Sometimes, late at night, Borman awoke with the sound of their screams ringing through his head.
They weren’t the last to die. In June ’67, Ed Givens was killed in a car crash. He’d been support crew for Apollo 7. Then in October ‘67, mechanical failure in another T-38 took the life of Clifton Williams while he was flying to Alabama to visit his parents. He never got to see them and he never made it into orbit.
Eight dead astronauts.
Since the original Mercury seven, there had been five more intakes into the program. Knowing the dangers involved, NASA had chosen 66 men to train for space. They wanted bold men; risk takers. But with risk came mishap. Based on the odds so far, the chance of dying was better than one in 10. Even for test pilots those aren’t the sort of odds you’d choose to bet your life on.
Yet that’s precisely what Borman had been doing for the past six years, and it was wearing thin. He’d done what he set out to achieve. But he knew before lift-off that Apollo 8 would be his last flight.
If he had to pin it down, it was burying Ed, Gus and Roger that did it. Ed White’s loss had been particularly hard to take. He’d been a good friend and their wives were very close. When they first heard about the fire, he and Susan had driven straight over to Pat White’s house to be with her. That was nigh on two years ago, but it still seemed like yesterday. Borman had flown to Cape Kennedy the next morning to help with the investigation. That night, after seeing how those men had died, it was one of the few times in his life he’d gotten drunk.
NASA sent him to Washington to defend the Apollo program, which by then was facing the very real risk of permanent shutdown. It’s one thing to die in a plane crash. It’s another thing entirely to be burnt alive inside your space capsule on the launch pad. They learnt their lessons from the fire. He convinced Congress NASA knew what it was doing, that America needed to win the space race. Such a catastrophe would never happen again, he assured them.
But he wasn’t entirely certain he believed that. Isn’t that what any government agency said when it was being blamed for a disaster that might have been avoided? People always wanted to believe the lessons of history had been learnt, right up until the next time another peculiar set of circumstances contrived to prove them wrong.
He’d been aware they were having problems with Apollo 1. It was the first launch in the program, so that was to be expected. They had also shown, time and again, they had the manpower and the ingenuity to get past any problem.
But if he had been harbouring any doubt about retirement, this morning’s dream had told him all he needed to know about his state of mind. He was done. It was time to quit while he was ahead. Time to stop putting his wife through the pain and suffering. To thank God for His blessings and make the most of life with his feet firmly planted on the ground.
Just a few months ago they’d been a split second away from losing Neil Armstrong in an LLTV, their Lunar Landing Test Vehicle. Neil was one of the best performers in the lunar trainer, he’d logged more hours than anyone else — a dangerous necessity for anybody harbouring the ambition of landing on the Moon. But on that day it got away from him. He was only about 100 feet off the deck, plenty high enough to kill you if you fall but low enough to make ejecting exceedingly dangerous. He made it just in time for his parachute to slow his descent. The LLTV crashed to Earth and exploded. Neil drifted to the ground nearby and walked away. Later, they worked out if he had waited another two-fifths of a second to eject he would have died. After that near miss they asked Armstrong if it might be safer to call a halt to LLTV training. He insisted it was a risk they had to take, that the LLTV was by far the best way to prepare for landing on the Moon.
Borman couldn’t be at all sure he’d have given them the same answer. He’d logged almost no time at all in the LLTV and he knew one thing for certain — he didn’t want to start now. More astronauts were going to die, of that he was positive. Maybe not this year or the next. Hopefully not before they set foot on the Moon. But everything they had done in the Apollo program and everything they would do from this day forward was being done for the first time.
He opened the door to his room slowly, but heard no movement from Lovell or Anders. They must be still asleep. He had no idea what time it was or how long he might have slept, but figured it must have been at least five or six hours. He hadn’t slept for that long in almost a week. His rest periods in space had been stilted and broken, and never lasting more than two or three hours at most. He’d felt sick for much of the trip.
But he felt good now. Alert. Remembering to pick up the report Menzel had given him, he made his way as quietly as possible out of the sleeping quarters to the conference table in the adjoining room. He plucked a banana from a fruit bowl, pulled out a chair at the end of the table furthest away from where Lovell and Anders were sleeping and began to read.
The Condon committee’s report was a weighty document. Clearly some heavy duty work had gone into it. He had been aware of the University of Colorado UFO Project’s formation back in ’66 and knew there would be intense interest in its conclusions.
There had been early whispers that the head of the operation, Dr Edward Condon, had made his mind up on the subject from the outset. However, any serious scientific analysis would have to be conducted with rigour or those involved would leave themselves open to accusations of fraud or prejudice. He knew enough about Condon to believe the man was too smart for that.
He flicked through the index, noting headings that caught his interest. At the back of his mind was the section that referred specifically to the object he and Lovell had spotted while orbiting the Earth in Gemini VII. He didn’t find that reference immediately but noticed that the committee’s overall conclusions were front and centre in the early pages of the report.
The Condon committee’s work had been set in train by the findings of an Ad Hoc Committee of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board in March 1966. That committee, which included the renowned scientist Dr Carl Sagan and was headed up by Dr Brian O’Brien, had declared the US Air Force program dealing with UFO sightings, called Project Blue Book, was well organised, but under resourced. The O’Brien advisory board recommended Blue Book be strengthened to allow for scientific investigation of selected sightings in more detail.
Borman remembered this ruffled a few feathers at the time. The inside word was their finding hadn’t been well received by the higher echelons of the Air Force, which had been looking for a way to shut Blue Book down. The so-called UFO phenomenon had been a headache for the Air Force since the early 1950s. In 1953, a scientific body called the Robertson Panel, formed by the CIA to examine the subject’s troublesome public profile, concluded the best way to shut it down as a topic of debate was to declassify every UFO report in the Government’s possession.
Needless to say, this never happened.
In the years that followed, the public’s interest in strange visitors and foreign flying objects had grown dramatically. In the glare of such a bright public spotlight, the Air Force advisory board’s findings in 1966 were a sensation. The Condon committee was formed to tackle the beast head-on. They were tasked with examining whether deeper study of unidentified flying objects might in any way broaden scientific knowledge.
Seeing in print their summary dismissal of that suggestion put a wry smile on Borman’s face. They had been clever in framing the question that way. It meant they didn’t have to tackle anything uncomfortable or sensitive. They only had to evaluate the evidence at hand in relation to whether it held any promise in expanding upon the bounds of current scientific knowledge.