NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Frank Borman, astronaut and Commander on Apollo 8, part 2 of 2

Given your philosophy about why you were doing the job, Frank Borman, 125, take one. Well I remember two segments of the mission that I think impacted me the most. Number one was seeing the earth rise over the lunar surface on Christmas Eve and recognizing that we were a long way from home and that the mission was going very well. That had an enormous impact looking back at the earth. And the second part was landing on the carry. When we stepped out of the helicopter onto the carrier, realizing that we had done our job well, that we'd beat the Russians to the moon and there was no doubt in my mind now that the rest of the program was going to work. I had a feeling, almost of euphoria, I was so pleased. I was so thankful, you know, because let's face it, God must have been looking after us so we wouldn't have made it so.

It was a very, very, very religious experience for me. Okay. I mean, we have a magazine problem here, okay. Back on roll 125, right, Borman, take two. Come into the moon. So we approached the moon upside down and backwards in perfect blackness. We had hoped to go around the moon and counter or get it 60 miles above the earth, the moon's surface. One of the things that would tell us if we were on track or not was a certain point in the flight plan when we'd look down and see the sunrise impacting the lunar surface. And I remember the awe that I had for the people that had done all this calculation at the exact second we were supposed to see it there it was, and it was a clear indication that everything was in good shape. What did it appear to you? I mean, you're the first guy to see that side of the moon, you and Anders and that.

Yeah. Well, it was very rough. It was distraught. I think Jim described it as looking like dirty beach sand. To me, it looked more like the burned out gray ashes of a barbecue after you burned. But of course, people have been there. You can ask them and they'll tell you exactly what it was like, but it was a sobering side, but it didn't have the impact on me at least as the view of the earth then. Did you, when you were looking at the craters and the, and so forth, did you come to any conclusions in your own mind? What had caused those and that changed? Well, it looked to me like they're mostly meteorites. So Anders Bill was more into the geology of the business and he knew a lot more about the surface geological features than I did. Well, you said in the press conference afterwards, and all the lot of holes out there, they could have. Yeah, that's right. There are a lot of holes. I can tell you all, sure, everybody on the moon that there are a lot of holes that, that looks to the moon.

There are a lot of holes. It looked to me like most were made by meteorites. Coming around, it looked like there was something like a hole kind of sort of too, didn't it? That's Anders about that, he knows everything. Were there any, were there any tense moments in that that when you, when you did that trans-Earth injection, the burn, the four minute burn that you had? Well, there were a lot of tense moments in the flight. I think the burn to insert our cell into lunar orbit was a tense moment. It was done behind the moon and then of course the, I think, the premiere of all. The tense moments was the, the burn to get us back out of lunar orbit. We only had a single engine to do that and had it failed, we'd still be circling the moon. So, everybody, I can assure you there were six eyeballs focused on those instruments. You've talked in the past about the trepidation that's your wife of the Susan, you described that to me.

When did she tell you that she was trepidation about this whole thing? Well, Susan, as I said, is probably the best thing that ever happened to me, it was marrying Susan. But she internalized all of her fears, never was anything but supportive of me and then after the flight, she told me how concerned she'd been. In what, what sets, what did she, she just said she didn't think I was going to come back. She was convinced that this mission was, was not going to be a success that it was going too fast, too far too fast and that she didn't see how possibly the engineers and everything could have gotten it all together that quickly after the fire. Which was a logical, a logical thought for someone that hadn't been involved in it as directly as those that were. Anyway, look, it wasn't just the astronauts that lost their lives from the standpoint of their personal lives, not, not being killed, but lost their personal lives this program. There were hundreds, thousands of people that dedicated, era of people that dedicated

everything to this to make certain that we won. Now you can't get that kind of enthusiasm and that kind of a dedication out of exploration or out of picking up rocks. You've got it because it was a political battle in the Cold War. It was a nationalistic impulse and it's great and only we have it today as too bad. Well, the genesis, the reading of genesis, whose idea was that? Well that was a suggestion. When we were told that we would have the largest audience that ever listened to human voice when we made our TV broadcast from the Moon on Christmas Eve and the only instructions that we got from NASA do something appropriate. To me it was a wonderful re-affirmation of what this country is all about. So we wrote out some letters and asked people, and frankly I didn't want to get involved.

I didn't want to take the time to worry about that when we had so much else in Saiborgan who was a friend of ours with the US Information Agency suggested how about reading from genesis. And he had consulted with one of his friends, so that's how it happened. Did you find that what was going on? I know how invested you were, how, you know, totally consumed you were by the program, but 68 was a difficult year. Were you aware of what was going on down on the ground in any way that affected you when you were up there and you're reading this thing and you're looking at that herb? I mean, any of those thoughts go through your mind? 68 was a bad year for the US. The campuses went nuts, the Vietnamese war was on, we had the assassinations. And to be honest with you, although I was aware of it, none of them really impacted me that dramatically. I had my own thing that I was trying to do and we wanted Apollo 8 to be a success and everything else was subordinate.

Didn't you get a postcard at the end of it all? After we got back, we got a fact, or back then, I guess there were Twix's, T-W-X's and it said, Teletype said, thank you Apollo 8, you saved 1968. I think a lot of people felt, well, at least something good came out at the end, because 68 was a rotten year for America. Do you think that Apollo ended prematurely, or do you think it ended soon enough? I think it ended about right. Probably if I had been God in running NASA, I would have stopped it after the first three flights, I mean, after the first three landings. But if you want to look back at it, reality, the mission was accomplished when Apollo 11 returned Earth. That was what we were doing. That's why we spent the money. And the other was frosting on the cake and I think they did well with it.

I mean, they got a lot of knowledge about the moon and so on. Was it worth the cost of those additional missions? I don't know. We had it all paid for, so it probably was. Do you think in retrospect that the science that was done was valuable, or could we have done it with unmanned missions just as easily? I don't think you're ever going to be able to say that man understands things so man has been there. We may have an understanding and depth about places like stars and so on, but I doubt a human psyche will be satisfied till somebody walks on Mars, which I think is going to be a vastly more difficult prospect than people think of today. So I think that the right blend of unmanned and man is important. I think we have a different take on this from you that I did, from a lot of other people when I asked this question, but what did Apollo, the Apollo program mean to you in the final analysis?

I think you probably said it five times today, but let me hear. Final analysis, the Apollo program to me was the successful implementation of President Kennedy's mandate and another nail in the coffin of communism. It was to me a triumph in the Battle of the Cold War. That's why I was there. If you think that I would have devoted that much of my life simply to exploration or science just, I wouldn't have. I'm not built that way. That's not my thing. But I was in the military. America means a lot to me. I believe in freedom. And from my standpoint, we were preserving it. Did you ask about the... Yeah, couple of words. Well, one of the concerns of Apollo 8 was we wouldn't have a lamb with us to provide backup. And of course, I said, on Apollo 13, we're all wondered if Jim was going to make it back or not.

Yeah, to see, I'm glad it didn't happen on 8. And it didn't. Of course, Bill Anders knew the systems and had worked out every conceivable way to do it safely. So I don't know whether he would have been able to catch it or not. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out. Great. Terrific. Okay, thank you. Thank you. That wasn't that painful, was it? No, I'm good. Good luck. Thank you very much. Here we go.