Apollo 8 Astronauts Reflect on Historic Moon Voyage 50 Years Later

Most years have at least a little -something going for them, but 1968 was awful from the start. On just the 23rd day, North Korea seized the U.S.S. Pueblo, killing one sailor and holding the rest prisoner; on the 30th day, the start of the Vietnamese holiday of Tet, the Viet Cong launched a massive military offensive that cost more than 35,000 lives on both sides; on the 95th day, the Rev. Martin Luther King was murdered; on the 157th day, Senator Bobby Kennedy’s murder followed; on the 233rd day, Soviet army tanks crashed into Czechoslovakia; on the 241st day, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago descended into violence. The year was shaped—and soaked in—the blood that was shed. And then, on the 359th day, there was -poetry. Three days earlier, the crew of Apollo 8—Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders—had rocketed away from the mess at home and ventured out to the moon, becoming the first human beings to reach and orbit our closest celestial neighbor. They arrived, as history would have it, on Christmas Eve. During the eighth of their 10 orbits, they pointed a TV camera out of one of their five windows and showed a global audience of 1 billion—nearly one of every three people alive—the grainy, flickery but undeniably otherworldly sight of the ancient lunar surface crawling by below their spacecraft. As that image played, Anders began reading: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth,” and then...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized onetime space Source Type: news