Apollo 50: Apollo VIII, part 1

"There's no question that it was a coffin, and I'd have flown it gladly."
-Frank Borman to Congress, after the Apollo 1 fire

In spaceflight, there are "good" missions and "bad" missions. "Good" missions are the milestones: first man in space, first orbit, first spacewalk, first flight of a new vehicle, first lunar landing, first use of a lunar rover. "Bad" missions are the dull, routine ones: a two-week endurance test, for example, or a repeat flight of the previous mission.

Frank Borman began his NASA career getting bumped from a "good" mission to a "bad" one, and ended it getting bumped from a "bad" mission to a "good" one.



Borman was born in 1928 in Gary, Indiana. He graduated from West Point in 1950 and became a fighter pilot in the Air Force, serving in the Philippines in the early 1950s. In 1957, he returned to West Point as an assistant professor of thermodynamics and fluid dynamics, and in 1960 began work as an experimental test pilot. He joined NASA as part of the second astronaut group in 1962, alongside John Young, Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, Pete Conrad, Elliot See, Jim McDivitt, Ed White, and Tom Stafford.

When Alan Shepard was scrubbed from Gemini 3, the first manned Gemini mission, due to Meniere's disease, his co-pilot, Tom Stafford, was scrubbed as well. Slayton assigned Shepard's backup, Gus Grissom, to the mission, and provisionally assigned Frank Borman as his copilot, which would have made Borman the first of the second group of astronauts to fly in space, as well as landing him the first manned Gemini flight - certainly a "good" mission. But Grissom, after meeting Borman and for reasons he apparently took to his grave, requested a different copilot, and so Borman was removed from the flight. (Grissom and Borman were both Air Force, whereas Borman's replacement, John Young, was Navy, so whatever the reason was, it wasn't interservice rivalry.)

Instead of flying the prestigious Gemini 3, Borman got handed Gemini's turd sandwich: Gemini 7, a two-week endurance flight in December 1965 with little to do but let the doctors run tests on you. The one consolation was that he would command that mission instead of "pilot" it.*

*The designation "pilot," as used in Gemini and Apollo, is laughably misleading. In general, the Command Pilot (in Gemini) or Commander (in Apollo) would fly whatever craft he was aboard. And even "fly" was a bit of a misnomer, since computers handled most of it. The only Lunar Module Pilot who actually got to pilot the LM was Apollo 12's Al Bean.

Borman's frustrations were compounded by the fact that one of the tests the NASA doctors wanted to run was a comparison of two men in a pressurized capsule, one wearing a spacesuit, one not. Borman drew the short straw and was assigned to wear his suit for the entire flight. It proved to be far too uncomfortable to sleep in, and so eventually the doctors relented and allowed him to take it off. Another experiment for Gemini 7's guinea-pig crew required them to collect some of their bodily waste for post-flight analysis. Borman apparently hated the fecal containment system so much that he tried to go the entire 14-day mission without having a bowel movement - and apparently made it to day 8! Whether that's true or not, what is true is that Borman and Lovell had such a frustrating time with the urine collection device that they recommended simply venting it into space on subsequent flights, an idea that was incorporated into the design of the Apollo command module.

In the aftermath of the Apollo 1 fire in January 1967, Frank Borman dealt with North American's leadership and testified before Congress. (Borman's testimony begins on page 187 of the book, which is page 206 of the pdf.) As part of his job liaising with North American, Borman at one point had to have the company fire one of its top executives, who was having a nervous breakdown in the aftermath of the Fire. That executive was Scott Crossfield, the first man to fly at Mach 2.

Another bit of apocrypha: Supposedly, Deke Slayton had originally wanted Gus Grissom to command the first moon landing, and when Grissom died and left none of the Mercury Seven (save the irascible and soon-to-retire Wally Schirra) on the active roster, Slayton wanted Borman to have the job. I don't know if that's true (and remember, Schirra was adamant that there had been a rule that nobody would command two Apollo missions), but it's worth throwing out there.

Okay, remember this mission schedule from September 1967?

