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Jan. 2, 2026 01:43-02:01 - CSPAN
17:55
Apollo 8 Reunion
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
Followed by her appearance at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
C-SPAN's day-long marathon, remembering notable figures who died last year, continues.
Also passing in the year 2025 was NASA astronaut James Lovell, who, along with fellow astronauts Frank Borman and William Anders, was aboard the Apollo 8 space mission, the first crewed flight to leave Earth's gravitational sphere and orbit the moon.
The three members spoke at the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, as part of a reunion discussion in 2009.
Let's walk through the flight.
I said a minute ago that the previous Saturn V that had been launched prior to you guys, it was a few months, had had a lot of problems.
First of all, the final stage, the last, the third stage that was actually going to send you to the moon on that flight didn't fire.
And it did another little thing called a POGO.
What was a POGO?
How could a 30-story, five-story building POGO?
Well, one of the test flights, as I recall, this was 40 years ago, of course, was the fact that we had an engine that went into a vibration sort of a thing on the structure, and we were afraid that if it disintegrated, it would ruin the whole day of the flight.
And so this was something that the engineers that had designed, of course, the rocket had at Huntsville said, we have that solved.
We think that we have the confidence in our Saturn V and in a discussion with all the NASA people who were making the decision at that time to change the flight from an Earth orbital to a flight to the moon, which, of course, was, I think, initiated by George Lowell, if I'm not mistaken, if I'm not correct, Chris.
And then decided upon and brought up to the hierarchy in Washington and said, we can do it.
And so the POGO situation was taken care of.
That, by the way, happened on Apollo 13.
A little bit on 8, too.
On the second stage, we had a POGO on the second stage.
But that's the other story.
You were the, you, we'll get to 13 in a little bit.
You were the first three guys who sat on top of this big machine and were launched into space.
What was going through your mind?
Well, let me back up just a little bit.
What went through your mind when they told you that you were going to not do the orbital flight on Earth, but you were actually going to do this circumlunar flight, Bill?
Well, actually, I was a little disappointed.
Why is that?
Because I'd been training for the lunar module, checking out in the lunar landing training vehicle, and I thought, well, if we can just get Apollo 8 out of the way, I maybe be on Apollo 14 or something.
I didn't realize that going on Apollo 8 as a lunar module pilot would sort of promote me to the command module position.
So I was a little disappointed.
But as Frank is, I think, said very cogently, that Apollo, it wasn't a program of science all that much.
Sure, we picked up rocks.
Sure, we were interested in exploration.
It was another battle in the Cold War.
And if it hadn't been for the Russians, we wouldn't have had the public support to pay the taxes that it required to beat those dirty commies.
And that's what it was.
And so I was quite pleased with the opportunity being an Air Force officer to have a chance to be involved in Apollo 8.
For the younger folks who were here, what was the Cold War like at that time, and what were the Russians doing and what were we doing to counter that?
Well, if I can answer that question, there was perceived that the Soviets were more technically advanced with regards to spaceflight.
After all, they put up Gagarin before we did.
He went into orbit and Shepard just went into a 15-minute suborbital flight.
Then they put up two people and we still hadn't gotten up to them.
And so the idea was that the technology and the prestige of being a leader in this technology was very, very important.
And I think it is, if we want to be a leader in the world.
And it wasn't until the Gemini flights started to go, where we started to do rendezvous and EVA and finally working up to the end of the Gemini program that we were catching up with them.
And of course, the epitome was Apollo 8 going to the moon.
And we know now, of course, from all discussions with the Russians that they were very active in a lunar program and that they had almost decided to send two people in circumnavigating the moon.
But they were very conservative too.
And they had sent two flights around the moon and 68.
And of course, we had information about that.
And that's why that decision was made for us to go to the moon.
And we launched, and while they were deciding whether to send two cosmonauts on a Proton and a Zon to also circumvent the moon.
Was that the reason why it was sort of kept a secret, your flight, until a few weeks before it happened?
I think it was kept a secret for a good reason because the flight plan generated in Houston and it had to go up and be approved by the NASA headquarters and then by President Johnson.
But I think it's, I think, I don't think we fully realize often enough the impact that President Johnson had on the space program.
