The year 1968 was by any measure a bad one for America. Two of our nation’s leaders were assassinated—Senator Robert Kennedy and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Following King’s murder, riots swept across the nation’s biggest cities, with the National Guard deployed to bring them to an end. The war in Vietnam continued to escalate, as did protests and civil unrest across the nation to end it.
The event that saved 1968 from an endless barrage of bad news was a journey that propelled three men nearly a quarter-million miles from Earth. That journey to space and the iconic photograph that would define it, “Earthrise,” provided a moment of national pride and unity. But it did something even deeper, inspiring a sense of unity—and even awe and transcendence—in a country desperately in need of all three.
How did one of history’s most iconic photographs come to be? Ironically, the very forces that impelled America to send troops to Southeast Asia—and drive a wedge in America’s social and political landscape—propelled us into space: our battle with the Soviet Union.
It wasn’t Earth Day activists or peaceniks that inspired the photo, though both would claim the picture as symbols of their movements (as did modern climate change activists). It was born out of an epic struggle over competing visions of how human beings should govern and organize themselves. A worldwide competition between communism and our constitutional Republic. Between collectivism and capitalism. Between Karl Marx’s vision and the vision of America’s Founding Fathers.
Photo by © CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images
Our nation’s race to space was set in motion when President John F. Kennedy commanded NASA to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, and before the Soviet Union. By 1968, America was losing that race, perpetually a step behind the Russian space program. The Apollo 8 mission—thanks to some aggressive updates and flight alterations—finally put America in the lead. A lead we would never relinquish.
The Apollo 8 mission produced many firsts: the first to take humans to the moon and back, the first to orbit the moon, and the first to have live TV coverage from deep space. It was also the first mission to have pictures taken by humans deep in space. One picture would become the symbol of that race: “Earthrise.”
The Apollo 8 crew hurtled into space on December 21 on a Saturn V rocket that stood more than 360 feet tall (the same height as a 36-story building), propelled by the nearly 160,000,000 horsepower produced by its five F-1 engines, reaching the moon in a mere three days, Christmas Eve day. Once the spacecraft entered lunar orbit, it made 10 complete orbits before returning home.
It was on the fourth pass that Apollo 8’s crew—Bill Anders, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell—witnessed what would come to be known as an “Earthrise” for the first time.
“So we were in lunar orbit upside down and going backwards, so for the first several revolutions we didn’t see the Earth, and didn’t really think about that,” Anders recalled in an interview with NASA years later. “And then we righted ourselves heads-up and twisted the spacecraft so it was going forward, and while Borman was in the process of doing that, suddenly I saw in the corner of my eye this color and it was shocking.”
The banter between the Apollo 8 crew members was captured for the world to hear. “Oh my God! Look at that picture over there, it’s the Earth coming up! Wow, that’s pretty!” Anders said to his crewmates as he hurried to replace the black and white film in his Hasselblad 500 EL camera with color film.
“I put the long lens on and started snapping away,” Anders continued. “I just took the f-stop and just took a shot and then moved it, took a shot and then moved it and then we really didn’t think that much about it.”
That evening, Americans and the world—nearly a billion people—watched in awe as America’s intrepid space explorers broadcast a live TV Christmas Eve message from space. What could they say after seeing what they’d just seen?
“We are now approaching lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send to you,” Anders began. Anders then read the first verses of Genesis, with Borman and Lovell to follow—10 verses total. It would become, instantly, the largest mass-televised Bible reading in world history.
Days later, the negatives from the photo session splashed safely into the Pacific Ocean along with the crew. The photos were developed within days. Soon thereafter, the world would see what the astronauts had seen from their capsule: “Earthrise” in all its glory.
Life magazine’s year in review—published in January 1969—put “Earthrise” on its cover and printed the photo on a double-page spread alongside a poem by U.S. poet laureate James Dickey: And behold / The blue planet steeped in its dream / Of reality, its calculated vision shaking with the only love.
Five decades later, Lovell recalled the impact Apollo 8 had on him during a speech celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apollo 8.
“Seeing the world from 240,000 miles, my world suddenly expanded to infinity,” Lovell said. “I put my thumb up to the window and it completely hid the Earth.
“How did I fit in what I saw? In my mind, the answer was clear. God gave man a stage upon which to perform. The rest was up to us.”
Millions of Americans thought similar thoughts about that photo. About God’s magnificent design. God’s beautiful and perfect creation.
Lovell then closed things out with these final words about the mission, and the iconic photo that embodied it.
“It was the American public that received the greatest gift,” he said. “After a year of controversary, Apollo 8 gave them a reason to be American. The flight of Apollo 8 can best be expressed by a telegram received by the crew. It only said: “Thanks, you saved 1968.”