What a great time to get a stomach virus

Apollo Flight Continuing Despite Illness

SPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) ─ Sick and short of sleep, the Apollo 8 astronauts streaked through a boundless, void Sunday, ever farther from earth and toward a glowing crescent moon looming larger and larger before them.

Air Force Col. Frank Borman, Navy Capt. James A. Lovell Jr. and Air Force Maj. William A. Anders reshuffled their mission schedule Sunday night to take turns sleeping, trying to catch up from a restless first night in space that ended with Borman racked by illness.

Borman said he vomited, had diarrhea, chills and headaches during the early Sunday morning hours. He gamely kept the news of his illness from ground controllers.

When Borman did report he was ailing, the Air Force colonel shrugged off the illness as a "24-hour flu, intestinal flu," and was feeling better.

Officials said the illness wasn't serious enough to end man's first voyage around the moon, but Dr. Charles Berry, chief of medical flight operations, somberly reported that "the chances are" the illness will spread to Lovell and Anders.

Both Lovell and Anders said they had been slightly ill earlier. All three astronauts took pills to control diarrhea.

Despite their illness, the Apollo 8 astronauts beamed a television show from their high-flying stage on schedule.

The short transmission showed the crew at work in their space cabin as they flashed through space at 3,174 miles an hour.

"This program is coming to you from about halfway to the moon," said Borman, smiling and looking chipper even though he had been violently ill only hours before. "We're about 31 hours, 21 minutes on the way and less than 40 hours from the moon."

Anders, operating the TV camera, caught Lovell busy at spacecraft KP duty, preparing the crew's lunch and a dessert of chocolate pudding.

The Navy captain leaned into the camera and said, "Happy Birthday, Mother." His mother, Mrs. Blanche Lovell of Edge-water, Fla., was 73 Sunday.

Anders tried to give earthlings the first live view of their home planet, but a telephoto lens failed to work. Normal lens on the camera showed the earth only as a white, shining round blob.

After Anders tried repeatedly with the telephoto lens, a ground controller asked: "You don't have a lens cover on there, do you?"

"No," Anders said. "We checked that, as a matter of fact."

A second television transmission is scheduled for 2:06 p.m. EST Monday. Space officials said they were trying to solve the telephoto lens problem for the Monday telecast.

While the astronauts fought their illnesses, people around the world paused in the holiest of Christian seasons to offer prayers for their safety.

Pope Paul VI praised the Apollo 8 flight as a "fearless and courageous adventure."

"Our gaze moves to the sky, unable to escape this marvelous fascination." he said. The Pope asked 10,000 gathered in St. Peter's Square in Vatican City to pray for the astronauts.

In the space community around the Manned Spacecraft Center here, special prayer services were held Sunday. A recorded prayer by Borman, a lay reader at an Episcopal church here, was to be delivered at services Christmas Eve or Christmas Day at his church.

Several hours after his illness, Borman asked to adjust the flight schedule to give the crew shorter, but more frequent, sleep periods. The three took turns sleeping Sunday night and reported they were feeling better.

At one point, the spacecraft commander told the ground:

"Remember, the most important part of the trip occurs in two days (actually on Wednesday) when we start back. So you all get better rested too."

"We'll do that," a ground controller reported.

Although the illness among the crew seemed to abate by Sunday night Berry warned that it could come again and again.

The symptoms were apparently those of an intestinal virus, he said, which, in the closed environment of the spacecraft, could bounce from crewman to crewman and back again.

"They play ping pong with that sort of thing," he said, adding that if "two or three" of them come down with the illness, "it could conceivably" end the mission.

But even if the crew does have to return to earth, it will take them at least two days, because they are so far out from earth. They could, in essence, turn their spacecraft around up to about. 6:51 a.m. Monday. After that, the shortest route home will be a loop around the moon.

The spacecraft since it left earth orbit has been the prize in a celestial tug of war between the gravitational pull of the earth and the moon. The spacecraft's speed has slowly declined since it was launched toward the moon as the earth tries to pull it back. The speed will continue to decline until 3:29 p.m. EST when it reaches a low of 2,300 miles per hour. Then the moon wins the battle and grasps Apollo 8 in its gravitational embrace. The spacecraft will pick up speed until it again is traveling more than 5,000 miles an hour.

At about 69 miles above the moon's surface, the spacecraft will arc around behind the moon and out of sight of earth. The crew will fire the powerful service propulsion rocket and Apollo 8 will be captured by the moon's gravity.

It'll remain trapped there, orbiting at 3,600 miles an hour, for 20 hours, or 10 orbits. The crew will then fire the rocket again and return home. Should the rocket not fire, Apollo 8 would become an orbiting tomb for the astronaut trio.