The Earth Behind a Man’s Thumb

The big goal was leaving Earth's atmosphere and landing on the moon, to keep the pledge President Kennedy had made at Rice University on September 12, 1962. JFK inspired many all around the world with his words that day: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do … other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."

By 1968 Lovell, William Anders, and Frank Borman were training for Apollo 8, a dress-rehearsal flight for a lunar landing. Originally they were not scheduled to leave Earth's atmosphere. They were only going to test the slingshot effect—a high-velocity orbit of the earth that would launch the capsule on a flight to the moon. But there were rumors that the Russians were trying to get there first, so NASA changed Apollo 8's flight plan.

Now Apollo 8 would fly to the moon, orbit around the dark side, and return to Earth in the last week of December. If it all went well, the spacecraft would be orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve, 1968. The training for the momentous flight went on feverishly all during 1968. When I met Lovell at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago—where he helped organize an elaborate exhibit commemorating the flight—I asked if the astronauts had been aware of all that was going on outside of NASA that year—the riots, the assassinations, the antiwar protests.

"We were all senior military people," he said, "and we were so intent on our project we put all of that aside. We did talk about the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and we worried the cost of the war would eat into the space program."

Lovell says that even though he wasn't paying too much attention, he thought the culture was disintegrating. "My background," he says, "was more patriotic. Listening to your elders, taking direction, trying to be a leader. The hippie movement sort of soured me."

On December 21, 1968, in the predawn darkness, Lovell was getting ready to enter the spacecraft atop the giant Saturn V rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Borman and Anders were already inside the vehicle. Lovell tells me, laughing, "I was left alone. I looked down, and I could see the lights of the press cars coming in for the launch. I thought, 'These people are serious. We're going to the moon!' "