NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with William "Bill" Anders, US Air Force Major general, engineer, astronaut, and Lunar Module Pilot on Apollo 8, part 1 of 3

Are you going to ask me that again or are you going to just answer? On Gemini 8, I'd been assigned as one of the capsule communicators, this was the first time I'd ever done that job, which we called Capcom, and early into the flight, I took over from Gem level. It seems to me it was late at night. It was, the mission had been a little boring almost. The spacecraft was up there somewhere over the Soviet Union, and I don't remember exactly what Gemini said was sort of a quick status report, but nothing memorable in Gem left. No sooner had Gem gotten out of the building when we had contact with the spacecraft, but immediately knew that there was a problem. The spacecraft was spinning out of control. The spin was accelerating. The crew didn't know why. They knew they had some kind of stuck thruster, but they didn't know which thruster. There was a lot

of them. They were docked with the Agena rocket. It could have been a thruster stuck on the Agena, and indeed the Armstrong jump to the relatively logical conclusion that since everything had been okay up to the docking, and they had just docked that it was probably something wrong with the Agena. So he undocked. As soon as he did, the spacecraft began to accelerate in its motion, which meant that without the Agena mass there, now the thruster must have been on the spacecraft, and they had great difficulty isolating where the problem was. They turned everything off, but they were still spinning. And so after quite a bit of confusion, justifiable confusion, both in the air and on the ground, they were able to stabilize the spacecraft by selectively turning thrusters on and off to find which one was stuck. They isolated the stuck one, brought the spacecraft back under control,

but they had used a lot of their attitude control fuel. And because of this, they backed into a mission rule that said when your attitude control fuel gets such and such low, then we have to have recovery, because we can't afford to let the spacecraft go any longer. So suddenly, I was counting them down to a reentry out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. No ships to speak of, no aircraft carriers standing by. So this was quite a baptism in fire. To me, and fortunately, they floated around there for quite some time, and were picked up by a destroyer. But this experience stuck in my mind and actually came back and related to another problem that we had on Apollo 8. Well, on Apollo 8, we were coming back from the moon. Frank Borman had gone to get some sleep. I was flying to the degree you can fly

a spacecraft falling down from the moon. Flying the spacecraft, Jim Lovell was down in the navigation bay doing star sightings to test the navigation equipment. We really didn't use the navigation equipment on board for that first flight out to the moon. And Jim, in his haste, hit the wrong button on the computer, which caged the gyro, which sent the attitude reference system to zero, which lined it up with the spacecraft where it was supposed to be lined up with, you know, the universe. And so I suddenly saw the attitude ball in front of me starting to move. Coincidentally, one of the thrusters fired that was taking care of the attitude of the spacecraft. And I jumped to the conclusion that, oh my God, we've got a stuck thruster, just like Jim and he ate. So I came in with

a hand controller in the opposite way to counteract this thruster. And was trying to take the movement out. I couldn't do it. So I came in with more. Actually, what was happening was the ball was just moving inside the instrument panel on its own. The spacecraft had been up until that moment perfectly neutral, until I put the thrust in. And then I saw that that the shafts of light from the sun, hitting little dustmotes in the air, was moving. So that further convinced me that we had a stuck thruster, came in with more thrust. Frank Mormon woke up about this time. What the hell's going on? And so I think we got a stuck thruster. And then I realized that the light was rotating the wrong way for this thruster being stuck. And by this time the ball had now zeroed out. And then I realized, oops, it was because of this caging of the gyrosystem that made it look like a stuck thruster

a la, Jim and he ate. But really wasn't. So we quickly brought the spacecraft back under stability. But we didn't know where the hell we were with attitude. And poor Jim Lovel, of course, was being debriefed by Frank pretty thoroughly by this time. You couldn't see very many stars because sunlight was reflecting off water and urine crystals that were microscopic but floating around the spacecraft. And so it was very difficult for us to reorient the reference system, which had to be done because we were about 24 hours out from reentry. And if you reentered with the wrong attitude, the wrong spacecraft attitude you could skip out or dig in. And that was both lethal results. But fortunately, Jim's sharp eyes and a little help from the ground, we managed to shoot a few stars and eventually stumble on the right combination. And the computer said, yay, barely, we know where we are now.

