The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

Gliding beneath them was a ravaged, fractured, tortured panorama that had been previously glimpsed by robot probes but never before by the human eye. Ranging out in all directions was an endless, lovely-ugly expanse of hundreds – no, thousands; no, tens of thousands – of craters, pits, and gouges that dated back hundreds – no, thousands; no, millions – of millennia. There were craters next to craters, craters overlapping craters, craters obliterating craters. There were craters the size of football fields, craters the size of large islands, craters the size of small nations.

Many of the ancient pits had been catalogued and named by astronomers who first analyzed the pictures sent back from probes, and after months of study these had become as familiar to the astronauts as earthly landmarks. There were the craters Daedalus and Icarus, Korolev and Gagarin, Pasteur and Einstein and Tsiolkovsky. Scattered about the terrain were also dozens of other craters that had never been seen by human or robot. The spellbound astronauts did what they could to take this all in, pressing their faces against their five tiny windows and, for the moment at least, forgetting altogether the flight plan or the mission or the hundreds of people in Houston waiting to hear their voices.

From over the advancing horizon, something wispy started to appear. It was subtly white and subtly blue and subtly brown, and it seemed to be cliimbing straght up from the drab terrain. The three astronauts knew at once what they were seeing, but Borman identified it anyway.

“Earthrise,” the commander said quietly.

“Get the cameras,” Lovell said quickly to Anders.

“Are you sure?” asked Anders, the mission’s photographer and cartographer. “Shouldn’t we wait for scheduled photography times?”

Lovell gazed at the shimmery planet floating up over the scarred, pocked moon; then looked at his junior crewmate.

“Get the cameras,” he repeated.

On Christmas Day Lovell had arranged to have a gift delivered to his wife while Apollo 8 was in lunar orbit. The gift card read “Merry Christmas from the Man in the Moon”.

The crew had broadcast from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. Lovell:

“What you’re seeing,” said Anders as he steadied the camera and braced his buoyant body against the bulkhead of the ship, “is a view of the Earth above the lunar horizon. We’re going to follow along for a while and then turn around and give you a view of the long, shadowed terrain.”

“We’ve been orbiting at sixty miles for the last sixteen hours,” Borman said while Anders pointed the lens downward at the surface, “conducting experiments, taking pictures, and firing our spacecraft engine to maneuver around. And over the hours, the moon has become a different thing for each one of us. My own impression is that it is a vast lonely, forbidding expanse of nothing that looks rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone. It certainly would not be a very inviting place to live or work.”

“Frank, my thoughts are similar,” Lovell said. “The loneliness up here is awe inspiring. It makes you realize just what you have back on Earth. The Earth from here is an oasis in the vastness of space.”

“The thing that impressed me the most,” Anders took over, “was the lunar sunrises and sunsets. The sky is pitch black, the moon is quite light, and the contrast between the two is a vivid line.”

“Actually,” Lovell added, “the best way to describe the whole area is an expanse of black and white. Absolutely no color.”

The flight plan called for the broadcast to last twenty-four minutes, during which time the ship would glide across the lunar equator from east to west, covering about 72 degrees of its 36 degree orbit. The astronauts were to take this time to explain and describe, point and instruct, and try to convey through words and grainy pictures what they were seeing.

On Christmas Eve they finished their broadcast by filming through the window and reading from a prepared script. Anders said:

“‘We are now approaching the lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send to you.

“In the beginning,” he began, “God created the Heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Anders read slowly for four lines, then passed the paper on to Lovell.

“And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.” Lovell read four lines of his own and handed the paper to Borman.