NOVA

Apollo 8... A last-minute change

sets a mission on a dangerous new course.

I said, "What?!

That's the craziest idea I ever heard."

A lot of risk.

Untried technologies put to the test.

Any one of them can be a disaster

if it doesn't go perfectly well.

It's the height of the Cold War;

two superpowers race to the moon.

They were beating us at every turn.

I want to be part of winning.

A president's deadline looms.

Landing a man on the moon before this decade is out...

There's just enormous pressure.

Then, tragedy strikes.

Hey! We've got a fire in the cockpit!

"How are we ever going to get there?"

A secret decision is made.

He said, "Close the door,"

so I realized that something was big.

A half-century later,

the legacy of this audacious journey affects us all.

The mission that got us to the moon.

"Apollo's Daring Mission,"

right now, on "NOVA."

I'm at the foot of the ladder.

It is perhaps the greatest technological feat in history.

Okay, I'm going to step off the LEM now.

Humans arriving at another world.

That's one small step for man;

one giant leap for mankind.

Yet before the arriving could happen,

first there was the leaving.

Pressurized.

It's December 1968.

A space mission unlike any other begins...

Apollo 8.

It was the most dangerous mission of all.

It was the boldest move that NASA ever made.

Three men... Frank Borman, Jim Lovell,

and Bill Anders...

Are departing on a journey no one has ever made before.

For the first time

in human history, humans left earth.

All previous missions have stayed in earth orbit.

But these three veteran fighter pilots...

Lovell from the Navy,

Borman and Anders from the Air Force...

Will take their spacecraft to another world.

Apollo 8 will orbit the moon ten times;

it will not land.

But this mission will make the landing possible

by testing key technologies needed to reach the moon:

a giant rocket, a redesigned spacecraft,

a revolutionary new computer.

The rocket has never carried humans before.

The spacecraft and computer have flown only once,

on Apollo 7... a mere 180 miles off earth's surface.

One, zero.

Apollo 8 will take these untried technologies

on a half-million-mile round trip

in the ultimate test.

We have cleared the tower.

Roger.

We probably had one chance in three

of making a successful flight,

had one chance in three

of not being able to do our mission

but at least making it home alive,

and one chance in three of not making it back.

Apollo 8, Houston, you are a go for staging, over.

It is a giant risk.

But originally Apollo 8 was supposed to be a baby step...

Just another test flight around the earth.

It took years of test flights.

And you really have to think, of course,

of the Apollo flights as a system.

It was the typical NASA

inch-by-inch, one-step-at-a-time approach.

But in the summer of 1968,

years of careful planning and preparation are suddenly upended

by an alarming discovery.

We were training in California,

the three of us... Bill, myself, and Frank... when suddenly

Frank got called back to Houston.

Deke Slayton said, "Frank,

"I want you back here in Houston right away.

I have to discuss something with you."

Deke Slayton is in charge of the astronauts.

And so I said, "Well, Deke, let's discuss it now, I'm busy.

I can do it over the phone."

And he reminded me who was boss.

Things weren't gentle

and politically correct in those days.

We weren't candy asses, okay?

And so I went back to Houston.

And he said "Close the door,"

so I realized that something was big.

A CIA spy satellite has photographed

an enormous Soviet rocket on a launchpad.

It can mean only one thing.

The CIA had information

that the Soviets were planning on sending a man around the moon

in the year of 1968.

A Soviet cosmonaut reaching the moon

would be a stunning defeat for America.

For years, the U.S. and Soviet Union...

Both armed with nuclear weapons...

Have been locked in a deadly cold war.

There was a sense

that communism was a profound threat

to democracy and to the United States.

Starting in 1957 with Sputnik,

the Soviets open a new front: space.

Yuri Gagarin, Valentina Tereshkova,

blow after blow after blow.

They were beating us at every turn.

In April 1961, a new president, John Kennedy,

writes a memo about space that will have profound consequences.

He said, "Guys,

find me something we can beat the Russians at."

Now it is time to take longer strides.

I believe that this nation should commit itself

to achieving the goal, before this decade is out,

of landing a man on the moon

and returning him safely to the earth.

Kennedy has set a firm deadline: the end of the 1960s.

It was a simple, one-sentence statement...

The goal and the schedule.

Clear, succinct... No fuzz on that goal.

I never joined NASA to explore space.

Yeah, basically I was a military person,

and it was clear to me

that we were in a serious confrontation with the Soviets.

I want to be part of winning.

Military test pilots... Now "astronauts"...

Begin flying in 1961.

By 1967, Americans have mastered the basics of space flight

and all the techniques needed to reach the moon.

Apollo, America's moon program, is about to take its first step.

Apollo 1 will be a test of the new spacecraft,

the command module, around the earth.

The crew is Gus Grissom, America's second man in space;

Ed White, who took America's first spacewalk;

and Roger Chaffee,

a Navy pilot who flew airborne photography missions

during the Cuban missile crisis.

Three weeks before launch,

a dress rehearsal on the ground...

A practice countdown.

It's January 27, 1967, a Friday.

Things are not going well.

Ah, who's transmitting?

This is the command pilot, do you read me?

It was the end of a very frustrating day.

You're pretty garbled here, Gus.

They were having communication problems with the crew.

How we gonna get to the moon

if we can't talk between three buildings?

They can't hear a thing you're saying.

Jesus Christ.

When all of a sudden, you know, I thought I heard "fire!"

Hey! We've got a fire in the cockpit!

The fire quickly becomes an inferno.

And, you know, the rest is history.

With no chance of escape, poisoned by toxic fumes,

three astronauts perish.

It was a pretty sad scene.

Most of the guys were sitting on their consoles

with tears running down their cheeks, you know,

just couldn't believe what had happened.

Everybody knew what they were doing was dangerous,

but they didn't really think of it

as being dangerous on the ground.

And it was a huge shock that an accident like this would happen

in kind of an ordinary training scenario

without being in space.

Over the next few months,

the charred spacecraft is painstakingly disassembled,

each piece tagged, studied, and photographed...

5,000 images in all.

Sifting through these artifacts,

the Apollo Review Board pieces together what went wrong.

We came out with a scathing report

on the problems not only of the test

in which the fire occurred,

but also in the development of the spacecraft.

There was no ass-covering.

There was a lot of

soul searching as to what had happened

and all of the things that went with it.

Electrical wiring shows shoddy workmanship.

Investigators believe the fire began

with a spark from a wire that had rubbed bare.

That spark quickly became an inferno,

because the command module was full of flammable material.

Everywhere you turned

there was stuff that would be subject to a flash fire

if you got the right ignition source.