NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with William "Bill" Anders, US Air Force Major general, engineer, astronaut, and Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 8, part 2 of 3

Well, I had five kids and my wife couldn't get insurance and so it wasn't so much me at risk as it was the family. And yet she and I had weighed the risks. We talked about the pluses and the minuses. We talked about the fact that this would be the culmination of my military test career, flying on Apollo. It was a wonderful exploration to be involved in. I certainly wanted to land on the moon, but going to the moon, the first humans nonetheless, was still a wonderful experience and not the least to be able to serve my country in a nationally important program. All ballots down to the various risks, most of them unknown, some of them reasonably predictable, were worth it.

You know, it takes me back to competition for seeds. I mean, you know, in Allen's book, deep, you know, deep made a lot of seeds, you know, how much those seeds were precious. How did you feel about that? Was it a competitive nature? You guys are all competitive, a competitive nature. How did you, how did one make sure that he got a seed? Well, we, as you could imagine, speculated a lot on what the were the criteria of getting a seed on one of the Apollo flights. In retrospect, all our theories were much more complicated, overcomplicated. What it really boiled down to, if one can believe Deeks book, which was written by a third party, even nonetheless, but he had a chance to review most of it before he died, was that basically you just stood in line and when your turn came up, almost independent of your qualifications. If you made it, you were qualified in his view. I didn't share that view, but nonetheless, you stood in line and when your turn came up, you got a seed.

What was your motto? Motto for seeds? Well, you had an idea and ate us about work hard and you'll get noticed. Well, I thought that the harder one worked and the more one could stand out doing whatever task was assigned, the more one would be rewarded. That turned out to be not the case, I mean, surely it wasn't, you could get a seed no matter what. Some of the people did trip up and get sideline to a degree, but there wasn't the kind of selection process that I had been used to in the Air Force where if you did a good job, you got a good assignment and if you didn't do a good job, no matter how much you were great around the bar, it didn't count. During these early days, even before Apollo 8, the notion of getting geologists involved, getting scientists on these missions, I know there was some resistance in the astronaut core.

Now as a test pilot, what was your reaction when you first heard that they were trying to get some scientists on these flights and get some geologists into these seeds? Well, just to waste a little of your film here, I wasn't a test pilot. I had been in flight test, but I didn't go to the Edwards test pilot school. So I was a little bit of an oddball. I was sort of the politically correct, I guess. They're going to let a few technical people in so long as they almost look like test pilots. That put me at the back of the line to start with. I was interested personally in geology even before I came to NASA. So I participated in all the geology they had to offer and then some. This probably worked against me because that really wasn't the right stuff, you know. So I thought that, okay, we're going to the moon really as a political program to demonstrate technological permanence to the United States and to the rest of the world that the United States is better than Russia. And the real reason is to jam that flag on the moon and that's about it.

But while we're there all by the way, let's do a little lunar geology. Let's do a little exploration. And that was a major motivator for me. And yet I realized that though I thought I was a pretty bright guy and knew picked up, you know, at least the superficialities of geology pretty quickly that I really wasn't a geologist. And it seemed to me unfortunate that here we were going to have quite a few lunar landings and there was no geologist on the manifest. When I went to Washington to on the Arnonics and Space Council to help set out the future part of Apollo, one of the authorities that I interacted with was a fellow by the name of Bill Pecora who ran the United States Geological Survey. And one day on an airplane flight back from someplace, he and I had both given a talk to some convention. We brought up the fact that there were no real geologists on Apollo.

And I told Bill, I said, look, NASA needs you for another program called Landsat. You have some political clout with NASA. Why don't you make a trade with them? Why don't you tell them you'll support them in Landsat, you have output a real geologist on the moon. Well, I don't really know exactly what happened, but about three months later, NASA switched crew members on the last flight and put Jack Schmidt on the crew. Interesting. And he's a real geologist. Yeah. Interesting. Now, Jack, by the way, doesn't hate that story. He thinks he got there on his own. Yeah. Right. Well, what about Apollo 8? You were working with Borman at a level, and a level came on a little later. When did the mission change, and how were you notified, and how did you feel about it?

My recollection of how and when the Apollo 8 mission change was, I was out at Downey with Frank, testing the Apollo 8 command module, and I had been assigned to the lunar module. I was the lunar module pilot, and I thought, well, I'm not going to go to the moon on the first flight of the lunar module. I'm going to test it in Earth orbit, but that plus the fact that I had been heavily involved in the lunar landing training vehicle to learn how to land on the moon. The alarm strong and I had come from Gemini before the fire as the backup crew on Gemini 11. He and I were the first two to train in the lunar landing training vehicle. So I thought, well, this looks good. And so I'm getting a lunar module on Apollo 8, and that all adds up. So maybe on about Apollo 14, I'll cycle into lunar landing, which is really what I wanted. But the lunar modules, all of them, were falling behind schedule.

