To the Moon! by Jeffrey Kluger & Ruby Shamir

Author:Jeffrey Kluger & Ruby Shamir
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2018-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

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The TLI burn that would propel the Apollo out of Earth orbit and orient it toward the moon’s orbit awaited the astronauts exactly two hours, fifty minutes and forty seconds into their mission—near the end of their second Earth orbit. It would require extraordinary precision. For that reason, neither the astronauts nor the onboard computer would execute it. Instead, the burn would be directed by the room-size computers at Mission Control.

The way the physics works, flying away from Earth is more like climbing uphill from Earth, with the ascending power of speed battling the downward pull of gravity. Take off going a little too fast and you’re going to win that tug-of-war—but if you miscalculate and miss the moon, you’ll fly off into space and be adrift forever.

Slowing down just a bit too much means you will ultimately lose that gravitational battle, so if your trajectory is far off and you miss the moon entirely, you will simply arc over and head back home like a ball thrown high in the air that falls back to the ground. If you miss the moon by only a little, you’ll be moving slowly enough to surrender to the moon’s gravity, at which point you’ll whip around the far side and get hurled back to Earth. In the first case, you’ll make a U-turn in empty space; in the second case, you’ll speed around the traffic cone of the moon. Either way, you remain on what flight planners called a free-return trajectory—and either way, you’ll be heading home, never having entered the moon’s orbit.

Until the burn took place, Lovell, for one, was content to claim a few minutes of downtime and drift from window to window while reacquainting himself with the singular view of the Earth, slowly turning below his spacecraft. It was a vista he’d seen over the course of 330 orbits the first time he was in space; he would see it for a far briefer spell on this flight, but especially since Apollo had five windows to Gemini’s mere two, he wanted to make the most of his opportunity.

“Gee, this is the best flight I’ve ever had,” he said with a wink to Borman, a comradely reminder of the grind the Gemini 7 mission had been. He looked out the window again and caught a bright flash as the nighttime side of the Earth gave way to the day. “Here comes the sun,” he announced.

“Where?” asked Anders, eager to see as many sunrises and sunsets as possible during their brief stay in the Earthly neighborhood.

“Well, take a look,” Lovell said, waving him over to the window. “It crept up on us.”

Though Borman stole a few glimpses of his own, he was not partial to the idea that his crew would spend their limited time in orbit sightseeing. But since they were so busy with the windows, he reckoned that he might as well put them to work there. Given how central

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