The Only Life We've Got

Update: a version of this was on the Recommended list at Daily Kos. It was the third most recommended diary of the day.
It was exactly forty years ago, on Christmas Eve of 1968, when millions of Americans watched a television show live from the Moon. Three U.S. astronauts—Bill Anders, Frank Borman and James Lovell were the first humans to go beyond Earth orbit and escape Earth’s gravitational influence, to circle another world.

They described the oppressive gray emptiness of the Moon’s surface below them, as viewers saw slowly rolling gray video images of what they were talking about. Then the astronauts read the first ten verses of the Book of Genesis, and sent holiday greetings to the people of “the good Earth.” More U.S. viewers watched this broadcast than any TV program of any kind before, and eventually an estimated one fourth of the world’s population saw it.

But the event of December 24, 1968 with the most lasting impact happened when no one was watching—when the astronauts were cut off from communication on the dark side of the Moon. They had been concentrating on the lunar surface, when Frank Borman caught a glimpse of color on the gray horizon, a conspicuous glow of blue and white against the black sky. It was the Earth. While he excitedly snapped photos in black and white, Bill Anders loaded his camera with color film, and got the shot that became historic. We know it as “Earthrise.”

According to Robert Poole’s fascinating new book, Earthrise: How We First Saw Ourselves (Yale University Press), the idea of photographing the Earth was foreign to NASA’s ethos and sense of the Apollo mission. NASA wasn’t interested in where the astronauts were coming from but in where were going: into space, to the Moon. Only the stubbornness of a few individuals, especially Apollo’s photography chief, Richard Underwood (who emerges as something of a hero in Poole’s book) led to the photos we do have.

The engineers and mission planners snubbed earth photos as “touristy snap shots,” and astronauts often didn’t see the point of them. Until they got out there. Then, as several admitted, seeing their home planet whole became the most memorable aspect of the voyage. In fact it was the Earth that made the impression from the start. “How beautiful our Earth is!” exclaimed Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space.


But it was the Earthrise photo that became a spectacularly popular image—splashed across magazine pages, and posterized for posterity and dorm room walls. Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders later suggested that it caused people to “realize that we’re all jammed together on one really kind of dinky little planet, and we better treat it and ourselves better, or we’re not going to be here very long.”
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