Holiday Special - The Apollo 8 Mission and Our Place in the Universe

This special holiday podcast features an interview with NASA historian Bill Barry who explains how the Apollo 8 mission showed how the pursuit of space can be a unifying force in a divided world.

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The clock was ticking in 1968, and the race to the Moon was on. The Apollo 8 mission, which came about by accident as NASA was finalizing tests on weight and vehicle performance, sent a crew to the Moon to see if humans could fly safely on the Saturn V rocket. They did, and one of the most amazing takeaways of the mission—aside from the safe return of the astronauts—was the famous Earthrise photo taken on Christmas Eve and the unexpected lesson it taught us: our place in the Universe. NASA historian Dr. Bill Barry says that the “barren, lifeless terrain of the Moon, set against a black sky with nothing out there, and this one little blue and white dot that’s our planet, impacted our perspective of Earth, humanity, and our shared future.” That photo, along with the astronauts reading from the first book of Genesis, is a testament to how space exploration inspires people to do their best, be creative, and work together in a positive way.

Want to learn more about how the APOLLO missions changed the world? Stop by our APOLLO exhibit, which closes on January 2, 2019, and then mark your calendars for the opening of Destination Moon: The Apollo 11 Mission in April 2019, which features the original Command Module that landed on the Moon. 

Destination Moon: The Apollo 11 Mission is an exhibition from the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. This traveling exhibit comes to our Museum in 2019.

Transcript:

SEAN MOBLEY:       Hello and welcome to this episode of The Flight Deck, the podcast of The Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. This episode is coming to you on December 25^th, observed by many as Christmas Day, so you can consider this The Museum of Flight Holiday Special. And we do have a very special guest today. In late December 2018, we’re also celebrating an important aerospace event, the 50^th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission. So I sat down with NASA’s chief historian, Doctor Bill Barry, to discuss the legacy of Apollo 8 and also talk about how the pursuit of space can be a unifier for people who otherwise feel divided.

00:01:00

BILL BARRY:           The ‘60s are an interesting time, because of course everybody, particularly the Soviet Union and the United States are sort of duking it out for advantages in space, but they’re also afraid that the other guy’s going to get an advantage, so there were some things that we could agree on. One of which was that we shouldn’t be putting weapons in space to drop on each other. The Soviet didn’t really abide by that necessarily. They had a secret program put nuclear weapons – actually, delivering a nuclear weapon from orbit is actually not really very useful, because you have to like be in the right spot at the right time, as much as you launch a missile and hit a spot. Anyway, it was one of those technologies that appeared at first to be a really big advantage and it turned out not to be. Everybody could agree that that was probably not where they wanted to go. So agreeing that countries shouldn’t claim the moon and other bodies in space as territory like they used to on earth. There’s a treaty over Antarctica these days, for example, that we’ve agreed that there are no territory claims, but there are plenty of countries who still have territory claims in Antarctica. We don’t have that issue in space, at least not yet.

SM:     I don’t remember if it was for a podcast episode or for an article I wrote here, but talked a little about Antarctica’s influence on space law and all that.

BB:      Yeah. And of course the Antarctica Treaty was being developed a little bit before that. So there’s a natural flow on this is an area we’re going to declare a scientific zone, and that sort of logic was applied to space. So a lot of treaties get written, so the outer space treaty on returning astronauts – you know, for example, if an astronaut spacecraft comes back unscheduled and lands someplace other than where they planned, like in the Soviet Union or cosmonauts land in the United States, we agreed that we would return them to their home countries.

00:02:36

Which of course was not a given at the time.

SM:     That’s fair. Yeah. Chuckle about it now, but I was born far removed from that time.

BB:      It seems kind of silly, and all the whole Soviet/US thing seems kind of silly from the perspective of here we are 30 years after the end of the Cold War, but it was really serious stuff. I mean, space competition between the two systems was a really big thing. One that we’re willing to spend 25 billion dollars on in the 1960s and send people to the moon, because we thought it was important to prove that the US, western capitalist model was at least as effective as the Soviet system, which was up for debate at the time.