But that stemmed from Jim and he ate. So talking about this, though, you talk about real test pilot attitudes when you talk about Jim and I ate and it's spinning out of control. Let's talk about the fire for a second. Where were you when you heard about the fire and when you heard about it, did it surprise you? I was home. I had been in the simulator half the night so I had gone home. I was called by my friend Albein and was told that since I was an iris to the white residence that I should go over and tell Pat White that her husband had just burned up. I can remember driving over there perplexed of why this happened because Apollo and my view had been so thoroughly thought through much more than any airplane that I'd ever flown or tested. Yet in retrospect, it was amazing to me that they had missed

an extremely in retrospect obvious point. That if you take oxygen at 100% and pressurize it above atmospheric pressure, in this case five and a half pounds above atmospheric pressure, then almost anything will burn. An asbestos, any fire blanket will burn under those kind of pressures. And there must have been, you know, 50 people who are 100, including the crew, who knew that they were going to do this one test for the first time, with 100% oxygen pressurized above atmospheric because this spacecraft was just sitting, you know, at the bottom of the atmosphere and they wanted to test its leakability, not with air but with oxygen. They'd combined two tests, one of the oxygen system and one of the pressure system, and that was the fatal flaw. And yet nobody said, well, wait a minute, you walk into any hospital where somebody's on 100% oxygen in a tent where the pressure

is maybe one millimeter above atmospheric and there's always a no smoking sign. And so one little spark set it off and once that happened, there was no stopping it. Do you have an attitude of feeling about these test pilots who, you know, you said you went and told Pat, wait about her husband? Was your attitude about that as part of this test pilot? Well, the people who were selected for the program had been called, if you will, by their past experience, down to a group who either had some kind of emotional flaw. They didn't worry about that much, or we'd like to think down to other rather steely-nerved types. And so, by own just speaking for myself, I thought and still think that Apollo and going to the moon was safer than some of the flying I'd done as an Air Force officer

as a fighter pilot, up an Iceland flying in terrible weather with loaded airplanes and certainly at that time, in my view, safer than being a fighter pilot in Vietnam. And so this was, we had selected these careers because we had decided that for whatever benefit we saw in it, personal satisfaction serving the country blah, blah, blah, but it was worth it to take these risks. I don't think anybody didn't think there was a risk. Now, I don't know that Grissom White and Chaffee had contemplated, you know, burning up on the ground in sort of a ignoble way. I mean, they weren't even on a mission. And it was, you know, sad that they were going to die that it wasn't, you know, way that where they had been training. But basically, we had accepted these kinds of risks. I thought in the case of Apollo White that we had one chance and three of a successful mission, one chance of three

of an unsuccessful mission yet surviving, and one chance and three of an unsuccessful mission and not surviving. And I had five kids. And so it played on my mind. It wasn't me losing so much, but my wife, you know, who couldn't get, we couldn't get insurance. And yet I had decided and talked over with her that the benefits, personally to me, of the fulfillment of a fighter pilot test pilot career, the ability to participate in a marvelous exploration program, and to serve my country, all boil down to being worth it. Great. We ran out of film. That's why I was. Oh, it was good. It was good. We got it. One second. We're going to take a slate. This is Frank Bourman, role 123. Take one. Well, Gemini said most basically a mission to prove that humans could live two weeks in

space, in zero G environment. And so that was the mission, because that was one of the requirements for the Apollo program. And I thought at the end of the North American to rock well out of downies to be sort of the onsite manager of the changes that were mandated by Houston. So I had a team, Doug Brum, Aaron Cohen and some other people. We spent a long time out there making certain that things were kosher at the factory and that the changes that were sent from Houston were really going in properly. So I was very, very knowledgeable and very confident of the block to vehicles as a result of living with it. Excellent.

So we've interviewed a lot of the engineers. You came towards the moon. You didn't see it though. You didn't see it until you turned over. And I want to take me through that process and when it appeared to you to be Frank Bourman, 126, take one. We didn't, as we approached the moon, we couldn't see it. It was pitch black outside and we were upside down and backwards and hoping that we would come within 60 miles of the far side of the moon. Oh, sorry. I was going to say maybe I switched the tape. We interviewed George Miller a couple weeks ago. I was having sound problems and he kept telling me engineering advice. I said, you need sound canceling. I thought it was engineer authority.