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You know Frank Borman.  You know him as the commander of Apollo 8, the first flight to orbit the moon.  Perhaps you remember him as the one who put forward the idea of reading from Genesis in lunar orbit on Christmas Eve 1968.

If steeped in space history, you know he was the command pilot for Gemini 7 which set record of 14 days in space in December 1965 and served as the rendezvous target for Gemini 6.  You’ve seen the iconic pictures.

If old enough, you remember Frank Borman as chairman of Eastern Airlines in the 1970s and ’80s, making commercials in which he recited their motto, “We earn our wings every day.”  He made the airline profitable — until the deregulation of the airlines.

You may even know he served as the on the board that investigated the Apollo 1 fire in 1967, was the ramrod for correcting the deficiencies of the spacecraft.  A West Pointer through and through, he had a single-minded focus — beating the Soviet Union to the moon.

You likely don’t know this story:  When planning Apollo 8, NASA trajectory experts, in order to launch and splashdown in daylight, pushed for 12 orbits of the moon.  Frank Borman said they could achieve all their goals in ten orbits and he wasn’t gonna risk the mission in lunar orbit a moment longer than necessary.  Ten orbits, he said — even though it meant splashing down just before dawn in the Pacific, descending in dark on just the second manned Apollo.  

We won’t have photographic documentation if something happens to the parachutes, some NASA officials argued.

They were no match for the West Pointer.  “What the hell does that matter?” he said, “. . . If it doesn’t work, we’re all dead and it won’t make any difference if nobody can see us.”

Guess who won the argument.  

Frank Borman, age 95, member of the second group of astronauts, died on November 7.