SM:     And that’s one thing that I find inspiring about the modern space program is that on the larger political scene, Russia and the US are confronting each other. At the same time though, our scientists and our space programs, when a US astronaut goes up, they’re going in a Russian capsule to a space station designed by Russians, and Americans, and Japanese, and Canadians, and Europeans. I mean, all over the world. So it’s inspirational to me in that there’s all this stuff going on in the world, but at the same time we’ve managed to pull together over this.

00:03:54

BB:      Yeah, well space is really hard, and it’s expensive, because it’s hard. And no one country wants to spend a gazillion dollars or whatever their currency is to do things in space, so this sort of limited stomach for spending on space. In the United States, we spend less than half of one percent of the federal budget on NASA. That’s still about 20 billion dollars a year. That’s not chump change. But in the large scheme of things, it’s still a pretty small investment. And most other countries spend less than we do in terms of percentages on their space program. So it makes sense to get together. And engineers and scientists who work together, they speak the same language, math, fortunately. And so that’s an international language. It’s easy for them. And once you get them together and they start talking about problems, the issues over what their government says about one thing or the other, for engineers and scientists, those things generally are sort of secondary considerations I think sometimes, and it’s really easy for them to kind of get engaged in the process and get excited about a problem that they need to solve together. So the working level relationships between the United States and our partners in the space station program from wherever they are on planet earth are generally really positive, and we work to make sure that’s true. It’s not always easy to work those things out, but it is the focus of things and one that I think sort of comes naturally to the scientists and the engineers.

SM:     And you’ve had a chance to experience that firsthand. Before your work as the NASA chief historian, you were representing NASA in Europe.

00:05:34

BB:      Talk about great jobs at NASA. Getting to be a chief historian, and just before that I get to be the NASA Europe rep. I was a scientist at the Embassy in Paris, and I traveled all over Europe talking to our partners in Europe about various things. Really, that job’s sort of a glorified bureaucrat job, because we have folks in Washington who basically do the same thing, except they have to do it in Washington D.C. I got to do it in Europe.

SM:     I’d much rather do it in Paris than in D.C.

BB:      Which is a lot more fun. And before that, I’d spent about six years working on our relations with Russia in our office in Washington D.C., so I got to see lots of that stuff, and it’s one of those things that’s really gratifying to see how much space inspires people to do their best, and to be creative and effective, and to work together in a positive way. It’s one of those activities that I think it’s hard to imagine why anyone would object to spending a few tax dollars on.

SM:     Now this episode will release on December 25^th. Many celebrate that as Christmas Day, but in 1968, people around the world also celebrated the Apollo 8 mission, which took place over Christmas of that year. So as people listen to this, it will be the 50^th anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission. What are some reflections on that? Maybe some lesser known stories or things from the Apollo 8 mission?

00:06:54

BB:      Well, Apollo 8 was an amazing, amazing mission, and it kind of came about by accident. The lunar module wasn’t ready yet. They were having problems getting the weight down and the performance of the vehicle ready, and so NASA’s in this position in 1968 and we’re trying to get to the moon by the end of the decade, the clock is running, we had just gotten over the fire, Apollo 7’s about to launch in October of 1968, and NASA’s looking at the alternatives on how we’re going to fly this sequence of flights because we have to check out the lunar module, we have to check out operations of these vehicles in orbit around the moon, and operationally from the ground, how do we make that work? Lots of issues, and you want to do sort of a dress rehearsal, so there’s this whole sequence of missions that have to be flown, and you really can’t afford to wait for the lunar module to be ready. Saturn-5’s ready to go with two test flights, and that first one went really well, second one didn’t go quite so well. There was what they call (unintelligible 00:07:49). Oscillation vertically in a rocket. But they figured out how that happened, and engineers were really convinced they had that sorted out. So you get the big rocket ready to go, you got the command source module ready to go. No lunar module. What are we going to do? And so they basically create this mission that hadn’t really been planned. We’ll just send a crew to orbit the moon and that way we can test out can we get to the moon? Can we fly astronauts on a Saturn-5 safely? How do we operate around the moon? Does the system work? And we can kind of (unintelligible 00:08:20).

