The Apollo 8 mission took place fifty years ago. It carried the first humans to the Moon and into lunar orbit.
The famous “Earthrise” photo from Apollo 8 captured by Anders. Image credit: NASA
Three brave men
Fifty years ago, the first manned flight went into orbit around the Moon. Yes, on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1968, three astronauts became the first humans to go into orbit around the Moon.
Left to right: Lovell, Anders, Borman. Image credit: Wikimedia commons
The flight was commanded by Frank Bormann—on his second and last flight. The Command Module Pilot was James Lovell—on his third flight, with another later on the ill-fated Apollo 13. The Lunar Module Pilot was William Anders—on his only flight.
Apollo 8, powered by its newly-redesigned Saturn V rocket, was launched on 21 December 1968. The mission was originally planned to be the second crewed Apollo Lunar Module and command module test, to be flown in an elliptical medium Earth orbit in early 1969. But the plans were radically altered when it was decided the Lunar Module was not ready for flight. So in August, the bold decision was made to send the crew all the way to the moon. The imperative was to reach the Moon before the end of the year, before the Russians.
The Apollo 8 mission is regarded as NASA's boldest and perhaps its most dangerous mission. The risks were overwhelming. Strapping three men atop a monstrous Saturn V for the first time—and sending them all the way to the Moon. What could go wrong?
It wasn't all plain sailing. Eighteen hours into the journey to the Moon, Borman fell ill with vomiting and diarrhoea. But after getting some sleep he felt somewhat better so NASA gave the go-ahead for the mission to continue.
Around the moon
NASA was keenly aware of how bad it would look for things to wrong over Christmas. So they wanted to get there and back as soon as possible. The decided that ten orbits would be enough.
Placing the Apollo spacecraft in lunar orbit was not easy. Since the right spot to fire the engine was behind the Moon and thus out of Earth contact, this manoeuvre had to be done manually. The crew executed it perfectly.
The three astronauts were the first human beings—in the whole history of humankind—to see the dark side of the Moon.
In a public broadcast, Borman called the moon a “vast, lonely, forbidding type of existence,” while Lovell paid tribute to the Earth's “grand ovation to the vastness of space.” The crew then took turns to read a passage from Genesis, the first book of the Bible.
Discovering the Earth
On their fourth lap around the Moon, Anders pointed out the Earth rising from the Moon's surface. “Oh my God, look at that picture over there!” Anders said. “There's the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!”
The photograph he took of that scene remains one of the most iconic images in history. It's not that it was planned; the only planned photos were of potential landing sites for future missions.
“We came to explore the moon and what we discovered was the Earth,” Anders is fond of saying.
His Earthrise photo, capturing the planet's exquisite, but fragile beauty, became a rallying point for the entire environmental movement of today. It is the great legacy of the mission, forever underscoring the absence of political borders as seen from space.
The Earth from Apollo 8. Image public domain
Lovell remains awestruck by the fact he could hide all of Earth behind his thumb. “Over 3 billion people, mountains, oceans, deserts, everything I ever knew was behind my thumb,” he recently recalled.
It reminds me of the Leonard Cohen line, “We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky.”
And as Anders has often wondered: “This is not a very big place, why can't we get along?”
A Merry Christmas
On Christmas morning, the spacecraft went on its final orbit around the Moon. Once again, the tricky procedure of firing the rocket to head it back to Earth had to be done out of communication with Mission Control. The silence—and considerable tension—was broken by Lovell's voice saying “Please be informed there is a Santa Claus.”
The Apollo 8 crew is still around: Borman and Lovell are 90, Anders is 85. Merry Christmas to those heroes.
References:
ABC ActionNews: 50 year anniversary of Apollo 8, NASA's 1st flight to the moon
Lunar and Planetary Institute: Apollo 8 Mission
Space.com: Apollo 8: First Around the Moon
Wikipedia: Apollo 8
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