William Anders, former astronaut, is holding a photograph he took in space 37 years ago of the Earth rising above the surface of the moon. It’s an image that’s been reproduced millions of times over the last four decades, showing a delicate and lonely planet set against the austere black of space.
“What really made the earthrise [photo],” Anders says, “was not just this beautiful view of Earth out there on its own, but to see it contrasting against this ugly, beat-up, stark, shades-of-gray, foreboding moon surface.”
Anders, now 72, recorded the image during NASA’s Apollo 8 mission in late December 1968, the first flight of human beings beyond the gravitational pull of the Earth and the first to reach and orbit the moon.
“This was at Christmastime, and this” — Anders gestures at the Earth in the photograph — “looks more like a Christmas tree ornament than like a huge lump of granite that you can just kick around willy-nilly. It gave a kick-start to a struggling environmental movement.”
It’s the end of two days of appearances in Chicago for Anders and one of his crewmates, James Lovell, to promote a new documentary on Apollo 8, “Race to the Moon,” to premiere on WTTW and other PBS stations across the nation at 9 p.m. Monday (Frank Borman, the mission commander, canceled his Chicago appearance at the last minute.)
They’ve just finished a morning drive-time conversation with WGN Radio’s Steve Cochran and are talking about the mission in one final interview before Anders catches a plane to his home outside Seattle, and Lovell heads for north suburban Lake Forest where he lives.
It’s somewhat astonishing that the Apollo 8 has faded so much from public consciousness that its crew members have to go out and beat the bushes to drum up interest in this retrospective look at their flight. For months after their trip to the moon, they were worldwide heroes, feted as champions at the United Nations, honored in parades in city after city, and named Men of the Year by Time magazine.
Of all of America’s space flights, Apollo 8 was the most poetic.
In addition to breaking the bonds of Earth and producing the iconic earthrise photo, its three crew members used their Christmas Eve transmission from orbit around the moon to read the opening 10 verses of the Bible to an estimated 1 billion watchers and listeners:
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth . . . “
Yet, the mission is overshadowed today by the 1969 moon landing of Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and by the ill-starred Apollo 13 mission, commanded by Lovell, nearly stranded in the vast emptiness after a spacecraft explosion. Lovell later wrote a book that was the basis for “Apollo 13,” the 1995 film in which Tom Hanks played Lovell.
The blame
“It’s his fault,” Anders says, nodding his head at Lovell. “He did his tear-jerker. People like angst. We didn’t have enough angst.”
Nonetheless, for simple, straightforward dramatic punch, Apollo 8’s reading from Genesis certainly packed a wallop. So much so that science writer Robert Zimmerman titled his 1998 book about the flight “Genesis.”
In his book, Zimmerman writes that, during a preflight news conference, a reporter asked Borman if he was planning “a Christmas-type gesture from space.”
With the informal help of some non-NASA colleagues, the straight-arrow commander decided on those opening words — a fundamental text for three of the world’s great religions. Lovell and Anders agreed.
“Apollo 8 . . . delineated the differences between the Soviet vision of society and the freely religious American system,” Zimmerman writes. “Yuri Gagarin [the Russian cosmonaut who was the first person in space] proclaimed he saw no god in space. Borman, Lovell, and Anders saw Him everywhere, and said so.”
Not exactly, say Lovell and Anders, half a lifetime after the event.
“People often ask me, `Do you see God up there?'” says Lovell, now 77. “I say, `No, because God is down here as well as He is up there.”
“If He’s anywhere,” says Anders, half under his breath.
Asked to elaborate, Anders, a former Air Force general who was raised Catholic, takes a long, long moment to think about his response. Finally, he says:
“There are billions of galaxies, billions and billions of stars, and probably billions and billions of habitable planets. If there’s a God, I think He’d be worried about all the other planets and not be an Earth-centered deity as most religions suggest. So I’ll take no position on whether there’s a God or not — or Gods.
“To me anyway, Apollo suggests that we’re a very tiny part of a very immense thing, and, if there is a God, He’s much more immense than most religions would imply. And He must be awfully fed up with us killing each other.”
Death was always a possibility for the three crew members during the Apollo 8 flight. The mission represented a major gamble for NASA and for the U.S. as a nation.
Last-minute change of plans
Initially, Apollo 8 had been planned as an Earth-orbit flight. But, after the Central Intelligence Agency discovered the Soviet Union was hoping to send cosmonauts on a loop around the moon before the end of 1968, NASA decided instead at virtually the last minute to send the spacecraft to orbit the moon and return.
To get there and back safely would be a tremendous public-relations boon in the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
But the hurry-up schedule, which provided only four months of preparation before launch, risked tragedy.
“This was a national effort to demonstrate U.S. technological pre-eminence,” says Anders. “Had this mission failed, a lot of nations would have drifted off [to the Soviets]. I tell you what this was was a big crossroads. I can imagine [if the flight had ended in tragedy], that maybe the [Berlin] Wall wouldn’t have come down. Who knows what other dominoes would have been affected?”
Didn’t try
As it happened, the Soviets never did try to get to the moon.
“I think what they did was, they figured this flight would not make it, and it would give them the time to test again and make sure they could do the job,” says Lovell. “We did make it, so they decided, `We’ll pretend like we were never planning to go to the moon.'”
Risking their lives, though, was something that came with being an astronaut.
“We were all essentially military officers,” says Anders.
“We were fighter pilots. One way or another, we [had faced] the communists — in Iceland, for me; over the ocean, for Jim. So was a reasonably natural progression, and, in my view, safer than being shot at in Vietnam over a patch of jungle.”
For Borman, Apollo 8 was his third and final space flight. It was also Lovell’s third, and he went up a fourth time in the luckless Apollo 13. For Anders, Apollo 8 was his only time in space.
Yet, as he said on the radio broadcast earlier on this morning, Anders does go out on a clear night and peer skyward at the moon and remember his time there so long ago:
“I look up there and think to myself: It’s a long, long way off.”
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preardon@tribune.com
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The Christmas Eve broadcast from space
On Christmas Eve, 1968, the Apollo 8 astronauts ended their television transmission, heard and seen by an estimated billion people, by reading from the book of Genesis.
Lunar Module Pilot William Anders: “In the beginning, God created the heavens 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.”
Command Module Pilot James Lovell: “And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Commander Frank Borman: “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.”
Then Borman added, “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.”