So first crew to ever launch on a Saturn-5, Borman, Lovell, and Anders, and they head out to the moon. By the way, unbeknownst to most people, but NASA is aware of this and so is the US Intelligence Agency at the time, the Soviets had been testing this system to send a couple cosmonauts around the moon, and they had a whole series of test flights.

00:08:41

They flew five test flights in 1968. We didn’t know at the time, but each of those flights failed in different ways, so the Soviets weren’t ever quite ready to go, but it looked like they might actually fly a mission in December. They had a launch window in December. And so we were kind of nervous about whether they were going to launch and get to the moon first and beat us to the moon, so that was another motivation for Apollo 8 is to send crew around the moon and kind of preempt the Soviets for a change. And so the crew launches, and it’s a highly successful mission. The systems work really well, and it just so happens that they get to lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, and the crew sends back this message from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve where they did some readings from the Bible, from Genesis, the first few words of Genesis. And this really sort of heartfelt ending. If you listen to the audio of it, Frank Borman, when he signs off, you could almost feel the loneliness in his voice. He’s up there with two other guys, but they are far from home on Christmas Eve, and I think that had a really big impact, particularly because 1968, it was a really bad year for the United States. Multiple political assassinations, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and the war in Vietnam’s going badly, there are protests, there’s election turmoil over things. And to have a success like this happen, such a huge success that it kind of riveted peoples’ attention, and to have it happen so dramatically over the holiday season was I think pretty amazing.

00:10:17

And to me, one of the biggest things is that Bill Anders, as he’s taking pictures of the surface of the moon, looks out the window and sees the earth rising over the lunar surface, and the whole crew gets excited. They take some pictures. The famous earthrise picture. And that picture alone really sort of captured something about earth, and really I think signifies one of the things that we learned from Apollo that we really weren’t expecting to learn, our place in the universe. That picture is the barren lifeless terrain of the moon, this black sky, nothing out there, and there’s one little blue and white dot out there that’s our planet. That perspective you get from sometimes looking at things in a different way. We’ve actually had a picture like that from our robotic probe. It was a black and white a couple years earlier in 1966, so we had seen earthrise-like pictures before, but to have it taken by humans and have it come back in color. And of course, back in those days, it wasn’t digital, so we had to wait until the crew landed, they developed the film, and then they print the picture and then they go, “Oh, my god. Look at this picture.” And it became a cultural thing that has effects that are still rippling through now, where peoples’ perspective on earth, and humanity, and our shared futures together, and how fragile it all is. I think that’s had a huge impact on things, so Apollo 8, an amazing mission in so many ways.

RECORDING:            And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with goodnight, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on this good earth.

00:11:53

SM:     Thank you for tuning into today’s episode of The Flight Deck. If you want to learn more about Apollo 8, check out the museum’s Apollo exhibit. But if you’re listening to this episode, when it comes out, you better move quick, because on January 2, 2019 we’re closing our exhibit to install Destination Moon in its place. And be sure to visit the museum in 2019 for Destination Moon, the Apollo 11 mission, a state of the art traveling exhibit from the Smithsonian Institution featuring the iconic Apollo 11 command module Columbia, and over 20 other one of a kind artifacts, many flown on the historic mission. Destination Moon shows why we went to the moon, how we got there, and the impact the moon landing had on the world. I am personally so very excited for this. It’s going to be fantastic.

If you like what you heard in the podcast, please subscribe to us and feel free to leave a review on Apple Podcast or wherever you downloaded us from. You can find more information about the podcast on our website, www.museumofflight.org/podcast. You can e-mail the show at podcast@museumofflight.org. And until next time, this is your host Sean Mobley to everyone out there on that good earth saying we’ll see you out there, folks.

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Host: Sean Mobley

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