During the Apollo program, to prepare for Apollo 11’s descent to the Moon, NASA organized several preliminary missions to test the docking between the service module and lander, to test extravehicular activities, and much more. One of these missions was Apollo 8, the first to reach lunar orbit.
The three astronauts on board, Frank F. Borman II, James A. Lovell Jr. and William A. Anders were the first three men to leave the Earth’s gravitational sphere, the first three to reach lunar orbit and the first three humans to see another celestial body up close. Today, June 8, it was announced that William Anders passed away. James A. Lovell now remains the only one of the three Apollo 8 astronauts still alive.
William Anders died in a plane crash when the plane he was piloting crashed near the San Juan Islands, Washington state. The plane, a Beech A45, sank in the sea, with only the astronaut on board. He was 90 years old.
Earth’s Dawn by William Anders
On board the Apollo 8 mission, William Anders was the astronaut who took one of the most important photos of the entire Apollo program, and he did it during the first lunar mission. The “Earthrise” image has also become one of the most iconic photographs ever taken from space.
It was taken on December 24, 1968 and shows the Earth rising above the lunar horizon. Anders gave the world an image that changed humanity’s perception of their place in the universe. The sight of the fragile and beautiful Earth suspended in the void of space, with the lunar soil in the foreground, had a profound impact on the global consciousness of the 1960s and 1970s.
Earthrise fueled environmental movements and influenced the philosophical and scientific thinking of the time. This photo remains a powerful symbol of the connection between Earth and space, and of the human capacity for exploration and discovery, and will outlast not only William Anders, but all of us.
Apollo 8
The Apollo 8 mission, launched on December 21, 1968, represented a significant technological and engineering advancement in space exploration. For the first time, the Saturn V demonstrated that it could launch humans beyond Earth’s orbit safely first and foremost. Furthermore, the environmental control, navigation and deep space propulsion systems of the Command and Service Module (CSM) were validated.
The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) managed the flight paths and navigation operations, using the inertial guidance system to precisely track the orientation of the vehicle and the Unified S-Band (USB) system combined telemetry, command remote, voice communication and video transmission, ensuring communications with Earth. All this had never been done.
Furthermore, for the first time, an atmospheric re-entry was carried out returning from the Moon, while there were astronauts on board the capsule. This demonstrated the reliability of the Apollo capsule’s heat shield. All these operations performed for the first time made the Apollo 8 mission perhaps one of the riskiest and most ambitious of the Apollo program, probably surpassed only by Apollo 11.
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