Good afternoon, everyone. My name is jennifer, im a curator here in the Smithsonians National air and space museum, and i want to welcome all of you and send a quick thank you to our sponsor boeing. Im hoping all of you are excited as i am. As somebody who watches a lot of things on its about space, Jeffrey Kluger is a familiar face to me, certainly. He is the editor at large for Time Magazine, and hes also a local. Hes also the author of multiple books on topics on everything from narcissism to polio to siblings. Notably for today, at least in the context of this museum, hes the author of two books that well bring up, i think, other the course of this time. First, lost moon which he published in 1994 which is the story of apollo 13, of course, the inspiration for that movie. And today hell be not only talking about his new book, but also signing the book afterwards just outside the gallery if youre so interested. The book is apollo 8 the thrilling story of the First Mission to the moon. Welcoming Jeffrey Kluger. [applause] thank you. So i mentioned the book lost moon. You wrote it in 1994. Its been some time. You do write about space in Time Magazine quite a bit, but storyline, that exciting moment at this point in time . The apollo 13 or the apollo 8 . The apollo 8 book. A lot of it came from someone in the audience today, jill, my young adult book editor who has a great book of her own out. She and i were having lunch one day speaking about great yarns, great yarns that could work for kids and work for adults. And the story of apollo 8 came up. And my feeling had always been and has always been that when the great tale of american history, American Space history is written, it will be apollos 8, 11 and 13 that are the true benchmark missions. We all know why 11, first footprints on the moon, apollo 13 was the great tale of survival, but apollo 8 was the first time human beings left the gravity field of earth. We have lived for our entire existence as a species at the bottom of a gravity well of earth. We managed to haul ourselves out of the dirt, get spacecraft get aircraft into the atmosphere, spacecraft around the earth. But orbiting the earth is sort of dog paddling in the local harbor. For apollo are 8, it was the first apollo 8, it was the first time we sailed across the true, deep waters of deep space, went to another world. And for the 24 hours those guys were there, they were creatures of another world. They were no longer earthlings. They were moonmen for 24 hours. It was the mission that made all of the landings possible. So you that story gets at what i wanted to ask about which is what makes apollo 8 special. Obviously, for those who were alive at the time, apollo 11was quite special because of the first steps on the moon, but 8 was a dramatic shift in the plan. Right. Talk a little wit about what a little bit about what made it so special at that particular point many time, 1968. 1968, as we know, was easily the most bloodsoaked year in modern human history. There was bobby king Bobby Kennedy assassination, Martin Luther king, riots in the u. S. , riots at the democratic convention, tet in vietnam, more riots in mexico city, paris. The world was bleeding from a thousand selfinflicted wounds. And then in the summer of 1968 a handful of people at nasa realized there was a way to right the ship of the Space Program and, as a dividend, sort of redeem the year and redeem the country. Remember, this was one year after the apollo 1 fire. Nasa had lost three astronauts on a launch pad fire. The dream of getting to the moon by 1970 seemed completely beyond reach now. The spacecraft had to be built from the bottom up. The saturn 5 rocket wasnt working, the lunar module was hopeless. That was nowhere near ready to make a landing. So here we were in the summer of 68, 16 months before kennedys deadline. And the guys at nasa and they were all men at the time, not including the women from Hidden Figures who did such incredible work they said we can fix this command module, and if we do this work and if we do it fast and if we get our guys trained and catch a couple of breaks, we can be in knew far lunar orbit in 16 weeks and kick start this program. And they dead it. They did it. Its about the people who put all this effort into it. Are they what draw you as a journalist to these stories . These are really dramatic events. Talk about some of the people and, obviously, you have three main characters in your book. Yes. Tell us about those particular people. Well, these three guys up here, they are, left to right, jim, bill and frank. I am, i never lose sight of the fact that how privileged i am to call jim a friend. Ive known him, ive known the lovell family for 25 years now. But all three of these guys in some ways represented Something Special and something particular about why human beings travel in space. And thats frank borman, why we travel in space and why we do these ambitious things. They all went into it with different motivations. Lovell simply loves nothing more than being in space. Hes never as happy as when hes in space, and he was never as happy in space as when he was doing something totally crazy like being on the first crew to fly to the moon. Bill anders adores machines. He adores the counterintuitive way a machine like the lunar module worked. He made himself an expert of every little rivet and wire and bolt on the lunar module. Now, on this mission he didnt get to fly, so he then learned the systems of the command module. To him, it was taking a machine and making it do something amazing. Frank borman is and was a patriot. Frank borman trained to be a fighter pilot. He went to west point. He joined the air force. He wanted to fight in korea. To him, this was his country needed him, and he was ready to fight. He was grounded for about a year due to a burst eardrum. His window of opportunity passed to fight in korea, and when this opportunity to be an astronaut and to fly this Improbable Mission was presented to him, he knew that