Christopher's Reviews > Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon

Short version: Wow, what a surprise.

In 2018, the 50th anniversary year after the flight of Apollo 8, I resolved to reread the two books devoted to the subject—Robert Zimmerman's Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, The First Manned Flight to Another World, and Jeffrey Kluger's Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon.

To space fans, Apollo 8 is probably the least celebrated of the great spaceflights of the cold war. There wasn't a book devoted to covering the flight until Zimmerman published his trailblazing book in 1998, thirty years after the fact. Amazingly, it was nearly another twenty years before Kluger's book arrived in 2017.

I was enthusiastic for Kluger’s book. He was Jim Lovell’s collaborator on Lost Moon, which later became the basis for the movie Apollo 13. Kluger is an outstanding writer, and I think his efforts on Lost Moon made it one of the best books about the Apollo program.

With Apollo 8, it seemed to me that Kluger had written the definitive book about Apollo 8. Kluger wrote elegantly and authoritatively, and he tells the story almost through the eyes of the astronauts themselves. What more needed to be said about this event?

But as we sometimes learn, a new perspective can be refreshing, even when we think the last word may have been spoken about a particular subject.

In 2018, a new book about Apollo 8 was unexpected, especially from a writer whose skills did not appear to be in aerospace. I found Rocket Men by a happy accident during a search on Amazon, and I automatically knew I needed to have it.

But I was skeptical, I’ll admit. Robert Kurson was a bestselling author, but I didn't know anything about him or the book he wrote, Shadow Divers. I’ve read a number of books of space history by authors whose scholarship was casual and dubious, and I was afraid this might be one of them.

It was with that skepticism that began reading Rocket Men. It initially did nothing to allay my fears. First, I groused about the title, which I felt was too broad and undescriptive. Rocket Men also happens to be the title of an earlier (and lesser) book about the Apollo program, so the chance of confusion was possible. What author wants to title their book after an earlier, undistinguished book about the same subject?

Adding to my skepticism was reading Kurson’s opening line to Chapter One:

As he sat on a beach in the Caribbean, a quiet engineer named George Low ran his fingers through the sand and wondered whether he should risk everything to win the Space Race and help save the world.

Kurson was losing me right from the gate. What quiet engineer contemplates saving the world? This did not seem like the behavior of George Low, one of the architects of the Apollo program. What a melodramatic way to begin a book, I kept thinking.

Kurson’s first big mistake came in describing how Apollo 8 came to be a lunar mission.

As Kluger accurately described in his book, the crew that would eventually become Apollo 8—Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders—were originally slated for a high earth orbit mission on Apollo 9. When Apollo 8 was reconfigured for a lunar mission, the crews of Apollo 8 and 9 were swapped, so Borman’s crew took Apollo 8. Apollo 9 was then scheduled for the high earth orbit mission with a test lunar module, which would not be available in time for Apollo 8’s late December schedule.

This is an important change, and all it needs is a short explanation of before and after. But Kurson’s description is brief, incomplete, and confusing. I can only imagine the quizzical look on the reader’s face when they read on page 9 that Borman is commander of Apollo 9, only to learn on page 12 he’s leading Apollo 8. The reader might naturally believe it's a typo on page 9.

Elsewhere, there are a few minor errors of fact. In one instance, Kurson describes the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 as having taken place at the Baikonur Cosmodrome—although the launch complex was not known by that name until many years later. In the 1950s it was known merely as a missile test range near Tyuratam. It’s a small error, but when I see an error like this, I always wonder what else is wrong.

A bit later, for whatever reason, Kurson chooses to translate the words ‘astronaut’ and ‘cosmonaut’ into the overly simplistic ‘star sailor’ and ‘universe sailor,’ respectively—and I began to imagine that Kurson was grasping at straws.

Still later, in a disappointingly brief single line, he says of Apollo's immediate predecessor, ‘Project Gemini, designed to perfect techniques the Apollo flights would use to land men on the Moon, opened a floodgate of progress.’ That's it? How about that Gemini’s major successes were in spacecraft rendezvous and extravehicular activity? And how about that those skillsets arguably vaulted the US space program ahead of the Soviets by that point? To understand how Apollo came to be, I think it must be said why Gemini was important in laying the groundwork.

And then came my outrage of the book. It was with a story apparently shared with Kurson by former Johnson Space Center director Christopher Kraft. In describing the reconfiguration of Apollo 8 as a lunar flight, Kurson writes, ‘Engineers hadn’t even run a trajectory analysis to account for the phases of the Moon in December, or lunar lighting at that time of the year, or the position of the Moon relative to the Earth during such a flight.’

This is misleading, because such a sentence would only have been true before the mission was reconfigured. Kraft is certainly referring to a specific point in the Apollo 8 planning, when a December mission date was contemplated but not yet committed. By the time Kurson tells this story, Slayton had already swapped Apollo 8 and 9, and Apollo 8 was designated a lunar mission with a known December window. So why would there be any question about lunar positions and trajectories? Because there wouldn't be. Kurson inserted this story too late, and it should have taken place when the change was being discussed in August.

