.
The exact historical birthday of Jesus is disputed, and probably "unknown" from a purely scientific/historical view. This take from the site history.com seems typical of the strict scientific view (that is, as much as we can say without including the proof of our hearts):
"The first official mention of December 25 as a holiday honoring Jesus’ birthday appears in an early Roman calendar from 336 A.D. But was Jesus really born on December 25 in the first place? Probably not. The Bible doesn’t mention his exact birthday, and the Nativity story contains conflicting clues."However, for the believer, in the year 1968 A.D., the story of Apollo 8 gave us God's blessing of the choice of date. 1632 years after the first known celebration. How about that.
God's blessing for you and yours.
/Christian
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References for this post
[1] Billy Watkins, Apollo Moon Missions: The Unsung Heroes, ISBN:9780803260412
[2] Gene Kranz, Interview, 1/8-1999, The Johnson Space Center Oral History Project
[3] Moon Shot. Dir. Kirk Wolfinger. Documentary. 1994.
[4] NOVA: To the Moon. Dir.Kirk Wolfinger. Documentary. 1999.
[5] Frank Borman, Countdown, ISBN: 0688079296
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| I highly recommend Billy Watkins awesome book "The Unsung Heroes"[1]. It features interviews with a number of key participants in the Apollo project, unknown to the public - some of the "unsung heroes". Among them Joseph Laitin. The description of the origin of the Apollo 8 Genesis reading in this post is partly re-told from the book. |
