Frank Borman

• 1. Introduction

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  Frank Borman received a telegram after returning from the Moon. It was from a stranger, and it said simply: "Thank you Apollo 8. You saved 1968." That single line captures what Borman's most famous mission meant to a country that had spent the year reeling from assassinations, riots, and the grinding misery of Vietnam. But the man who commanded the first crew to orbit the Moon was not someone who thought much about historic firsts. He later told an interviewer that he never wanted to be the first person on the Moon, and that once Apollo 11 was over, the mission was over. The rest, he said, was just frosting on the cake.

  This documentary follows a man driven by a single, consuming goal: to beat the Soviets to the Moon. Along the way, it asks how an Oldsmobile dealer's son from Gary, Indiana, became the commander of one of the most consequential space missions in history. And it asks what kind of man turns down the chance to land on the Moon.

• 2. The Boy from Gary

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  Frank Frederick Borman II was born on the 14th of March 1928, at 2162 West 11th Avenue in Gary, Indiana, the only child of Edwin Otto Borman, who owned an Oldsmobile dealership. His great-grandfather Christopher Borman had immigrated from Germany in the late 19th century and found work as a tuba player in a traveling circus. The family line had a flair for unlikely careers.

  Because Frank suffered from repeated sinus and mastoid problems in the cold and damp weather of Gary, the family relocated to Tucson, Arizona, where his father took a lease on a Mobil service station. Borman attended Sam Hughes Elementary School, then Mansfeld Junior High, where he tried out for the football team, failed to make it, and simply formed his own squad with neighborhood boys, sponsored by a local jewelry store. He earned pocket money delivering the Arizona Daily Star.

  At Tucson High School he was an honor student and the second-string quarterback on the varsity team. The first-string quarterback broke his arm in the opening game, meaning Borman stepped in. Every one of the four forward passes he attempted that season was incomplete, yet the team won the state championship. He also started dating Susan Bugbee, a sophomore at his school, a relationship that would shape the rest of his life. His first airplane ride had come when he was five years old, and at fifteen he learned to fly at Gilpin Field, taking lessons from a female instructor named Bobbie Kroll.

• 3. West Point and the Air Force

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  Borman wanted to study aeronautical engineering, but neither the University of Arizona nor Arizona State University offered strong programs, and his family could not afford an out-of-state school. A friend's father knew the Arizona congressman Richard F. Harless, who already had a principal nominee for West Point. Borman was listed as a third alternative. All three nominees ahead of him dropped out, and Borman entered West Point on the 1st of July 1946.

  Hazing from upperclassmen was common, and many of his classmates were older veterans of World War II. He failed to make the plebe football team but was taken on as an assistant manager by head coach Earl Blaik. By his final year, Borman was a cadet captain commanding his company and managing the varsity football team. He graduated on the 6th of June 1950, ranked eighth in a class of 670, and commissioned four days early so that Air Force officers would have equal seniority with Naval Academy graduates.

  He married Susan Bugbee on the 20th of July 1950, at St. Philip's in the Hills Episcopal Church in Tucson. Fighter pilots were then being sent to Korea, and Borman requested assignment to Luke Air Force Base near Phoenix, partly because Susan was eight months pregnant. At the last minute his orders were changed to Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, where he practiced aerial bombing and gunnery. A perforated eardrum from dive bombing with a bad head cold sent him to the Philippines instead of Korea, where he joined the 44th Fighter-Bomber Squadron at Clark Air Base under Major Charles McGee. He earned his Master of Science degree in aeronautical engineering at Caltech in June 1957, then became an assistant professor of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics at West Point. In June 1960 he was selected for Class 60-C at the USAF Experimental Flight Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, a class that also included Michael Collins and James B. Irwin.

• 4. Two Weeks in a Tin Can

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  Borman was publicly announced as one of the Next Nine NASA astronauts on the 17th of September 1962. Chuck Yeager, commandant of the USAF Test Pilot School at Edwards, told him bluntly: "you can kiss your godamned Air Force career goodbye." Borman signed his first Houston home construction contract for $26,500, and received an unglamorous assignment: developing expertise in the Titan II booster, a rocket he had no prior experience with.

