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

seronic, glory of the moon, and yet, to me, the most interesting thing, the most significant thing was looking back at our own planet, the Earth. We spent all our time on Earth training about how to study the moon, how to go to the moon. It was very lunar-oriented, yet when I looked up and saw the Earth coming up on this very stark beat-up lunar horizon, an Earth that was the only color that we could see, a very fragile-looking Earth, a very delicate-looking Earth. I was immediately almost overcome with the thought, you know, here we came all this way to the moon, and yet the most significant thing we're seeing is our own home planet, the Earth. Did you start taking pictures of the Earth? Well, we took pictures of the Earth, and of course those pictures have actually stood out in the history of Apollo as some of the most significant things. The pictures of the Earth from the moon on Apollo 8, the first pictures of our own home

planet, and the lunar landing itself on Apollo 11, in my view, were the two most significant things of Apollo. Every time I ask a science question, Frank, say, ask Anders, what was the attitude about science? Frank's attitude about science versus your attitude about science for this Apollo 8 mission? Well, Frank is a very highly technically trained guy, but he's more from a flight test background, and I had been trained as a nuclear engineer, as well as a fighter pilot, and so I had probably a little more open attitude about doing science on the flight, and yet Frank, I can't fault his discipline whatsoever. This was the first flight to the moon, and at this turn into a flying science lab, and because somebody dropped a test tube, we didn't make it back. All the science in the world would be for naught.

So the real mission was to get to the moon, go around the moon, and come home safely. And as long as science didn't intrude on that mission, as long as it could be about a third-level importance job, then Frank would tolerate it. And I think his discipline gave us a pretty good balance. The photographic regime was a little too intense in retrospect, and Frank realized that in real terms. I was caught up in it. He aborted it. And in retrospect, I was disappointed at the time. And actually, when he ordered me to go to sleep, I laid under the couch and peaked out the window. Didn't sleep at all. But we made it back safely. We might not have. And so I don't fault, and I congratulate Frank and others before him who had said, look, we can't be overwhelmed by the scientist. And they got a lot of science out of later flights. Apollo 8 was not a scientific mission.

They talked to me about being ordered to sleep. That's an interesting story point. How did that come about? I don't remember the exact sequences, and yet it was clear I'd gone almost a whole flight without having slept, both born and level snored, and also they were together on watch. And I was alone awake. And so when I was trying to sleep, they were awake, and they'd chat about football scores and the spacecraft, and Frank was a little deaf, so he level had to talk loud. So I didn't sleep very well. Plus, in fact, I was concerned about the spacecraft, and it was my job to keep it running. And it was not a very great place to sleep. I always felt like I was just as I'd drop off, I feel like I was falling out of bed like you do. And so I'd gone about, I guess, three days with no sleep. So 0G is not a very trying environment, you know, you're floating around. I think Frank either detected or realized in theory that people who hadn't slept

very much are more prone to make mistakes. So he decided that with the burn to get out of orbit and the velocity back by reigniting the rocket was so critical. And I was this flight engineer, and the one to make sure all the valves came on, and the signals, blah, blah, blah, I worked at a time, but he would rather have me less photographs, more sleep than I would have personally selected. And so we got into a little debate about it, but he was a boss, and so I flew it smartly and he looked like I was sleeping. How did Jack Schmidt help you in training for a poly way, what did he try to help you with? Well Jack Schmidt was a real geologist and a good teacher, and so I wanted to, on the thought that maybe we would never go back to the moon, who knew, you know, this flight

wasn't successful, and all we do is whistle around at once, and barely managed to make it that maybe the United States, who didn't want to be embarrassed in space, they wanted to put the moon in, but they didn't want to crash, might not go. So I wanted to make sure that my one chance of seeing the back of the moon, I could bring back as much geological lunar science as I could. So Jack would come down, and we would sit in the sauna and go over basic geology, impact craters versus volcanoes, and I had a personal interest in this anyway. So he was very helpful in that, as were others, and I came up with kind of my own little checklist on how to identify rocks, and so he was a very helpful guy in that regard, and that's why I had no inhibition about recommending that he fly later to, or at least some geologists, and he was the only geologist we had in the program that some geologists

