![]() In the summer of 1987, preparing for my interviews with the Apollo 8 crew, I pored over stacks of NASA documents, including the recently declassified official transcript of the astronauts’ private conversations captured by the onboard voice recorder. Almost two decades later I was sitting down with my childhood heroes, the men who went to the Moon, to hear their lunar experiences firsthand. I did everything I could to feel like I was part of this amazing science-fiction dream coming true. I had my own “mission control” in the den, with models of the spacecraft, maps of the Moon and articles about the flight from Time and Newsweek. On December 24, 1968, I was a 12-year-old space fanatic, glued to the television as Borman, Lovell and Anders sent back live TV pictures from lunar orbit. With the 50th anniversary of Apollo 8 approaching, I can’t think of a better time to share the whole story, which is told on these pages for the first time. Even after my book was published, the controversy continued for another two decades, until a NASA computer wizard confirmed my conclusion beyond all doubt. I found myself challenging NASA’s official version of the event, and landing in the middle of a dispute between the astronauts themselves. I discovered the answer 30 years ago when I was researching my book about the Apollo astronauts, A Man on the Moon. I can’t help but take that question personally. Walter Cronkite used it as a backdrop on the “CBS Evening News.” Wilderness photographer Galen Rowell called it “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken,” and it’s no accident that 16 months after we saw ourselves from the Moon, the first Earth Day took place.īut one question about the Earthrise photo has dogged historians for almost half a century: Who took it? postage stamp, and it adorned the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog. ![]() The following year it was made into a U.S. The picture that came to be known as “Earthrise” offered a precious moment of transcendence after a year of violence and turmoil. ![]() In today’s visually bombarded world it’s hard to imagine the immediate, global impact of that single image. In the following weeks, on newspaper front pages and magazine covers around the world, we suddenly saw ourselves as inhabitants of a lovely and seemingly tranquil planet afloat in the endless void of space. ![]() In December 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders returned from history’s first voyage around the Moon with this stunning image. It’s arguably the most iconic photograph of the 20th century: the Earth rising above the Moon’s bleached and desolate horizon, a breathtaking jewel of color and life more than 230,000 miles away. ![]()
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