And I knew that there had to be some give somewhere, but it was above my pay grade as to how they would handle that. So Frank and for me, that the decision had been made to take Apollo 8's lunar module away from it. I don't even think we were called Apollo 8 at that time, something else, but we were going to lose our lunar module. I was going to become the command module specialist. I don't think Jim had just barely come onto the flight and that we were not going to go testing a lunar module in Earth orbit. We were going to go around the moon for the first time, and the humans had ever left the influence of Earth's gravity, and we were going to do it for the first flight on the Saturn 5. My initial reaction was not all the good things about that was, well, I'll be damned. I'm losing my lunar module. I'm being put on the command module monorail track. That doesn't bode well for a lunar landing for Bill Landers.

So that bothered me a lot, but when you get delt lemons, you've got to make lemonade out of it. And a lot of people would have killed to have my bad job. So I have rationalized that, well, I guess I would have rather walked on the moon on the third or fourth landing, but to be able to be participate in human kinds, not just America's, but human kinds. First flight away from the Earth on Apollo 8 was pretty special. The lunar landing training vehicle was one of the many simulators we used in order to condition the pilots to be able to land on the moon. The moon being airless, so there was no drag, no wind, and the moon having one sixth, the fourth, the fourth of gravity. They started out in our training by teaching us how to fly helicopters, and that was useful.

I didn't land on the moon, so I have to project a lot of this. But one difference about a helicopter is that it has its mass, but it's a mass influenced by Earth gravity, which is six times that of the moon. So the degree that mass is involved without getting into a high school physics lesson, you're going to get fooled by training in a helicopter on the Earth as opposed to a helicopter on the moon if there were, of course, an atmosphere, which there isn't. So NASA came up with this lunar landing training vehicle, which took out five, six, the verse gravity, and all of the atmospheric drag aspects in a computer that gimbled a jet engine that took care of the Earth aspect of the flying and provided the same kind of rocket thruster dynamics that the lunar module would have. And it was an amazing training vehicle. In my view, there should be a special show on the lunar landing training vehicle.

Was there a lot of competition between you and Armstrong as to who could fly that thing better? Yes, he lost, but, well, Neil, in fact, the difference in technique between Neil Armstrong and I resulted in Neil almost getting killed. And I only say that because Neil's technique was that of truly of a test pilot. He wanted everything perfect when he started. But I was quite satisfied with the more pragmatic approach. So I flew it the morning before Neil had his almost disastrous flight. The same problem was in that vehicle when I flew it that was in it with him. And so our technique was to go up to 500 feet, stabilize, and make a lunar landing trajectory. Cut. Just ran out of film. Don't pick this up. Roll number 35. So the object was to go to 500 feet, stabilize the vehicle and make a lunar landing trajectory. Now stabilization meant switching from full jet engine lift over to rocket engine lift

as to assisted rocket engine lift and then going and making a landing. And the idea was to hit the ground at a particular spot within certain parameters. So you wouldn't break it, not to mention breaking your own neck. This day the wind was kicking up a little bit and so I got to altitude. I wasn't perfectly at 500 feet. I didn't have exactly the right parameters but I was in control. And so I went ahead and made not only one landing, I made the lunar landing trajectory. We had about two and a half minutes of fuel so you had to do this pretty fast. And then I made several other just pop up and down touchdowns within the fuel limits. And they weren't world champion perfect trajectories. But from a training point of view, in my view, they were totally adequate and everybody was happy with it.

And so I got racked up for a written, you know, Anders made four or five landings. That was kind of good. When Neil flew it several hours later, now the wind had kicked up a lot more. And Neil being a very precise test pilot and that's his training and he wanted to make sure that everything was just exactly right. So when he got to 500 feet, he spent a lot more time getting the parameters of start, just right, the right velocities, the right position, blah, blah, blah. At the same time this vehicle was automatically correcting for the crosswind. It was tilting over so that it was leaning into the wind so that Neil wouldn't know. He wouldn't have this wind crosswind sensation in the training vehicle because he wouldn't have it on the ground. It had two rocket fuel tanks, two round tanks, one on each side of the vehicle with a cross feed between them. So while Neil was up there getting the near perfect start, fuel was draining from one

tank to the other. No, that didn't make that much difference because we thought we had fuel low level fuel sensors in both tanks and we did have them in there but the uphill tank sensor, we didn't know it but had failed. So unbeknownst to Neil and the people on the ground, the fuel level came down very low in that tank and Neil wasn't given a warning and he's a very bright guy and had he been he to gotten his tail on the ground real fast and the people on the ground would have ordered him to do that. So Neil, thinking he still had enough fuel, started down his, you know, better than I had trajectory and he was slower making more precise movements and when he got down near the ground suddenly the other light came on, the other sensor detected low level but he thought he had a little more time so he continued with his landing but not at a rapid pace which is all sensible if you assume everything is working and in just about prior to touchdown