this was his chance to fight a very important battle in the cold war. To go out to win and to come home. For him, it was a mission. All three guys knew about the ethical nature of the mission. They knew this was not just for nasa, not just for america, but for the pee cease at large. Species at large. They were going to make us, homo sapiens, a twoworld species. They were aware of that, but they all came to it with different personal agendas. And thats ooh actually brought out really nicely in their Mission Patch which was designed by jim lovell, really that drawing things together, drawing the earth and the moon closer together by actually having people go there. And lovell and borman had an interesting connection, the fact that theyd already flown together. Thats so this is a unique crew in many respects, but in part because they had flown together before. Thats right. And if you go out into the entry gallery, look at the gemini 4 spacecraft. That was the exact same model of spacecraft that these two guys, borman and lovell, flew in the first time they flew. It is basically two coach seats, and youre wearing inflatable suits so your shoulders are touching. And the overheld is three inches above your head when the hatches were closed. Jim and frank lived in that spacecraft without ever getting to open the doors for two solid weeks in lower earth orbit. Borman described it very glamorously as a fortnight in a mens room. Thats how he described it. [laughter] they joked when they came home that they said, well, i dont know, maybe well get married. [laughter] theyd spent so much time together. Spent so much time together. But if you it was a mission nobody wanted. It was this gritty, lunch bucket mission. They did it, they performed it brilliantly, and that crew cohesion was, i think, what made it made apollo 8 work so well. They brought in bill anders who was a whipsmart, energetic hot shot in all the right ways, and he just rounded out that crew. As you said, he didnt get to command the lunar didnt get to drive the lunar module like hed hoped, but he ended up playing a substantial role even where the story has come today, in his photography. He immersed himself in studying the lunar surface. Probably one of the most famous photos ever taken in human history, which is earth rise. I know hes talked about it extensively. You know, and these kinds of things, these stories are covered through lots of academic histories, through biographies of these even these astronauts. And you can see earth rise here. So what is your take on flight that is really on this flight that is really new to add another voice to that story. What did you learn that, you know, you can convey in a book thats new for readers . Well, well, first of all, before i answer that, i want to say this is not by accident that this picture is sideways. Bill anders, in fact, insists on rotating it 90 degrees because, remember, they were flying around the flank of the moon. So the earth actually rises in a lateral way. Now, the lunar surface was below them, so they saw it rightside up, but this is really the way it looks in space. What made this a new experience for me, look, i knew that it was going to be thrilling to write everything that happened when they got into the spacecraft. And my editor, John Sterling who happened to be my first editor when i wrote apollo 13 he said to me i want those guys in that spacecraft by 40 of the way through your book. If you havent got them in there by then, cut 10 . Hes a very smart man, and i worked very hard to the make that happen. But what struck me also was that 16week window that they had to get this mission out of the planning stage and onto the launch pad. And it was that monoma knew call focus that they showed at nasa, particularly in houston to get the systems ready, to sell the necessary nasa saw brass on the idea of nasa brass on the idea of doing this. My original very long subtitle for this book was going to be the enengenius, outrageous inspired and insane mission of apollo 8. [laughter] the Marketing Crew almost hit me over the head with a newspaper and said, enjoy that, because itll never see print. It was ingenius, and it was inspiring, and it was outrageous, and it was insane. And yet every Single Person who was brought into the moon into the room for these quiet conversations, every higher and higher level of nasa brass who was told we think we have a way to get to the moon in 16 weeks, they all said you are out of your mind, it cant be done, and then they listened. And then they said, well, i think it can be done. I think we do have the hardware. We just have to fix it. I think we do have the manpower and woman power and human power to sprint to this mission. We certainly have the astronaut personnel. Look, borman, lovell and anders were great people for this mission, but chris craft, the director of Flight Operations once told me, i asked him what is the best pure pilot expect best crew you ever flew, and he said people always ask me that, and i always say youre going to think im making it up, but my answer was always it is whatever crew im flying right now, because every crew benefits from what the previous crew did. Even if for some reason borman, lovell and anders werent able to fly, they had these trios of extraordinarily gifted men. They just had to pick the one they felt was right for this mission. And we saw an image of the launch of apollo 8, and thats that whats really audacious what they did. This was the very first time that it had been done, and it didnt just go to orbit, it went all the way to the moon. There have been previous launches that went all right yeah, the first one was perfect, the we could one almost shook itself apart getting to orbit. Chris craft, again, a very frank manages he went out to give man, he went out to give his postlaunch speech x he had a twosentence statement. This was a disaster. Write that down. Disaster. Theres no way to fix that and walked out of the room. Flp when you see these objects, houses