An easygoing man, he was the perfect foil to Borman, which helped when they spent two weeks sharing the cramped confines of Gemini 7. As a boy, Lovell had dreamed of spaceflight and had kept faithful to this dream throughout his military and test pilot career. To him, Apollo was a battle in the Cold War against the Soviets and he brought a military mindset to his preparations.īorman’s hard edge was in contrast to friendly and gregarious Jim Lovell, the command module pilot. Borman testified before Congress on NASA’s push to recover from the setback. Just over a year later, in January 1967, he had suffered the loss of his closest friend, astronaut Ed White, when an oxygen-fed fire consumed the Apollo 1 cabin during a test. His first spaceflight was on Gemini 7 in late 1965.
Borman was in charge: a straight-talking, hard-driving man. Who were the Apollo 8 astronauts?Īpollo 8’s crew were all high-achieving military pilots. It was a moment that kept managers awake at night, because if it failed they would be stuck orbiting the Moon forever. They would make ten revolutions of this hostile, battered world before relighting their engine to come home. Apollo 8 had taken Borman, Anders and Lovell to where no men had gone before. Earthrise as seen from the Moon, taken during the Apollo 8 mission (Photo by Heritage Space/Heritage Images via Getty Images)Īs it passed midway around the lunar far side, over mountain tops lit by a setting Sun, its main engine had fired, slowing sufficiently to remain in the Moon’s gravitational clutches.