  His path to his first spaceflight was tangled. Gus Grissom initially had Borman as his co-pilot for Gemini 3, but after a long conversation decided they could not work together. According to Gene Cernan, the egos of Grissom and Borman were too big to fit into a single spacecraft. Borman was replaced by John Young. Slayton still wanted Borman for a long-duration mission, and eventually he was assigned to command Gemini 7 alongside Jim Lovell.

  At 8076 lb, the Gemini 7 spacecraft was 250 lb heavier than any previous Gemini. To stay fit for the mission, Borman and Lovell jogged 2-3 miles a day and played handball. Gemini 7 launched at 14:30 local time on the 6th of December 1965. Nine days later, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford launched on Gemini 6 and completed a rendezvous, bringing the two craft within 30 cm of each other. Schirra held up a sign in the window that read "Beat Army." Schirra, Stafford, and Lovell were all Naval Academy graduates; Borman was outnumbered.

  When Gemini 6 pulled away, Borman and Lovell still had three days left, confined to a space the size of the front seat of a small car. Borman began hoping something would go wrong to justify an early return. The crew took the stimulant dexedrine for re-entry on December 18, and Gemini 7 splashed down 6.4 miles from the recovery vessel. At 37, Borman was awarded the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and became the youngest full colonel in the Air Force.

• 5. Fire and Redesign

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  On the 27th of January 1967, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee died in a fire aboard their Apollo 1 command module. Borman was the only astronaut chosen to serve on the nine-member AS-204 Accident Review Board. He inspected the burnt-out module and verified the positions of every switch and circuit breaker. In April 1967, alongside Shepard, Schirra, Slayton, and McDivitt, he testified before both the House and Senate committees. His testimony helped convince Congress that Apollo could be safely flown again. He told the committees: "We are trying to tell you that we are confident in our management, and in our engineering and in ourselves. I think the question is really: Are you confident in us?"

  After the hearings, Robert Gilruth offered Borman the job of managing the entire Apollo project. Borman turned it down. Instead, he accepted a posting to the North American Aviation plant in Downey, California, overseeing the implementation of the review board's recommendations. There, he tangled with test pilot Scott Crossfield over the design of an emergency oxygen system. Borman refused to accept a design that did not protect the crew from noxious fumes. The dispute eventually led to Crossfield leaving North American. A redesigned hatch that allowed astronauts to exit within seconds added 1500 lb to the spacecraft's weight. Redesigning the parachutes to carry that load cost $250,000, which put Borman in conflict with George Mueller, who considered the expense excessive.

• 6. Christmas Eve at the Moon

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  In August 1968, the CIA reported that the Soviet Union was considering a lunar fly-by before year's end. George Low proposed a solution: fly a Command/Service Module to the Moon in December 1968, without a lunar module. When Slayton asked Jim McDivitt whether he wanted to command the mission, McDivitt turned it down; his crew had spent months preparing to test the lunar module and wanted to do exactly that. When Borman was asked the same question, he answered yes without hesitation.

  About six weeks before launch, NASA deputy director for public affairs Julian Scheer told Borman that a television broadcast was planned for Christmas Eve from lunar orbit and suggested the crew find something appropriate to say. Borman consulted Simon Bourgin of the United States Information Agency, who in turn consulted Joe Laitin, a former United Press International reporter. Laitin's wife Christine came up with the idea of reading from the Book of Genesis. The text was transcribed onto fireproof paper. Borman later joked: "One of the things that was truly historic was that we got that good Catholic Bill Anders to read from the King James Version of the bible."

  Apollo 8 launched at 12:51:00 UTC on the 21st of December 1968. On the second day, Borman vomited twice and had a bout of diarrhea, leaving the cabin full of small globules of waste that the crew cleaned up as best they could. Researchers later concluded he was suffering from space adaptation syndrome, which affects about a third of astronauts during their first day in weightlessness. On December 24, the crew entered lunar orbit. They made ten orbits in twenty hours. Bill Anders photographed the Earth rising above the lunar horizon, producing one of the most reproduced images in history.