of parliament was what you have done in your research and action will have to wait to talk to the people now using the technology. Talk a little bit about sort of what your reactions are coming to a place where we have all of that stuff. Thats a thing i was never so quite happy about my schedule this morning as to when jennifer said you have an hour. As a great then drag me away from the display. I believe these machines in these museums are powerfully evocative lease important for a lot of reasons. First of all and think anyone fully realizes the scale of them until you are standing next to them. In the case of the lunar modules, it is, the machine i have always said is so ugly it is beautiful it is the perfect machine. I can look at pictures of that all day and to stand in the vicinity of it and see this is the scale, this tactile nature even though we dont get to touch it. This is what it would have looked like to be a person engaged with that machine. The apollo in the gallery are another example of that you have this leak spacecraft. You have the much more regular looking spacecraft. You have two different machines built by two different empires on two different sides of the world. Empires that were at dagger points with each other. Nuclear data points. And yet between them connecting them there is this big lumpy child of seven ton black hardware that served as the docking. It had a port for the american ship, a port for the russian ship. It was the greatest engineering metaphor for global geopolitics. For how you can bring to spacecraft together and in so doing, bring two nations together. To see the hardware is to make it tactile. To make it real. It is the reason i never tire at looking at these. We are happy to have you. And a modern manifestation behind you. This is the size of a football field and yet many nations came together to build this thing. And of course Time Magazine actually chronicled some of this by way of a documentary about one of the more exciting moments of the last few years especially in going to the space station. And the Space Mission of thinking about that kind of two stories together. The International Space station, the partnership how do you see sorted in what youve been doing lately with Time Magazine free articles and research. In the political climate, in the climate of Technology Sharing or not sharing. And the general public support for spaceflight. Come expecting to see this continue . We think that a partnership from the International Space station will go forward and take us to the next place great. This is one of those questions i actually feel like i can answer optimistically. I think the collaboration will continue and i think it should continue. Part of it is because we are invested in it. 17 nations who are, who have collaborated to build this. If you took 17 families and they all built an Apartment Building and lived together youre kind of stuck with each other. So you better make this work. You put a lot of effort into it. I also think that will serve as a template for future international collaboration. Getting spacecraft to mars, getting human beings to mars will be an order of magnitude more difficult than it was to get them to the moon is because the distances are so much greater. If you can bring 17 countries together to do it, you cut costs, you cut time, you will collaboration, you bring special expertise from different groups of people. Also, i was touched by how readily and how poignantly the us Russian Corporation in space transcends petty politics. When we were over in and we watched the launch of a rocket at 130 in the morning and the bitter cold steps first of all i could have died happily at that point. Pretty spectacular yes and as i was in it jennifer earlier, there was such a granular level of collaboration there. There were three astronauts and cosmonauts and a russian flag and an American Flag. All the way down to the Little Details when they gave press conference is a miniature American Flag and did miniature russian flag. And when i got there for the reentry, a miniature flag. Everything about it is a symbol. Everything is all collaboration. Cooperation. Scott kelly who of course has a twin brother mark kelly, nothing is more defining than his relationship with his twin. He nonetheless calls misha his brother from another mother because of their missions in space. I wanted to bring the apollo 8 story a little bit. Folks have seen a story that popped up there which is the moon as seen by the apollo 8 crew. Seeing Something Like that, seeing earth from that perspective is really something that was brandnew at this time. This was huge. They broadcast this from the moon. On Christmas Eve. This is a pivotal moment. This is when people are not only to see the earth your photographs later but see it live on their television from 250,000 miles away. Is that really, it has helped for us to think about today and terms of how space and the media and the community interact . Is this partnership between the two. I mean nasas job cannot be done without public support. The medium brings that story to the public. Talk a little bit of your role as a writer for the Space Community and sort of excitement may be that you are helping in part for that story. That is something that i like to think about. Look, i would love to be in our shop. I want to be an astronaut since i was little boy. I still want to be an astronaut. I always realize though that even as a little boy that i am so illequipped to be national. It is just not something i have the brass to do. But to be in the vicinity of that, to orbit around that, to be in mission control, to be there, to be sitting here. Marilyn lovell once said to me when we were on this set of the apollo 13 movie, and again this is when i had already started to feel really close to marilyn and to the family at large. She said something to me that i took exactly the way she meant it. She said look, i have come to believe that jim was born to flight the mis