he ran out of attitude fuel. He ran out of the fuel and controlled the attitude of this vehicle. So now was like a kid's balloon at a party where they blow it up and let it go and it just started and Neil came up on the throttle to get away from the ground because it's the ground that killed you and got up to altitude but now this thing looked like was going to roll over on its back and somewhere along the line it on its own because he couldn't control it. It came sort of right side up and he ejected. That's famous footage. It's cut for a second. Bill Anderson, take two, describe the command service much and what's it like? Well it's a very complicated device, very crammed in and from a visibility point of view I guess it's a lot like a submarine. Though submarines really don't have windows but they do have a periscope but the ability to see out of a command and service module is very limited and in our case particularly

our windows got fouled very early in the flight. Some of the sealant on the inner pains leaked into the airspace between the pains and put a greasy, oily smear particularly on Frank Bournemann and Jim Lovell's window. Fortunately I have my side window for some reason didn't do it as much but we were very limited in our visibility out of the command and service module. Describe coming down to the moon the first time. You didn't come in looking at people's image of it as ah they came in they could see the moon out in front of them, describe the reality of it and your first impressions. When we were going into lunar orbit, we were going backwards, we were in total darkness, we were in the shadow not only of the sun by the moon but we were also in the shadow of earth shine. So we're in the double umbra, it was very black.

All there was we could see over our shoulder was a black hole with no stars and we assumed that was the moon. In fact the only time of the flight that my hair kind of crawled on the back of my neck going into this big black hole. We were counting down to turn on the service propulsion engine which would slow our velocity down so that we could be captured by lunar gravity. If we hadn't slowed down we'd have been slingshot it out around the moon and back to the earth. So just as we were in the middle of this countdown with not very many seconds to go, I noticed something caught my eye out of my window. My first reaction that it was somebody pouring oil down the window, of course there was no gravity to speak of and so the idea of oil running down the window, I mean I was getting a non-compute in my brain but that's what it looked like. And then I refocused my eyes and realized it was early lunar sunrise in a sense, it was actually sunset but it trust it was sunrise because we were seeing light on the moon

for the first time, very rough mountains, very low sun angle and these were the lunar mountains coming up the window through kind of a purplish haze of some kind of material smeared on our windows. And it was really interesting to look down there and it frankly took my attention away from the countdown and Jim Lovall both and I remarked about it. But soon our spacecraft, Führer Frank Bourbon got us back on track and we went through the countdown. What was that the highlight of that whole time, I mean were there any things in the lunar orbit or just to seeing the first sunrise? Well the highlight of that was the service propulsion engine burn. I mean the lunar sunrise was impressive but then to have the service propulsion engine kick on and steal away our life saving velocity that caught my attention a lot and the burn

was perfect. We knew we were in the right orbit but we knew we would be there forever if indeed that engine didn't work again. So that was a sobering thought and not sort of detracted from the first view of the back of the moon. The impression about the back of the moon was for the first time that it was a lot rougher than the front of the moon. The side that's always exposed to the earth and I think geologists are still debating why that is. Did you have any assignments that as you went around the back side of the moon things that you were supposed to be side typically paying attention to? Well I was the designated photographer as well as the flight engineer on the flight so I had to divide my time by making sure the spacecraft was working and going through a very full photo schedule and so that had me very busy back there changing field, changing

F stops, setting up cameras, etc. The Apollo was the best platform that was happened to be behind the moon at that time by far but it wasn't a great photographic platform. The cameras did shoot out the windows they were obscured a little bit by the haze on the film, Jim Lovel was running a camera through the navigation looking at the moon through a soda straw. It wasn't a great platform but this was the first time human kind had been behind the moon so it came back with some pretty spectacular photos. Well I've asked an important and lumbar this question to ask you too. There's a famous photograph, an earth-rise photograph, who took that photograph? Well that has been researched and I think almost everybody now will admit that I happen to take the photograph that was replicated on the stamp.

Frank we found out recently took the first earth-rise but it was in black and white and I happen to take the first earth-rise in color and that's the one that has been of significance. So I guess we can both share the glory. Lovel has jokingly said in order to break the tie. He was going to claim he took the first picture. What did you think when you saw that earth-rise? I know you took a photograph of it but I must admit beyond the test pilot attitude, or the pilot attitude, emotionally human, what was your mind? To see the earth come up over this very stark, battered, almost boring lunar-rise. We'd been in Earth orbit for three orbits and for some reason had not seen the earth. We were going backwards, we were upside down. We'd been trained to look at the moon. We hadn't been trained to look back at the earth even though as we had gone to the moon

we could see the earth and it was amazingly beautiful. But to see it contrasted by this stark lunar horizon, the only color that we could see in the whole universe. And my mind was very impressive, very emotional. And immediately I thought, well, how are I-