ought to fly on Apollo before it was terminated. So. Do you think that the Apollo 8 photos, did they serve a purpose, did they later on upon looking at them, did they contribute to the scientific record, are you proud of that? The Apollo 8 lunar surface program photos probably contributed some science, though their accuracy and ability were exceeded, and later flights when he had better camera equipment, better windows, had they been the only photos, they would be a treasure trove for science, but they weren't. There were quite a few more Apollo flights, not to mention the up close looking at the rocks right in there, right in the eyeball. The photo that I think contributed the most, not so much to science, but to politics, was the Apollo 8 Earthrise photo, that was replicated on the stamp that everybody swooned over.

I think it gave a jump start to the environmental movement. It helped point out that not only is the Earth delicate and fragile, but it's also very finite, it showed the political leaders that there really was only about that much difference between Washington and Moscow. So I think this has had a subliminal aspect of not just the Apollo 8 flights, but all of the views of the Earth from the moon have let the human race and its political leaders and its environmental leaders and its citizenry realize that we're all jammed together on one really kind of dinky little planet, and we better treat it in ourselves better, or we're not going to be here very long. You described the moon as a forbidding hole in the stars. What gave you that impression? Well this is the way that back to me. As we were starting to prepare ourselves to go into lunar orbit, and after we had lost

contact with the Earth, we suddenly went into the double umbra of the moon. That is the shadow from the sun and the shadow of earth shines. So it suddenly became extremely dark, there was no reflected light. There were untold stars. The navigational stars were washed out because now all these higher magnitude stars could be seen. We went from hardly being able to see stars at all to swamp with stars. And so here looking out the window was this magnificent star show, and as I turned around and looked over my shoulder, sort of in the direction we're going, suddenly the stars, there was a line, a curved line of no stars, of a immense black hole. And I realized that hair sort of stood up on my neck, and I realized that that was the moon.

That was the dark hole of the moon. And I had a kind of a feeling of falling into a dark hole. And it was a little eerie, but then I realized, well we were in lunar orbit and I put it in my scientist, not my emotionalist hat on, and was able to overcome the hair, getting back down on my neck. That's a good story. You had some concern over the hatch that was left over concerned from the fire. Can you talk to me about that a little bit? Well in the Apollo fire, one of the reasons attributed to the crew's death, and therefore in lack of rescue was that the hatch was designed to open inward, and they couldn't release it in a hurry. And so part of the quote-unquote fix was to have an opening hatch. I think that was a mistake. We didn't have any other fires. An opening hatch, an open outward, in a pressure vessel, pressured five PSI over vacuum, was

in my view an accident waiting to happen. And I would have rather had the old hatch, because I kept looking up at this mechanical engineer's dream of levers and hooks and latches thinking, boy if one of those fails this hatch is going to pop off, and we're going to be popped into vacuum of space. So that worried me a little bit. As an engineer I thought that was the one fix on Apollo that was sort of politically correct, it was designed for a launch pad problem, and here we were going to the moon and we shouldn't. That's one fix I think we shouldn't have made. Was your, you think your wife was concerned as Susan Borman was about the prospects of how well this was going to turn out? Oh, out of film. One more roll. We're all set. I mean. Take one. Well I can't speak for Susan Borman's concern. If Susan Borman was concerned or massively concerned, she hit it well.

