Nation: THE VOYAGE: POETRY AND PERFECTION

• Share

A SCANT decade ago, man was making his first tentative probes into near space. Now, his eye fixed on the moon, that cold and lifeless globe with its borrowed light, he was poised to soar beyond earth's atmosphere, beyond the 40,000-mile-deep magnetosphere and into a vast and trackless void. The moon flight was man's first great extraterrestrial venture.

The flight began flawlessly. On Pad 39A at Cape Kennedy, Fla., Borman, Lovell and Anders lay strapped in the 11-ft. command module that was perched atop a 363-ft. Saturn 5 rocket. With a deafening bellow, the rocket inched upward on a rising pillar of smoke and flame, then spurted off into earth orbit. During its second turn around the planet, it accelerated from 17,400 m.p.h. to 24,200 m.p.h., enough to escape earth's gravitational embrace and send Apollo 8 on the road of night that would lead to the moon. Almost 69 hours after liftoff, the three astronauts made their historic rendezvous.

Below them, less than 70 miles away, lay a desolate, pock-marked landscape. In the black sky above hung a half-disk —the earth—its blue and brown surface mottled by large patches of white. Thus, incredibly, they were there, precisely where the mission planners had predicted, finally living the dreams of untold generations of their ancestors. In orbit around the moon and 230,000 miles farther away from home than any humans had ever before traveled, the Apollo 8 astronauts conveyed impressions of their pioneering adventure with words that at times were poetic. Their telecasts gave earthbound viewers an unforgettable astronaut's-eye view of the moon.

"The moon is essentially grey, no color," Astronaut Lovell reported. "Looks like plaster of paris, or sort of a greyish deep sand. We can see quite a bit of detail. The Sea of Fertility doesn't stand out as well here as it does on earth. There's not as much contrast between that and the surrounding craters. The craters are all rounded off. The round ones look like they've been hit by meteorites or projectiles of some sort. Langrenus is quite a huge crater. It's got a central cone to it. The walls of the crater are terraced, about six or seven terraces on the way down."

From their descriptions, it was obvious that the Apollo crew had diligently learned its lessons. The astronauts casually called out names of lunar craters and other landmarks as if they were old friends. The Sea of Fertility. Messier. Pickering. The Pyrenees Mountains. The craters of Colombo and Gutenberg. The long parallel cracks or faults of Gaudibert.

What They Saw

On Christmas Eve, during their ninth revolution of the moon, the astronauts presented their best description of the moon in the longest and most impressive of the mission's six telecasts. "This is Apollo 8 coming to you live from the moon," reported Borman, focusing the TV camera on the lunar surface drifting by below. "The moon is a different thing to each of us," said Borman. "My own impression is that it's a vast, lonely, forbidding-type existence—great expanse of nothing that looks rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone. It certainly would not appear to be a very inviting place to live or work."