Retired Navy Capt. James Arthur “Jim” Lovell, the central figure in one of the nation’s most harrowing space-program dramas to date, has a spot of trouble counting to 10. He hits 5 without missing a beat; then the call of duty intervenes. A sound tech’s voice-check request is thus satisfied, just not quite in the way he expected. “5-4-3-2-1. I’m an old astronaut,” Lovell deadpanned. What can he say, y’know? Come to think of it, Lovell, 80, doesn’t have to say anything ever again, at least certainly not in his own defense. He’s an American hero dozens of times over, with a list of accomplishments that stretches to — well — the moon and back. As chief of the fateful Apollo 13 mission in 1972, he and crewmembers Jack Swigert and Fred Haise drifted between here and eternity, frantically trading their crippled command module for a clunky lunar vessel never designed as a rescue craft. His plaintive “Houston, we have a problem” signaled a four-day, seat-of-the-pants trek home and an avalanche of fervent prayer from a spellbound Earth. In fact, if it weren’t for the crew’s heroism, last Dec. 11 may well have been a very different day in Balboa Park. That’s when the San Diego Air & Space Museum welcomed Lovell, retired Air Force Col. Frank Borman and retired Air Force Maj. Gen. William Anders for a special memorial in its own right. The Apollo 8 mission, on which the three became the first to orbit the moon and to witness an earthrise, would commence 40 years ago this Sunday, Dec. 21 — and even as man would walk on the lunar surface seven months later, this program would set the stage for that event. The decades have sealed the men’s deep personal bond and, when it comes to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), fueled their disillusionment. But make no mistake: These guys are among our bravest, brightest and best, their humility and good humor coloring their place in history (just don’t force a Borman-Anders debate about whose earthrise picture has the more lasting impact, or things could get mighty ugly). Time magazine may have named them its Men of the Year in 1968, but the public mind did the mag one better. “You saved 1968!” read a telegram to Borman from somebody he’s never met. And maybe, just maybe, they did. “[Apollo 8],” Lovell said at a museum press conference, “accomplished something that gave an upbeat sense to the country after a rather tumultuous year of assassinations and riots. The Vietnam War was going on. We were able to help honor President Kennedy’s commitment to getting a man on the moon before the end of the decade. I think those were the things that were the most significant about the flight of Apollo 8.” “Agreed,” Borman, 80, added. “In that order, too.” Anders, 75, had a different take on the mission’s significance. Vietnam had spawned lots of creative means to avoid the draft – and for him, Apollo 8 was maybe the most innovative of all. “One of my lines,” the Grossmont High School grad quipped, “is [President] Clinton only went to Canada. We went all the way to the moon.” Truth is, Bill was going to school in Great Britain at the time and opted for student deferments. He’d return to the U.S. in 1970, not long after Apollo 12’s Charles “Pete” Conrad Jr. became the first man to hit a golf ball and dance on the moon. The Apollo program would end with its 18th mission in July of 1975, when NASA was a child of 17, and featured a docking with a craft carrying two Soviet cosmonauts. Budget constraints would spawn various reshufflings and flight cancellations along the way. And while NASA has triumphed in many respects since then and touts a 2009 budget of $17.6 billion, the men are quick to point out the agency’s colossal shortcomings and the reasons behind them. “This country,” Anders grunted, “has become so tangled in its own underwear that it can’t do anything. It can’t even fight in Iraq without a bunch of lawyers getting [involved]. And the risk-tolerance level at NASA has gone way down, mainly because they’re not really accomplishing much.” “It’s true,” Lovell added. “The [international] space station right now only has enough people to maintain it, without doing anything positive as far as education or experimentation or anything like that. It can support three people, whose job it is to maintain it.” “You couldn’t even build a Kennedy [Space] Center today anyway,” Borman said, “because of the environmental impact. [The contractors] went down to Florida and cleaned it out and I’m sure killed alligators, and they got it done. Now, you can’t even build over here in Ramona without putting radio collars on rats! It’s nuts!” Today’s NASA, Anders said, faces the biggest impediment of all – a diminished level of public endorsement. “Forty years ago,” he explained, “the farmer in Iowa was willing to put his tax money into beatin’ those dirty Commies. He didn’t really care that much about the money and the science. Now, even if the tax expenditure were adjusted for inflation, we couldn’t go to the moon again because of the congressional view on the budget and the lack of political support.” But in 2004, the Bush administration hawked the idea of a return to the moon, with George himself advocating a lunar landing by 2015. “In my view,” Anders said, “President Bush doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. Somebody’s got him to use the moon as a steppingstone to go on to Mars, if that’s even possible. And he’s not funding it, so to me, it’s a hollow promise. “What we ought to be doing is quietly going back to the moon… not because we’re trying to beat the Chinese or the Indians. We want to go back as human beings, not as Americans, to use whatever the moon can be used for, for radiotelescopes and that kind of thing — not to go back to find helium-3 and a bunch of rocks and all that other stuff.” “The reason we stopped [the moon launches] at [Apollo] 17,” Lovell added, “was people thought the risk was too great. But I think that by going back to the moon, we can reduce the risk as we improve our hardware to get there. We can make it not something that’s momentous but something we expect to do over a period of time.” The Challenger and Columbia disasters. A Martian orbiter that managed to disappear. The messy Lisa Nowak love-triangle case. Last year’s 3.2 percent budget cut by Congress. A massively overexpensive shuttle program. NASA is feeling some real-world effects unheard of a generation ago. And Michael Griffin, its administrator, has responded accordingly. In a Dec. 11 letter Anders furnished to The Beacon, he lauded NASA’s Apollo-era brass for its independence in its project decisions, expressing doubt that today’s political climate would inspire the same commitment level. “I really don’t think,” Griffin wrote, “that NASA’s current leaders, people who in my judgment are every bit as capable as those of the Apollo era, would be allowed by our various [congressional] overseers to make… equivalent decision[s] today. And until and unless we as a nation can again understand why it is necessary that great enterprises be executed in this fashion, I fear for our nation in this tough and competitive world.” Sobering talk from the agency that put men on the moon, undermined Venus’ persistent cloud cover, put two cantankerous little rovers on Mars and in effect charted man’s path to interstellar travel. But Jim Lovell, Frank Borman and Bill Anders are part of history in spite of it all. The world stopped in its tracks amid their Christmas eve readings from The Book of Genesis during lunar orbit; it covets the breathtaking earthrise photos that are forever a part of popular culture. And it chuckles at Borman and Anders’ little flap about the pics’ places in our consciousness. Borman took the first photo, in black and white, with the Earth peeking over the lunar horizon; Anders followed with a color shot of a much more prominent home planet. “That picture I took,” Borman trumpeted, “is one of the most famous in memory.” “Little dark,” Anders quietly shot back. “Little unsteady. You’ll notice mine captures a lot more light and color and vastness, the sheer vastness of space. A lot.” And they’re off. “Wasn’t [Nowak] a Navy astronaut?” Borman quipped, prompting Navy man Lovell to pull an imaginary trigger in Borman’s direction. “I don’t believe in UFOs, and I never saw one in space; that’s a buncha crap,” he churred, again squelching the rumor that he’d run across one during a Gemini flight in 1965. “Frank had to go to marriage counseling before [8],” Anders deadpanned. “I call him Frank, but he can call me ‘sir.’” “Go ahead and call him ‘dipshit,’” Borman snorted, waving dismissively in Anders’ direction. “That’s what we all do.” “Would you record that, please?” Lovell chimed in. Anders just smiled. Sort of.