This is where we live. In space. On a marble fortified against bottomless blackness by a shell of air and color, fragile and miraculous as a soap bubble.
In 1968, we Earthlings knew that already, sort of. But that abstract notion became visceral on Christmas Eve of that year. While scouting landing spots on the moon, the astronauts of Apollo 8 — Frank Borman, William A. Anders and James A. Lovell, Jr. — spied the shiny blue Earth rising over the ash-colored lunar mountains like a cosmic smiley face. That image, transmitted from space, went on to capture the imagination of the world: Earthrise.
Major Anders had the job of photographing the lunar landscape. When Earth rose, a robot would have kept on clicking off pictures of the craters. Indeed the astronauts briefly joked about whether they should break off and aim their cameras up. “Hey don’t take that, it’s not scheduled,” Commander Borman said. Then, like good humans, they grabbed cameras and clicked away.
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Earthrise: 50 Years Since Apollo 8
On Christmas Eve, 1968, astronauts orbiting the moon saw Earth rising for the first time.
Fifty years ago, the mightiest rocket ever built rolled out to its launch pad at Cape Kennedy. On the 21st of December, 1968, three men climbed on board for the first voyage to the moon. Before Apollo 8, no human had ever left Earth orbit. Frank Borman, James Lovell Jr. and William Anders became the first men to see the whole Earth from space. They send back grainy footage of Earth to televisions back home. “This transmission is coming to you approximately halfway between the moon and the Earth.” In the first broadcast, the Earth was a ghostly sphere, devoid of detail. But in their second transmission, a recognizable Earth wreathed in clouds drifted in and out of view. Their mission was to fly a figure 8 pattern out to the moon, orbit it 10 times and return safely home. But safety and success were not certain. Russian tortoises had survived a flight around the moon and back only three months before, and cosmonauts were rumored to be next. The astronauts worked hard and slept little. And on Christmas Eve, they arrived at the moon. They had only 10 orbits, about 20 hours, to photograph the moon and scout future landing sites. For its first three orbits, the spacecraft was flying backward with its windows angled down toward the surface. On the fourth orbit, Borman rolled the capsule to face forward, just as Earth was rising over the horizon. Anders: “Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” Borman: “Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.” [chuckles] Anders snapped the first image of Earth taken by humans at the moon. But it was black and white. Anders: “You got a color film, Jim? Hand me a roll of color, quick ...” Lovell: “Oh man, that’s great! Where is it?” Anders: “Quick!” Earthrise. Seen for the first time by human eyes. Earthrise wasn’t the first image of Earth from the moon. NASA’s Lunar Orbiter I turned to watch the Earth set in 1966. A year later, Lunar Orbiter IV caught the double crescent of the moon and the distant Earth. Of all these images, Earthrise is by far the most famous. It took a human behind the camera for humanity to see our world again and know it for the first time. Other Earthrises would follow, as men returned to orbit and walk on the moon. Lovell: “The vast loneliness up here of the moon is awe inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth. The Earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space.” A few hours after Earthrise, the Apollo 8 crew ended a Christmas Eve broadcast by reading from Genesis. Borman: “... 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.” The Apollo 8 astronauts didn’t yet know that their greatest legacy would be a photograph. The round Earth and its thin film of life, suspended in the blackness of space. Like them, we have seen Spaceship Earth. And 50 years later we are still learning to fly and preserve it.
“Earthrise” did not start environmentalism, but it became the movement’s icon, a gift of perspective at the end of a long, dark year. If you were young, 1968 was the best of times and the worst of times. The Beatles were still together, and “Star Trek” was on TV. You could get high and watch “2001: A Space Odyssey” at the movies. These cultural facets were products of a decade when technological optimism had reigned: you could wage war against communists in Southeast Asia and against poverty and discrimination at home, and conquer space on the side.
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But by the end of the decade, pessimism was ascendant. There was no peace or end in sight in Vietnam, nor on the streets at home, roiling with protests, assassinations and riots. In space, the United States trailed the Soviet Union in a peaceful but symbolic technological competition.