I'll freely admit that I'm nitpicking heavily on some of this. But that's what I do with any space book. As I begin reading space history books by unfamiliar authors, my bullshit radar is always locked on. Likewise, I'm also looking for positives that set books and authors apart from others. No difference here.

Fortunately, after that, Kurson’s flaws pretty much disappeared, and he began to find his stride. My opinion about Kurson’s writing began to turn around as he described how NASA administrator James Webb reacted to the mission’s planning:

Apollo 8 was a truly audacious undertaking—it would be the first time human beings would ride on the Saturn V rocket; it would be the first time human beings left low earth orbit; and it would be the first time human beings flew toward (and around) the moon. All of these goals were extremely hazardous, and potentially catastrophic. Apollo 8 would be by far the riskiest and most complex mission of the US space program to that point.

That realization was not lost on James Webb. Upon learning from his subordinates of the proposed reconfiguration of Apollo 8 as a lunar flight, the NASA administrator notably yelled over the telephone, ‘Are you out of your mind?!’ Even so, he did not veto it. To his credit, he deferred to his colleagues and allowed the plan to proceed.

According to the history of Webb’s departure from NASA, we know two things—(1) that Webb had already been planning to resign to coincide with the close of the Johnson administration, and (2) that when Webb told President Johnson in October 1968 of his plan to resign, Johnson ordered him to resign forthwith.

Kurson suggests—and I think convincingly—that Apollo 8 influenced or simply reinforced Webb’s decision to resign. Webb was wary of the great risks involved in the mission, and he may have felt betrayed that he was kept out of the loop on decisions such as the configuration of Apollo 8 as a lunar mission.

Webb’s diminishing presence in NASA leadership is suggested in the previous Apollo 8 books, but here’s where Kurson goes further. In several stretches, Kurson shares that there was some pessimism about scheduling Apollo 8 during the Christmas season. Some newspaper op/ed pieces warned against it, and Webb apparently was quite worried that a failure of such a high-profile mission in front of the whole world would remind Americans of that tragedy each Christmas season and all but ruin the holiday for generations to come. That was potentially a very heavy burden to carry into retirement.

It’s an interesting point, and not one shared in any of the other books about this mission.

For the first time, I felt like Webb left in part because he didn’t want to bear the chance of having to mourn the loss of Apollo 8, as he had the loss of the Apollo 1 crew the year before. It probably would have crushed him.

In another interesting section, Kurson highlights that it was Frank Borman who was the key figure who trimmed the number of lunar orbits down to just ten (i.e. a mere 20 hours in lunar orbit!). Borman was not one of those starry-eyed guys like Lovell who loved being ‘in the mission.’ Borman wanted to check only the necessary boxes and get their asses home. He figured the longer they stayed away from earth, the more the chance for failure.

Borman also fought other, lesser battles as well, including his refusal to allow a TV camera on the flight (a battle which he lost).

Like all single-mission histories, Rocket Men features the requisite chapter-long bios of the crewmembers. Kurson did his homework here, as well. All of the bios include some information either not widely shared or never before. One such story is of Anders’ single-digit greeting to a Soviet bomber crew during a mid-air encounter near eastern Iceland ca. 1958. Kurson also relates stories of Lovell’s deep and abiding love for his wife and his mother. I also came away with an even fuller understanding of—and maybe even an appreciation for—Borman's tightly wound, no-nonsense personality.

Another deeply reported section—also not mentioned in the other Apollo 8 books—describes the evening before launch day. After the crew spent time with Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Anders had several guests of his own, including his childhood priest. As the visit continued, Borman—tense in the hours ahead of launch—snapped at Anders for the perceived distraction, and then apologized for his outburst.

My favorite part of the book was Kurson’s description of launch day, including the ascent of Apollo 8 to orbit. Kurson takes his time, imparting a number of interesting details. This is one of the only Apollo books I’ve read, for example, that named one of the suit specialists helping the astronauts into their pressure suits. Not long after, he even notes that the red alloy rings were for output and the blue rings were for input—not the usual stuff most Apollo books repeat ad infinitum.

From the twenty-minute mark before launch to the completion of Apollo 8’s first orbit was a full 15 pages, and not one of those pages dragged. One of my pet peeves about space books is authors' tendencies to summarize the pre-launch, launch, and post launch phases into disappointingly few pages. (If I remember correctly, Zimmerman's book summarized the Apollo 8 launch in a flimsy three pages.) Launch is one of the greatest fascinations of rocket flight, but sadly, not many writers get it right. Here, it was surprising and satisfying to finally read an author expounding upon this central subject. Kurson manages to weave many different elements into a fast-moving narrative, and gets into a good amount of detail. He emphasizes the rough ascent of the Saturn V rocket and notes several times how terrifically loud it was in the command module. And central to the Saturn V’s success was the correction of the ‘pogo problem’—a significant linear oscillation that crippled the ascent of the uncrewed Apollo 6’s Saturn V. Interestingly, Apollo 8 did in fact encounter a pogo effect in the Saturn’s second stage on its ascent to orbit, and it was not an insignificant event. Still, Borman kept his hand steady at the abort handle, and when the third stage engaged, Borman reported the problem had safely passed.

[Work in progress. To be completed.]