Frank Borman: He was first to the moon

No-nonsense commander of Apollo 8, the first to orbit the moon, saw it as part of the technological arms race to beat the Soviets.

Frank Borman commanded Apollo 8, which circled the moon in December 1968. Picture: AFP / NASA

Frank Borman was the commander of Apollo 8, the first mission to fly humans around the moon. The achievement inspired awe and wonder among countless millions of people. Borman, though, was not one of them.

“I was there because it was a battle in the Cold War. I wanted to participate in this American adventure of beating the Soviets. But that’s the only thing that motivated me – beat the damn Russians,” he recalled. Weightlessness was interesting “maybe for the first 30 seconds”, he added in a 2018 interview for a radio show.

The early groups of NASA astronauts were heavily drawn from the US military, prioritising test pilots with engineering expertise, and Borman was the acme of a direct, disciplined and stolid officer. Though astronauts were lionised in popular culture as daring explorers with insatiable curiosity, Borman lived in prose rather than poetry and was once described by a NASA psychiatrist as the least complicated man he had ever met.

On a six-day mission in December 1968, Borman, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell orbited the moon and gathered knowledge and experience that paved the way for two members of the back-up crew, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, to walk on the lunar surface seven months later and, in effect, win the space race.

Anders took the famous Earthrise photograph of Earth above the moon and on Christmas Eve the crew read verses from the Book of Genesis during a live broadcast that at the time was the most-watched television program in history. Borman concluded: “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you – all of you on the good Earth.”

Yet travelling farther from home than any humans before him and seeing the moon at close quarters and the Earth from afar was not, Borman insisted, a transformative or spiritual experience.

“It didn’t really change my views much,” he said in an interview in 1986. “The grandeur of nature is a given. Seeing the moon on Christmas was no different than seeing the Grand Canyon on Easter morning. Sure, it was moving, but it was moving because of our isolation and because everything we valued was back on Earth.”

The accomplishments of Apollo 8 were overshadowed by the Apollo 11 moon landing, but it was a bold and risky effort that made front-page news around the world. Borman rationalised the risk by telling himself it was no more dangerous than flying a fighter aircraft in the Vietnam War. But no one had ever journeyed more than 1370km from Earth; Anders, Lovell and Borman flew 385,000km away.

The Apollo 8 crew, from left, Jim Lovell, Bill Anders and Frank Borman at the Kennedy Space Centre simulator in December 1968. Picture: NASA

The crew members were named “men of the year” by Time magazine and Borman was greeted by an enthusiastic crowd of wellwishers and press in London in 1969, where he met Queen Elizabeth II and Harold Wilson, the prime minister.

Highly respected within NASA after the success of Apollo 8, Borman was a leading candidate for a future moon landing mission – perhaps even the first. But the prospect held no appeal.

“I probably could have walked on the moon. Yeah,” he reflected in 2018. “I would have not accepted the risk involved to go pick up rocks. It doesn’t mean that much to me.”

When Armstrong made his “small step” on to the lunar surface, Borman, acting as the White House space liaison, was watching on television in the Oval Office with president Richard Nixon. Borman is said to have dissuaded Nixon from directing The Star-Spangled Banner to be played during the historic moonwalk, arguing it would have wasted precious time and struck an overly national­istic tone at a moment of profound importance for all human­ity.

Borman was born in Gary, Indiana, in 1928, to Marjorie and Edwin, who sold Oldsmobile cars. Hoping that a warmer and drier climate would ease their son’s chronic ear and sinus infections, they moved to the desert heat of Arizona, where they struggled to find work during the Depression, ultimately running a dry cleaners.

Borman became fascinated with aviation after he took a ride at about the age of five in a biplane at a county fair. He built model planes and had a newspaper round so he could save up to afford flying lessons at the age of 15. He was an American football quarterback at school and married Susan Bugbee, his high school sweetheart, in 1950.