Good, beautiful wife. I have read subsequently that she was quite concerned. And I really can't speak for my own wife's concern. She was very supportive. We had talked this over. We talked about the hazards. She had five children, no insurance. So every right to be concerned. But the wives, of course, had been married to fighter and test pilots. They hadn't left them, and they weren't stupid. So they had digested these problems. And in my view, Apollo 8 was really maybe even less dangerous than the earlier planned mission. We didn't have a lunar module to test. So from a hardware point of view, even though we were the first ones on the Saturn V, we could have been anyway, but going into Earth orbit. We weren't exposed to any lunar module hazards. We had the additional hazard of suddenly being heaved out to the moon, but NASA had been

thinking about that for a long time. So personally, and you can die in lunar orbit just as easily you can die. I mean, you can die in Earth orbit just as easily you can die in lunar orbit as the Russians have shown. So I didn't take this flight to be any more dangerous. And I probably communicated that to my wife. So I don't know whether she was more concerned than Susan or not. She was concerned, but she wasn't breaking down over it. What does that smell remind you of? It reminds me of trying to clean up this spacecraft, you know, after our leader had a few problems. What happened with Frank? The new ass Frank.

I mean, didn't he? The Frank has told me this story before. Well, for whatever reason, Frank became quite ill, initially just vomiting and then worse. And as easy as 0G makes life, it also has some very bad attributes. In other words, all the things we are human functions have to do on Earth. Many of them are greatly aided by gravity, things go down into the toilet, into the vomit bag. In 0G, they just go, whichever way they start, they keep going until they hit something. And so when Frank became ill, I, the smell is pretty close, you know, the smell was pretty bad. So I immediately grabbed some oxygen mass that was supposed to be there for a pad fire. And if we were not on the pad anymore, so I'm using this oxygen. And then we, Jim Lovelin, I had to kind of net these stuff out of the air like chasing

butterflies with paper towels. And then we had to clean up with these little airline type deals, take a bath, and that's not a good way. So every time I smell one of those airline little rip open towels, I'm immediately flashback in my brain to this other stuff. You told Mike Collins at the return home, was it pretty uneventful you mentioned it was Isaac Newton who was driving when it was back in the world? Well, once we made the maneuver behind the moon, it turned out to be so precise that we didn't need any correction all the way back from the moon. And we had to come 240,000 miles to hit something that was a reentry target about the size of a letter slot seen from about four miles away. We had to slide the letter into that slot.

And the initial throw was good enough that that letter went right through the middle of it. And so there weren't any corrections to be made, the spacecraft just had to be maintained. We fell for 240,000 miles really. Frankly, it was kind of boring. And you know, the earth seen the earth from the spacecraft was exciting, but after you've seen it for seven days, you know, that tends to wear thin as well. And so one time when I was on watch, Mike Collins called up and asked me how things were going, and I must have said something I was a little bit boring, probably amazed everybody on the earth. And he said, well, who's flying the spacecraft? Well, I was at the controls, but I commented that really Isaac Newton was flying the spacecraft and Isaac was in control, and we didn't have much to say about it. You were scheduled for Apollo 13.

You were originally scheduled for 13. Why didn't you make that slide? And do you think it would have been different if you had? Well, I had been assigned to Apollo 13 as the normal revolution of the backup crews before the crews had been announced. And then I was asked by the President to come to Washington to help formulate the post-apolo program, which I had been complaining about as don't expect the American people to support lunar landings at nauseam. They really were to jam the flag on the moon once or twice, maybe, but not 20 times. And so I went to Washington, and Ken Mattingley, my backup for that flight, was assigned to my place, very good guy. Ken was a bachelor, though, and had never had been exposed to general all these childhood diseases, and even as a child, he'd never, as far as he knew, had the measles. So when one of the other backup crew, Charlie Duke, came to the simulator, and then later

found out that one of his children had the measles, very shortly before the flight, NASA was justifiably concerned. They didn't want Mattingley coming down with the measles and lunar orbit, particularly when he's going to be the only guy in the command module waiting for level and, yeah, a level in Hayes to come up for the rendezvous. So they picked a guy who'd been the third or fourth level backup, and Jack Schweigert, who was a good guy, but just hadn't been trained. And so they went into a massive training program, mainly to train Jack out of rendezvous. And so that was the focus, and they decided, sort of at the last minute, that, okay, he was training well enough, and they'd take the chance to send him out on the rendezvous. Of course, unbeknown to any of us, a switch, a thermostatic switch inside Apollo 13 had

