There are times and places that are stamped so indelibly on our memories that even 50 years later they are as familiar as our own face in the mirror. It may be an event of great happiness or of great sorrow, a transcendent moment of beauty or a terrifying childhood memory.
Many times I have paused to let such memories implant themselves more firmly, to not let them rush by, to be sure that there was an image I could call up later, not just a rushed blur. When I held the hands of my children moments after their births, when I stood in Chile’s Atacama Desert at sunset, when I scanned a landscape dotted with yurts in Mongolia.
One such moment is approaching its 50th anniversary. The Apollo program that sent nine spacecraft to the moon was one of the great adventures of human history, and I followed it avidly. While the journey of Apollo 11 with Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins is the one that people younger than 50 can recite along with other historical facts, Apollo 8 was and still is to me the most thrilling of all the Apollo missions. It was a daring trip on a barely tested Saturn V rocket, still the most powerful ever flown, with only a few months of training, to a destination no one had ever before visited, with techniques worked out only in a compressed four month time period. It came at the end of one of the worst years in American history. 1968 saw assassinations, riots, a rising death toll in Vietnam, and increasing divisions among Americans. The crew of Apollo 8, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders launched on December 21st and arrived at the moon early in the morning of December 24th, Christmas Eve. They orbited the moon for 20 hours in 10 orbits. On the evening of December 24th, they broadcast from lunar orbit. Along with about one third of the human population at the time, I was watching. This was the unforgettable end of the broadcast.
After the broadcast ended, I stepped outside into the Texas night and looked up at the moon for several minutes, telling myself over and over that there were three men up there.
I know that memory can play tricks on you, that some things we think we remember accurately are simply wrong. So I checked myself with a program I have that can show what the sky looks like from any place at any time. Did I correctly remember that crescent moon high in the sky? The moon was not quite as high as I remembered it in Huntsville, Texas at 9:15 pm on December 24, 1968, only a little more than 20 degrees above the horizon. But here is the phase, chosen by the NASA planners to reproduce lighting conditions for the planned first landing in the Sea of Tranquility.
Even if the imagery is imperfectly recalled, the emotional memory is as fresh as yesterday. If you want to learn more about Apollo 8, I highly recommend a recently published book about the journey. Rocket Men by Robert Kurson is an excellent read, and you don’t have to be a serious space nerd to enjoy the adventure.
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