That year he graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point, New York – eighth out of 670 in his class – then joined the US Air Force as a test pilot and instructor, though a perforated eardrum suffered in 1951 during a dive-bombing practice run almost ended his career. He would suffer another in-flight health problem during the Apollo 8 mission, when he endured a spell of vomiting and diarrhoea that might have been an adverse reaction to a sleeping pill.

Borman during a NASA TV program in 2008. Picture: Getty Images

He studied for a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering at the California Institute of Technology and taught thermodynamics and fluid mechanics at West Point.

Like Armstrong, Borman was part of the second group of astronauts selected by NASA in 1962. Susan had wanted him to become a professor at the military academy. Like many astronauts’ wives, she was given little support to handle the stress of her husband’s perilous job. She drank to excess and later endured a nervous breakdown. Borman’s family stayed at home rather than attend the Apollo 8 launch.

In 1967, all three crew members of Apollo 1, including Ed White, a close friend of Borman, had died in a cabin fire during a launch rehearsal. Borman was part of the NASA accident review team and was one of the first to examine the charred interior as part of the investigation into the tragedy.

Borman had already spent almost 14 days orbiting Earth with Lovell for the Gemini VII mission in 1965, testing equipment and procedures to learn more about long-duration spaceflights.

“It was boring,” he said in a 1999 oral history. “You’re just drifting, tumbling through space, time goes slow.”

He retired from NASA and the USAF in 1970 and was sent, at Nixon’s request, on a 25-day international mission to drum up support for the release of American prisoners held by North Vietnam and the Vietcong.

Later that year he took a senior executive role at Eastern Air Lines, a large but serially unprofitable carrier based in Miami. When one of its aeroplanes crashed in the Everglades in Florida in 1972, resulting in 101 deaths, he immediately flew to the scene and waded through the swamp in search of survivors.

He became chief executive in 1975 and sought to instil military-style discipline to the sprawling enterprise. Known as “the colonel” in reference to his air force rank, he banned lunchtime drinking, sacked dozens of mid and high-level managers and drove to work in an old Chevrolet.

His status as a national hero initially guaranteed him respect among the workforce and his methods appeared to be working but his aura wore off in the 1980s as the company continued to struggle. He was, according to a 1985 New York Times profile, “repeatedly described as being autocratic, of running his operation like a military bureaucracy and of being irritatingly direct”.

The first rendezvous in space as Gemini VI-A comes within 2m of Gemini VII with Borman and Lovell aboard in 1965. Picture: NASA

The following year, another reporter noted a Tolstoy quotation on a wall in his office: “The only legitimate happiness is honest hard work and the surmounting of obstacles.” A battle with a union over cost controls proved insurmountable and Borman wept when the board sold the company to a rival in 1986.

He collected a hefty sum in severance pay, moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, vowed to work in support of the presidential election campaign of George HW Bush, and bought a vintage de Havilland acrobatic aeroplane for his personal enjoyment.

His sons, Fred and Edwin, both graduated from West Point. Fred became an American football coach at the academy, then founded a car dealership in New Mexico in the ’80s that he operated with his father.

Frank Borman held board positions with The Home Depot and National Geographic, among other companies, and became chairman of Patlex Corporation, a laser patent business. He was part of an international inquiry board convened by the South African government to investigate the plane crash in 1986 that killed Mozambique president Samora Machel and 33 others. Their report blamed the Soviet flight crew.

In the ’90s he bought a cattle ranch in Montana that he ran with his son Fred, and in his later years he cared for his wife, who developed Alzheimer’s disease and died in 2021.

He did not spend his free time consuming science fiction. A radio reporter once showed him an episode of a series he had never seen, Star Trek: The Next Generation, thinking his soul might be stirred by the idea of boldly going where no one had gone before – just as he had done 50 years earlier. “Nonsense to me,” Borman declared. “It doesn’t interest me, I’m sorry.”

Frank Borman. Astronaut and businessman. Born March 14, 1928, Gary, Indiana; died November 7, Billings, Montana, aged 95.

The Times