Triumphant Return from the Void

RETURNING home to Houston early one morning last week, the Apollo 8 astronauts, who had seen some astonishing sights on their journey through space, seemed even more astonished to find a tumultuous welcome awaiting them. They had already undergone hours of preliminary debriefing sessions aboard the recovery carrier Yorktown, where their spaceship, blackened by its fiery re-entry into the earth's atmosphere, also got a scientific onceover. Flown from the Yorktown to Hawaii, the astronauts boarded an Air Force C-141 jet transport for a 10-hr, flight to Ellington Air Force Base, just five miles from Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center.

There, a crowd of more than 3,000 and dozens of banners and placards awaited their 2:12 a.m. arrival. "Good ride, Skypokes" and "Welcome home, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and Captain Kirk," read the banners. As the crowd roared, the astronauts were greeted by NASA's Robert Gilruth, by their wives and by most of the astronaut corps. Spectators pushed through police lines to touch the sleeves of the astronauts' blue flight coveralls, to shake their hands and to ask for autographs. Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were clearly moved by the heroes' reception. "At 2 in the morning," said Borman, "I simply expected to get in my old blue bomb [his 1955 Chevrolet] and go home."

Scientific Booty. As the first men to circumnavigate the moon, the three will never again be able to return completely to their former lives. When they reached Houston, they had already been hailed in almost every nook and cranny of their native planet, including a somewhat envious Soviet Union. As scientific booty from their journey, they brought back photographs, both moving and still, so marvelous as to beggar the imagination of even the most dreamful of their fellow earthlings. Now they faced a schedule that, to them, might be even more wearying than their historic voyage: weeks of press conferences, parades and tours.

Taking a break only on New Year's Day, the astronauts met daily in the Manned Spacecraft Center with NASA officials and scientists to review every detail of their trip to the moon, referring frequently to the 400-page flight plan and the 1,000-page transcript of radioed conversations between the spacecraft and earth. After completing their debriefing, they will travel to Washington this week for a press conference in the State Department auditorium. On the following day, they will be guests of honor in a New York City ticker-tape parade up Broadway and a state dinner hosted by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Another parade a waits them in Houston on Jan. 13, and they have been invited to the Nixon Inaugural. There were rumors at week's end that the astronauts might also make a world tour, including stops in Russia.

Everything indicates that the Soviets would welcome them. Awaiting the astronauts' arrival in Houston was a telegram from ten Russian cosmonauts who have made successful spaceflights. "We followed very closely each stage of your flight," it read, "and note with satisfaction the precision of your joint work and your courage, which contributed to the excellent completion of this important experiment. We are confident that the exploration of outer space will greatly benefit earthmen. We congratulate you on a successful step toward this noble goal." In contrast to the terse and often dour notices that have frequently followed U.S. space accomplishments, Tass hailed the Apollo 8 voyage as an "outstanding" success that "opens a new stage in the history of space research." Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny sent a cable to President Johnson calling the flight "a new accomplishment in conquering the outer space by man."

Russia was not alone in its praise. Pope Paul stated that the "very remarkable space achievement of the astronauts" should enrich mankind's spiritual life. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson cabled that the flight "has added a new dimension to our appreciation that this is indeed one world." There were similar messages from U.N. Secretary General U Thant, French President Charles de Gaulle, Premier Eisaku Sato of Japan, King Hassan of Morocco and a host of other world leaders. Even Havana radio contributed to worldwide reaction by presenting lengthy and approving appraisals of Apollo 8's moon mission.

Ethereal Beauty. The world's admiration became even greater with the publication of the pictures shot by Astronaut Anders on the way to and from the moon and during lunar orbit. They are the first color-film closeups of the moon and the first color views of the earth from deep space. They show views of the moon never before seen by man and some lunar features previously undetected by the cameras aboard unmanned vehicles. They reveal the distant earth as a globe of ethereal beauty that understandably evoked feelings of nostalgia in the Apollo astronauts.

