Apollo 8: First night of the Apollo 8 mission. Frank Borman can’t sleep. After two hours of coughing, he takes a sleeping pill. Two hours later, he wakes up having convulsions with diarrhea and vomiting. It’s space sickness (and therefore not contagious), but the doctors on the ground fear a virus that could incapacitate the entire crew. Then there’s another problem: on Earth, that stuff ends up on the ground, while at zero-g, it stays in the air, and even when everything is cleaned, you can’t open the windows to let in air… After this initial scare, Frank Borman actually turns out to be an excellent mission leader for the crew.
