Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon by Craig Nelson

Author:Craig Nelson [Nelson, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Astronautics
ISBN: 0670021032
Publisher: Viking Adult
Published: 2015-05-21T16:00:00+00:00

Bill Anders remembered that riding on Apollo 8 “was like being on the inside of a submarine.” Jim Lovell said of being one of the first three humans to see the far side of the Moon: “We were like three schoolkids looking through the candy store window. I think we forgot the flight plan! We had our noses pressed against the glass, looking at those craters go by. It is really an amazing sight, an amazing sight.”

Frank Borman was amazed by a different landscape: “It was the most awe-inspiring moment of the flight when we looked up and there coming over the lunar horizon was the earth. It was the only object in the universe that had any color to it, basically blue with white clouds, and everything that we held dear was back there. A long way away.” Bill Anders agreed: “It was almost as if we were discovering the earth for the first time.” When Anders then joked to his rigid commander, “Hey, don’t take that [picture], it’s not scheduled,” Borman laughed, grabbed the Hasselblad, and turned it over to Anders, who in two shots caught the famous image of a blue-marble Earth rising over a desert moon that graced the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog and 188,380,000 U.S. postage stamps.

As would be true for all of Apollo, traveling 240,000 miles away gave the 8’s crew a perspective on their own spaceship. “After all of the preparation, after the split-second planning of everything on the mission, the big surprise waiting for them at the other end was not about the Moon, it was about seeing our home planet as a very tiny, very precious oasis of life and color in the blackness of space,” historian Andrew Chaikin remarked.

A few weeks before liftoff, a NASA official had mentioned to Borman that, when the spacecraft was in orbit on Christmas Eve, “More people will be listening to your voice than that of any man in history. So we want you to say something appropriate.” On the night of December 24, 1968, the TV camera installed in Apollo 8’s window broadcast images of a barren, lifeless, and crater-pocked Moon, while behind it rose a living planet of blue seas, brown lands, and white atmospheres. Bill Anders opened the flight manual to the back, where something had been printed up on fireproof paper. He began: “For all the people on Earth the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you.

“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.”

Jim Lovell: “And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

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