Soon after they had left earth orbit and headed toward the moon, the astronauts pointed Apollo back toward earth and aimed a 16-mm. Maurer movie camera at the third-stage S-4B rocket, which had just been separated from the spacecraft. The resulting pictures show the receding rocket gleaming in the sunlight against a black sky as the blue, cloud-mottled earth hovers below. (Minutes earlier, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory scientists atop a mountain in the Hawaiian Islands had used a Baker-Nunn telescopic camera to shoot a spectacular picture of the S-4B, about 120 miles high, blasting Apollo out of earth orbit toward the moon.)

The Apollo 8 movie sequences also include pictures of a reddish earth (shot through a filter on the navigation transit) glowing in the black sky. As Apollo orbits the moon in a nose-down position, the movies show the barren landscape flashing by only 70 miles below, then seemingly reversing in a dizzying maneuver as the capsule rolls into a new attitude. In other color shots, inside the cabin, viewers can see dimly the astronauts shooting pictures out of the window, a flashlight hovering weightless in mid-cabin and finally twirling into place after being nudged by an astronaut's hand.

In lunar orbit, the astronauts also pointed a 70-mm. Hasselblad camera straight down at the lunar surface and shot strips of overlapping still pictures that NASA technicians will use for stereo pictures of the landscape. With these, they will be able to determine the height of crater walls, boulders and ridges with great accuracy. Other pictures, shot when the sun was between 3 and 7 degrees above the horizon, brought out surface features undiscernible in unmanned Lunar Orbiter pictures, most of which were taken with the sun much higher in the sky. Although the spacecraft window and variations in film and in the reproduction of transparencies produced a yellowish tinge in some lunar photographs, blue and green in others, NASA scientists stress that the moon's true color is actually what the astronauts described: grey.

"An Amazing Series." After initial examination of the Apollo still pictures, NASA Geologist John Dietrich noted that the rills clearly visible on the lunar surface are similar to arroyos in the Western U.S. He suggested that they are "tension features caused by contraction of the delicate surface material." But the NASA scientist was most enthusiastic about a series of unscheduled lunar pictures shot by Astronaut Anders on the way back from the moon.

After Apollo 8's tenth revolution, when the Service Propulsion System (SPS) engine had fired to send the spacecraft back toward earth, Anders glanced out of the window and found himself looking at a view of the nearly full moon never before seen by man. From his vantage point above the eastern edge (as viewed from earth) of the moon, he could see both the front and hidden backside of the lunar surface. Unlimbering his Hasselblad, he used the remainder of his unexposed color film to shoot what Dietrich calls "an amazing series of moon pictures."

To the north, on the backside, these shots show a big, bright crater, previously unseen. Its presence had long been suggested to earthbound astronomers by whitish rays of material that extend from its rim over the lunar north pole and down onto the visible side. The Apollo photographs provided the first conclusive evidence that the crater did exist. The same series also revealed that two craters previously spotted by Lunar Orbiters were also heavily rayed, a feature that was not apparent in Orbiter photographs.

Even more information may eventually be gained from the Apollo 8 pictures. Two rolls of black-and-white film, one of them containing overhead shots of a proposed lunar-module landing site, were poorly exposed. NASA has high hopes that details can be brought out by photographic experts who were hurriedly called to Houston last week, and that the reconstituted pictures can soon be released and shown.

New Platform. While excitement about the historic flight of Apollo 8 was still simmering, a door in Cape Kennedy's mammoth assembly building slid open. From inside, a 363-ft.-tall Saturn 5 slowly emerged, standing upright on a crawler-transporter as large as half a football field. Seven hours later, the giant rocket completed its 31-mile trip to launch pad 39B. Atop Saturn was the Apollo 9 spacecraft, which is scheduled to be launched into earth orbit on Feb. 28 for the first manned test flight of the lunar module (LM).

If all goes well on that test, and on the moon orbital flight of Apollo 10 in May, the world could see, by this summer, even more sensational pictures, shot from a platform never before used by a human photographer: the surface of the moon.

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