President Kennedy announced it and got all of the, it's kind of like trips between us and the ground people.
He got all the credit for it.
But President Johnson, as head of the Space Council, really brought the lunar fight forward.
And then he had a wonderful relationship with another giant who's now dead, and that's Jim Webb, who was administrator of NASA.
And he didn't run, he didn't try to direct it.
He had so much trust in Webb, and Webb picked the leaders like craft.
And so it was a wonderful, wonderful management oriented.
I've often thought if the Defense Department would have had Webb instead of McNamara, they'd have been a hell of a lot better off.
But we were very, very fortunate to have President Johnson and Jim Webb at the top because they listened to the people.
They picked the people who knew what they were doing, then they listened to them.
I'm sure it didn't take 17 phone calls for them to launch Apollo 8.
But the other criterion, though, Frank, was the fact that Gemini or Apollo 7 had to be successful for their launch.
That was 12 way long.
Yeah, and their Earth orbital flight to make sure the command module was ready since we didn't have a lunar module.
Once that final test was done, then the decision, of course, was made for 8 to go to the moon.
Were you confident from the beginning it was all going to work?
Well, personally, I had a lot of confidence in NASA, not just JSC, but the people designing the boosters, the aerospace industry.
Frank put a lot of time in getting Apollo kind of back on the track along with Chris Kraft and his team after the fire.
So I had a lot of confidence, but I didn't think it was a slam dunk.
I frankly thought that, well, there's probably one-third chance of a totally successful mission.
There's probably a one-third chance of an Apollo 13 mission where you went but you didn't accomplish the goal, and there was a one-third chance that you didn't come back.
But as I said, this was, you know, the Cold War went well.
You can't really understand Apollo without putting into the context of the Cold War, which in retrospect, you know, looks a little strange from these years.
But, you know, as a military officer, I thought that was pretty good odds.
We had our colleagues being shot down in Vietnam without any glory.
And so, yeah, I didn't think it was totally safe, but I had the confidence that it was going to be as good as it could be.
But they'd no sooner lit off these engines.
Now, keep in mind that we had simulator training, and these people were a little masochistic in the kinds of things they thought about, you know, and how to screw things up.
Of course, we were on the ground, and so, boy, you had 16 problems going at once.
But you simulated, as far as I knew when I was sitting there waiting for the lift ignition, that, well, we've covered everything.
We've done launch abort, and Frank knows when to twist the handle if he has to.
And that thing no sooner lit off, but it shook so hard, and it made so much noise, which we hadn't simulated at all, and I thought, oh, shucks, we really missed this one.
Frank was smart enough to take his hand off the abort handle because, I mean, literally, I felt like I was a rat in the jaws of a big terrier just being shook back and forth.
Well, you know, we had, we compressed into four months, really, the training.
It normally takes about 18 months.
So we specialized.
Bill was competent with the systems, knew everything about it.
Jim was a navigator, and I sort of was the overall re-entry.
And I have complete confidence in these two people.
They're wonderful.
I couldn't have had a better crew than Jim and Bill.
I had complete confidence in the ground.
I'm not kidding you.
I really did.
And as a matter of fact, on Apollo 7, we would have blown it because I wanted to come back early because I was convinced that the, not Apollo 7, Gemini 7, but I was convinced that the fuel cells weren't going to work.
And Chris got on the radio and the time and said, we've simulated, they're going to work.
That was it.
I went to sleep.
I had that kind of confidence.
My main concern was that somehow the crew would screw up.
You mean those two?
No, the three of us.
Really?
I didn't want to be the guy that boarded when we didn't have to.
Tell them about the handle of the launch.
You sit over here, and if you turn it outbound, you're gone.
I still have to.
Tell me how that worked.
Well, you had a 70,000 pounds.
You only use that on the launch phase if the rocket catches on fire or something like that, and there's an abort handle that the commander can throw, and a rocket then takes the spacecraft off and plunks it into the ocean.
But, you know, the G-Force is about 20 Gs.
You don't want to do that.
Well, I wanted us to do a perfect mission.
I had confidence in them, and it turned out that way.
I didn't have any worry about anybody else.
It really was almost a perfect mission.
