RETURNING home to Houston early one morning last week, the Apollo 8 astronauts, who had seen some astonishing sights on their journey through space, seemed even more astonished to find a tumultuous welcome awaiting them. They had already undergone hours of preliminary debriefing sessions aboard the recovery carrier Yorktown, where their spaceship, blackened by its fiery re-entry into the earth's atmosphere, also got a scientific onceover. Flown from the Yorktown to Hawaii, the astronauts boarded an Air Force C-141 jet transport for a 10-hr, flight to Ellington Air Force Base, just five miles from Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center.
There, a crowd of more than 3,000 and dozens of banners and placards awaited their 2:12 a.m. arrival. "Good ride, Skypokes" and "Welcome home, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and Captain Kirk," read the banners. As the crowd roared, the astronauts were greeted by NASA's Robert Gilruth, by their wives and by most of the astronaut corps. Spectators pushed through police lines to touch the sleeves of the astronauts' blue flight coveralls, to shake their hands and to ask for autographs. Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were clearly moved by the heroes' reception. "At 2 in the morning," said Borman, "I simply expected to get in my old blue bomb [his 1955 Chevrolet] and go home."
Scientific Booty. As the first men to circumnavigate the moon, the three will never again be able to return completely to their former lives. When they reached Houston, they had already been hailed in almost every nook and cranny of their native planet, including a somewhat envious Soviet Union. As scientific booty from their journey, they brought back photographs, both moving and still, so marvelous as to beggar the imagination of even the most dreamful of their fellow earthlings. Now they faced a schedule that, to them, might be even more wearying than their historic voyage: weeks of press conferences, parades and tours.
Taking a break only on New Year's Day, the astronauts met daily in the Manned Spacecraft Center with NASA officials and scientists to review every detail of their trip to the moon, referring frequently to the 400-page flight plan and the 1,000-page transcript of radioed conversations between the spacecraft and earth. After completing their debriefing, they will travel to Washington this week for a press conference in the State Department auditorium. On the following day, they will be guests of honor in a New York City ticker-tape parade up Broadway and a state dinner hosted by Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Another parade a waits them in Houston on Jan. 13, and they have been invited to the Nixon Inaugural. There were rumors at week's end that the astronauts might also make a world tour, including stops in Russia.