Earthrise. Credit: NASA
Watchdog Earth wants to remember a remarkable Christmas Eve phone call, so to speak, from the moon.
Apollo 8 Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders were the first humans to orbit the moon, and they were there 45 years ago tonight. It was 1968 and all hell was breaking out back home on Earth, in a year that saw race riots, a Vietnam war escalation, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy.
I was ten years old and growing up rather sheltered in Saginaw, Mich.
The astronauts held a live broadcast, showing pictures of the what they could see from their spacecraft some 239,000 miles away.
That mission gave us arguably one of the most important photographs in human history — Earthrise. For the first time, we were seeing Earth from space, rising above our moon, a complete transposition of what had been a constant through our entire existence. It was a vivid expression of self-awareness, and an a most powerful illustration of our fragile existence in the cosmos.
“The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth,” NASA recalls Lovell as saying.
As Robert Poole writes in Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth:
‘Up there, it’s a black-and-white world,’ explained James Lovell. ‘There’s no colour. In the whole universe, wherever we looked, the only bit of colour was back on Earth. . . . It was the most beautiful thing there was to see in all the heavens. People down here don’t realize what they have.’ Bill Anders recalled how the moment of Earthrise ‘caught us hardened test pilots’.
Apollo 8 crew members (from left) Jim Lovell, Bill Anders and Frank Borman. Credit: NASA.
Most astoundingly, the broadcast ended with Anders saying: “For all the people on Earth the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you.”
Anders and his crewmates then started reading from Book of Genesis:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
Borman concluded:
And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.
Watch and listen for yourself.