welded shut during a test. It was a switch designed for AC current, which is much less demanding than DC current. And this was a DC circuit. And so during the testing, somewhere along the line, this switch welded close. So the thermostat didn't work, just like the thermostat in your house on your heater. If you turned your heater on, it would just keep heating and heating and heating until you realized you were too hot. It's my view that probably Apollo 8 had the same thermostatic switch welded shut, and we didn't know it either, and probably Apollo 11. But at least in our flight, I didn't want to trust the thermostats. And so whenever we needed to heat up the cryogenic oxygen, I would turn on the heater switch, watch the pressure, and when the pressure got up to where it should, well before the thermostat would cut it off, I would turn the heater off.

And so on our flight, obviously we didn't have any problem. On their flight for whatever reason, and we can't ask Jack Schwiger, because he's not with us anymore, they left the heater switch on. And when it got up to the thermostatic control level, which was still safe, it didn't cut off because the switch was welded close. And then it just kept heating and heating, and for some reason they didn't observe the pressure, and it eventually popped the tank. And when one tank popped, it took out the other tanks, so they were without cryogenic oxygen. What would have happened to you guys if the same thing happened to 13 that happened at 8? Well, I had thought about that, about the loss of the cryogenic oxygen. And I think that we probably could have made it. We could have used, in to the degree Apollo 11, a 13 was using, the lithium hydroxide canisters

in front of our mouse like gas mass to absorb the carbon dioxide we didn't need to have the fans. In fact, that whole sequence about the canisters and the lunar module and duct taping of my view was a little bit of Hollywood cranked in there, because we could have put them right in front of their mouths. And zero G, that's no great, grow great challenge. In fact, I think I suggested they suggest to the crew that they duct tape them to the heads, their heads, and that in their irritation they decided they weren't going to stand for that, so they duct taped it to the lunar module. But we didn't have a lifeboat, we didn't have a lifeboat. We didn't have a lunar module whose only lifeboat function was to provide oxygen, really. I mean, I think they did make a corrective maneuver, in our case we didn't have to make maneuvers, maybe we would have. And that if we didn't, if it happened right after our insertion to a lunar trajectory into going to the moon, and we had therefore four days to go out and back around on this

free return, that if anything we would die of lack of pressure, we would breathe the oxygen down. But we did have some, we had reentry oxygen, we had emergency canisters, and so if it happened later in the flight, we probably, I'd give it a 50-50 chance. Um, fine, if you have any regrets about that. But I wouldn't have been, it would have been a better book, because we didn't have a lunar module. Okay, good. Um, we're out though, you know what, because, yeah, we had to include, and somewhere along the line, it, on its own, because he didn't, he couldn't control it, it came sort of right side up, and he ejected. That's famous footage. Um, just a couple of seconds. Back on the science point of second, you really wanted the scientists to understand the limitations of the command service module, of trying to look outside those windows and stuff.

He told a story, I think, to Brent about that, bringing Wilhelms and those guys into that thing. Wilhelms? Don Wilhelms, the geologist. I don't remember, Don. Did a lot of mapping in the moon. My private tutor was, to the end of the command service module, I think a bunch of them. Okay. Well, Don, maybe, the guy who trained me was Jack Schmidt, and then a couple of NASA geologists, but Wilhelms, I'm sure, I don't remember him. Well, that's a big idea. Next. Do you remember the incident where you were trying to demonstrate to them how difficult it was? Well, I don't remember that, but it was indeed. Well, how about, let me ask you this, then. When you, the one who described the command service module as being kind of a submarine. Yeah. Except the submarine doesn't have windows. I'm in the submarine business, too. There we go. Are you in the submarine business? Well, we're general dynamics. General dynamics. That's right. Do you give me some money one time?

I'm sure. I'm called Steel Boats and Iron Man, which is a fast attack submarine. Yeah. All right. Here we go. Roll 128. Bill, they'll just take two. Describe the command service module. 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. The submarines really don't have windows, but they do have windows.