  The spacecraft splashed down in darkness at 10:51:42 UTC on the 27th of December. Borman had argued for a night landing; a daylight recovery would have required at least twelve orbits of the Moon. When the spacecraft hit the water, he did not release the parachutes quickly enough, and they dragged the craft upside down, hiding the flashing beacon from the recovery helicopters. He inflated the nose bags to right the craft, then waited 45 minutes for local sunrise before frogmen could open the hatches. Borman became seasick. The crew received ticker tape parades in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., where President Lyndon B. Johnson presented them with the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. Time magazine named the Apollo 8 crew its Men of the Year for 1968, featuring them on the cover dated the 3rd of January 1969.

• 7. Eastern Air Lines

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  Borman joined Eastern Air Lines on the 1st of July 1970, and by December had become senior vice president for operations. On the evening of the 29th of December 1972, he received a phone call informing him that Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 had disappeared off radar near the Everglades. He took a helicopter to within 150 yards of the crash site and waded waist-deep through the swamp, helping load survivors into rescue helicopters.

  He became chief executive officer of Eastern in December 1975 and chairman of the board in December 1976. He disliked the corporate culture of plush offices and company Cadillacs and Mercedes while employees were being furloughed. After taking over, he fired 81 middle managers and 31 vice presidents, saving $9 million annually in salaries. He drove to work in a second-hand Chevrolet Camaro with an engine he had rebuilt himself.

  Eastern had not turned a profit since 1969. Borman persuaded employees to accept wage freezes and introduced the Variable Earnings Program, under which workers contributed 3.5 percent of their salaries to a profit insurance fund. Profits jumped to a record $67.3 million in 1978. Borman then ordered $1.4 billion worth of new fuel-efficient aircraft, pushing the company's debt to $2.3 billion. Airline deregulation in 1978 increased the number of U.S. carriers from 30 to nearly 100, and cut-rate competition eroded Eastern's margins. In just the first three quarters of 1984, Eastern lost $128 million.

  Over ten years, the three main unions had given up a combined $836 million in wages and benefits. When the head of the International Association of Machinists, Charlie Bryan, declared the union would accept further cuts only if Borman resigned, Eastern's board sold the airline to Texas Air Corporation, headed by Frank Lorenzo. Borman resigned in June 1986. His severance payment was $900,000, and he drew a consulting fee of $150,000 a year from Eastern until 1991.

• 8. After the Astronaut

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  Borman and Susan settled in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where his son Fred had founded a Ford dealership. In 1998, Borman purchased a cattle ranch in the Bighorn Mountains of southern Montana, running 4,000 head of cattle on 160,000 acres. That same year he published his autobiography, Countdown, co-written with Robert J. Serling.

  Among his personal projects, he painstakingly rebuilt a rare World War II single-engine fighter, the Bell P-63 Kingcobra. He exhibited it at Oshkosh in 1998 and won the Grand Champion Warbird award. He also flew it in airshows himself. A NASA psychiatrist once described him as the least complicated man he had ever met; a Tolstoy quotation hung on his office wall: "The only legitimate happiness is honest hard work and the surmounting of obstacles."

  Susan developed Alzheimer's disease. Borman spent much of his later life caring for her, and after she moved to a nursing home, he visited her daily until her death on the 7th of September 2021. Following John Glenn's death in December 2016, Borman became the oldest living American astronaut. He and Jim Lovell, eleven days his junior, both celebrated their 90th birthdays in March 2018. In December 2018, the three Apollo 8 crewmates reunited for the mission's 50th anniversary at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, where the spacecraft in which they orbited the Moon is on permanent display. Borman told the gathering: "I have never said it before publicly, but these two talented guys, I'm just proud that I was able to fly with them." He died from a stroke at the Billings Clinic on the 7th of November 2023, at the age of 95, and was interred at West Point Cemetery.