Apollo 8 by Martin W. Sandler

Author:Martin W. Sandler [Sandler, Martin W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781536203998
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2018-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

Anders would always remember that “when I looked up and saw the Earth coming up on this very stark, beat-up lunar horizon, an Earth that was the only color that we could see, a very fragile-looking Earth, a very delicate-looking Earth, I was immediately almost overcome by the thought that here we came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our home planet, the Earth.”

Lovell had a different reaction to the Earthrise. “We came around the moon . . . and all of a sudden we saw the earth come out of a lunar horizon; and that was really a significant sight for me because I could put my thumb up to the window of the spacecraft and completely hide the earth. I realized that everything I had ever known, my home, my loved ones, everything that was there that I had known about is behind my thumb. I realized at that time just how insignificant we are in the universe.”

In 1948, a full twenty years before Apollo 8, British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle predicted that “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available . . . a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.” Hoyle’s remarkable prediction began to come true soon after Apollo 8 returned to Earth, as Anders’s photograph, which had been titled Earthrise, came to symbolize the lessons learned from human beings’ first voyage to another world. The Apollo 8 astronauts had indeed taken a picture that would forever change our image of our planet and ourselves.

“Look again at that dot,” noted astrophysicist and author Carl Sagan would write. “That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

To many, like Lovell, the Earthrise photograph became a symbol of the Earth’s fragility, a reminder of just how small and insignificant the Earth’s place in the universe truly is. Walter Cronkite found this a great lesson to be learned. “I think that picture of the earthrise of the moon’s horizon, that blue disk out there in space, floating alone in the darkness, the utter black of space, had the effect of impressing on all of us our loneliness out here,” he reflected. “The fact that we seem to be the only spot where anything like humans could be living. And . . . the major impression I think it made

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.