Home › Frontier & Sport › Exploration, Aviation & Space
Frank Borman
1928–2023 · 95 years Tier II
Offered the first Moon landing, and turned it down
Gary, Indiana was cold and damp and gave him sinus and mastoid trouble, so the family moved to Tucson, which he counted as home for the rest of his life. His father took a lease on a filling station. He delivered the Arizona Daily Star, failed to make the junior high football team and organized a rival one sponsored by a jewelry store, and finished as second-string quarterback on a Tucson High side that won the state championship in a season where all four of the passes he threw fell incomplete. He learned to fly at 15. He also started dating a sophomore at the same school named Susan Bugbee. West Point ranked him eighth of 670 in the class of 1950, and he married Susan that July.
Chuck Yeager told him joining NASA meant he could kiss his Air Force career goodbye. He went anyway, in the second group of nine, in September 1962. Gemini 7 put him and Jim Lovell in a cabin the size of the front seat of a small car from December 4 to December 18, 1965 — 13 days and 18 hours, with a rendezvous that brought Gemini 6A to within a foot of them. After the Apollo 1 fire he was the only astronaut on the nine-man review board, climbed into the burned command module himself to record the positions of the switches and breakers, and took hostile questioning from Congress that April. Apollo 8 launched on December 21, 1968 and reached lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, and about a billion people in 64 countries heard the crew read from Genesis.
Deke Slayton had already offered him command of the first Moon landing, and he turned it down. He had settled before Apollo 8 left the pad that it was his last flight, and he said afterward that he had joined to beat the Russians and that once Apollo 11 was over the mission was over — the rest was frosting on the cake. He watched Apollo 11 lift off from a television set in Nixon's office and went into airlines. Eastern made him chief executive in 1975 and had the four most profitable years in its history, and then deregulation, fuel and the debt on new aircraft ate it. Three unions gave back 836 million dollars in wages and benefits over 10 years. In 1986 the machinists' leader Charlie Bryan agreed to the last round only if Borman resigned.
The board sold Eastern to Frank Lorenzo instead, Borman left in June 1986 with 900,000 dollars, and the airline died in January 1991. The Christmas Eve broadcast outlasted it. Madalyn Murray O'Hair sued the government over the Genesis reading. A three-judge panel threw it out, the Fifth Circuit affirmed, and the Supreme Court would not hear it. He ran a Ford dealership in Las Cruces, bought a Montana cattle ranch, and rebuilt a Bell P-63 Kingcobra that took Grand Champion Warbird at Oshkosh. Susan developed Alzheimer's, and he visited her nursing home daily until she died in 2021. He died at Billings on November 7, 2023, at 95, and lies at West Point. Anders died in 2024, Lovell in 2025.
Lifespan
Frank Borman's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
-
Gemini 7
mission
Fourteen days aloft with Jim Lovell, and the first rendezvous of two crewed spacecraft 1965 -
The Apollo 204 Review Board
other
The only astronaut among the nine members investigating the Apollo 1 fire 1967 -
Apollo 8
mission
The first crewed flight to leave Earth orbit and circle the Moon 1968 -
Countdown
book
His autobiography, written with Robert J. Serling 1988
Life in brief
with age at each point- 1950 aged ~22 Graduates eighth of 670 from West Point and marries Susan Bugbee in July
- 1957 aged ~29 Takes a Caltech master's and begins teaching thermodynamics at West Point
- September 17, 1962 aged 34 Named in NASA's second astronaut group, the Next Nine
- December 4, 1965 aged 37 Launches on Gemini 7 for 13 days and 18 hours in orbit He was 37, and promotion afterward made him the youngest full colonel in the Air Force.
- January 27, 1967 aged 38 The Apollo 1 fire puts him on the accident review board He inspected the burned cabin himself and verified the switch and breaker positions.
- December 21, 1968 aged 40 Apollo 8 launches for the Moon He was sick on the second day, vomiting in the sealed cabin, and did not want it reported. Lovell and Anders reported it.
- July 1, 1970 aged 42 Joins Eastern Air Lines after retiring from NASA and the Air Force
- December 29, 1972 aged 44 Wades into the Everglades at night after Eastern Flight 401 goes down He took a helicopter to the crash site and helped load survivors.
- June 1986 aged 58 Resigns from Eastern after the board sells the airline to Texas Air
Related
Contemporaries
Frontier & Sport, born within 25 years
Jim Lovell 1928–2025Frontier & SportCommander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, whose calm leadership brought the crew home safely.
Althea Gibson 1927–2003Frontier & SportTennis champion who broke the sport's color barrier and became the first Black player to win major singles titles.
Arnold Palmer 1929–2016Frontier & SportGolfer whose charisma and television popularity helped turn golf into a mass spectator sport.
Gordon Cooper 1927–2004Frontier & SportMercury Seven astronaut who flew the final Mercury mission and later commanded a Gemini flight.
Buzz Aldrin b. 1930Frontier & SportApollo 11 lunar module pilot and second person to walk on the Moon.
Ed White 1930–1967Frontier & SportGemini 4 astronaut who performed the first American spacewalk, dying in the Apollo 1 fire.