A-missions: unmanned CSM/Saturn V tests (Apollos 4 and 6)
B-mission: unmanned LM/Saturn IB test (Apollo 5 - I'll cover this a bit in three months)
C-mission: Earth-orbit CSM test (Schirra, Eisle, Cunningham, backed up by Stafford, Young, Cernan)
D-mission: Earth-orbit LM test (McDivitt, Scott, Schweickart, backed up by Conrad, Gordon, Williams)
E-mission: high Earth-orbit LM test and lunar-speed reentry test (Borman, Collins, Anders, backed up by Armstrong, Lovell, Aldrin)
F-mission: lunar dress rehearsal
G-mission: first lunar landing
H-missions: subsequent short-stay landings with two EVAs
I-missions: lunar orbital surveys
J-missions: longer-stay landings with three EVAs and a rover

The ink had barely dried on that schedule when it had to be amended: C.C. Williams was killed in a T-38 crash on October 5, 1967, so the D-mission, presumably to be called Apollo 8, would need a new backup LMP. In less than a year, the schedule would undergo a much more drastic change, and Apollo 8 wouldn't be the D-mission after all. Nor would it be flown by McDivitt's crew.

But first, there was another astronaut to swap out. In July of 1968, Borman's CMP, Michael Collins, was forced off the crew by a bone spur on his spine. Surgery would correct the problem, and Collins would return to flight status, but he would not fly with Frank Borman. Instead, the backup CMP, Jim Lovell, would fly second seat to Borman once again, as he'd done on Gemini 7.

(It is amusing to point out that Lovell, originally assigned as the backup CMP on the E-mission,  had more spaceflight experience than either the backup CDR Neil Armstrong or the prime CDR Frank Borman. Lovell appears to have taken this in stride. It's also amusing to point out that swapping out Lovell for Collins meant that Armstrong's crew went from being the most experienced of the three assigned backup crews to the least. Well, amusing if you're not Pete Conrad. More on him later.)

One month earlier, in June 1968, the first LM had arrived at the Kennedy Space Center, whereupon 100 significant defects were discovered. Bob Gilruth, who had overall responsibility for all manned missions, determined that there was no way the LM would be ready to fly by the end of 1968. This would mean having to run the D, E, F, and G missions in 1969 in order to reach Kennedy's goal of a moon landing by the end of the decade - and each mission would have to be run flawlessly.

In August, George Low, the Manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, proposed a solution: fly a CSM-only mission in December 1968. It would not repeat the C-mission; instead, this CSM would ride a Saturn V to the Moon and back, allowing NASA to get a jump start on testing operations near the Moon, something that otherwise would have had to wait until the F-mission. He also proposed scrubbing the E-mission as duplicative and wasteful.

When his proposal was accepted (I'll get into one objection in the next post), Deke Slayton asked Jim McDivitt if he wanted the new mission profile. McDivitt said no; he was a test pilot, who had trained to fly the LM, and that was what he was going to do. Slayton turned to Borman, the commander of the now-scrubbed E-mission, who agreed to jump up to Apollo 8.

The following people were not happy with this switch: David Scott, Bill Anders, and Pete Conrad. When Apollos 8 and 9 swapped crews, they kept their original equipment, meaning that the CM originally assigned to McDivitt and Scott would now be flown by Borman and Lovell. Scott had been intimately involved with the testing of that CM, and, even though the Apollo 9 one was functionally identical, was not happy about giving it up to another crew. Anders had been assigned as the LM pilot, and would now be on a mission without a LM. And Pete Conrad had been bumped from backing up Apollo 8, which would make him the prime commander of Apollo 11, to backing up Apollo 9, which would put him in line for the second moon landing instead of the first.

On November 14, 1968, NASA announced the prime crew for Apollo 10, the F-mission, which would be the first all-veteran crew. At that time, the crew assignments were thus (italicized missions had already flown):

A-missions: unmanned CSM/Saturn V tests (Apollos 4 and 6)
B-mission: unmanned LM/Saturn IB test (Apollo 5)
C-mission: Earth-orbit CSM test (Schirra, Eisle, Cunningham, backed up by Stafford, Young, Cernan)
C-prime mission: CSM lunar orbit test (Borman, Lovell, Anders, backed up by Armstrong, Aldrin, Haise)
D-mission: Earth-orbit LM test (McDivitt, Scott, Schweickart, backed up by Conrad, Gordon, Bean)
F-mission: lunar dress rehearsal (Stafford, Young, Cernan, backed up by Cooper, Eisle, Mitchell)
G-mission: first lunar landing
H-missions: subsequent short-stay landings with two EVAs
I-missions: lunar orbital surveys
J-missions: longer-stay landings with three EVAs and a rover

The writing was on the wall. If all went according to plan, NASA would have two shots at a Moon landing in 1969.

They just needed their temperamental Saturn V rocket to work...

(to be continued)