Actually, I was a little bit.
Almost, it was a perfect mission.
I was disappointed because the people on the ground and the engineers had made Apollo 8 so perfect that I couldn't demonstrate what a great guy I was at fixing things.
Jim, my view is that being selected, and of course, you know, I wasn't on the mission to begin with.
Mike Collins was the third person on the original crew of Apollo 8 at that time.
I think it was called 8 at that time, or maybe it was 9 at the time, I forget.
And then Mike had a medical problem, so I replaced him.
So I was sort of the oddball guy out.
But when the decision was made to go to the moon, personally, I was elated because I was not looking forward to another Earth orbital flight with Frank Borman.
You see, I spent 14 days with this gentleman.
They came back engaged.
That's okay today.
way things are now we could get married.
Where do I go from here?
Don't ask.
What they're referring to, the Gemini flights, were the precursors to Apollo.
It was a two-man capsule.
It was very small.
It was about half the size of a Volkswagen.
And they flew a 14, it was a 14-day mission, right?
Yeah.
And all of those Gemini flights were, again, a stepping stone to Apollo.
And mostly it was involved in developing rendezvous techniques because we knew at that point that there was going to have to be rendezvous really on, at that point it had been made the decision to do lunar rendezvous and then Earth rendezvous.
So all those things had to work right and it was that experience that made it a success.
Now, let's keep going through the flight here.
You've gotten through launch.
You're the rat caught in the can over there.
You get into Earth orbit and begin to check out the systems.
And the third stage of the Saturn, the S-4B it was called, must then fire to send you on a trajectory to the moon.
The last time this was tried, it didn't fire.
What was going through your mind there at the lead up to that?
And tell us how that went.
Well, I was focused on it.
We've been working.
I never even thought about it not working.
I don't know how you guys are.
I just figured it was going to work.
But with that thrust and looking at the watch, and it just kept burning and burning, you know, what, five minutes or something?
F equals MA or A equals.
Well, I was just watching the velocity continue to go up and up and up.
Yeah.
And, you know.
Well, you didn't worry about it not lighting off, did you?
Oh, no.
I don't think we fixed it.
Yeah.
Where we worried about lighting off, of course, was number one, slowing down to be captured by the moon, and then nine orbits or ten orbits later, lighting the maneuvering engine to get away from the moon.
I mean, to get out of lunar orbit.
You're getting ahead of the story.
Yeah, if S-4B, if S-4B didn't light, we could come back.
Right, we were still in Earth orbit.
Yeah, yeah.
And that, as I recall now, you guys, I know you'll keep me honest, but it was a quiet, smooth burn.
No pogo, no nothing.
You just were accelerating.
Still, we could tell you were moving with the slight G-force and the numbers on the velocity.
Okay.
After you, now this maneuver was called TLI, Translunar Injection.
NASA had these wonderful acronyms for absolutely everything.
I always felt my job was sort of like a simultaneous translator at the United Nations.
I'd listened to the NASA thing in one ear and supposedly English came out the mouth.
Some days it did and some days it didn't.
You are now, you've now done something that no other man has ever done, the three of you.
You've broken the gravity of the earth and are moving to another celestial body.
And she was quoting Tom Brokall a while ago saying you could look out the window and see what was it like to look out the window and see the earth gradually getting smaller and smaller and smaller and knowing that everybody was there.
You could actually, the first time we turned around, we were about 20,000 miles out, I think.
We jettisoned the third stage.
And it was kind of like when you're a kid in the third grade and you're watching the clock, you know, well, you couldn't see it move, but if you looked away and looked back, it got a little smaller.
We were a long way out.
We knew we were moving.
To me, it looked like looking at the Earth when we had that initial velocity was in an automobile going into a tunnel and looking out the back window and seeing the entrance get smaller and smaller and smaller as we went down through the tunnel.
Very similar because we had suddenly, our velocity was very great at that particular time.
It slowed down as we went out.
How fast are you going at that point?
Well, probably around 23,500, 24,000 miles an hour.
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Another notable person to die in 2025 was Clint Hill, who served as a Secret Service agent for five presidents.
His most notable action, though, occurred during the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, when he threw himself over both President Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy following the shooting.
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