For all of the millions of years humans and pre-humans had existed, the Earth was always the thing underfoot, the thing all around, the thing that, even from orbit, could never be seen whole, never be reduced to the blue, marbleized Christmas ornament that it is-a tiny, fragile, sphere, suspended in the middle of nothing at all, with a billion billion creatures depending on it for life.Īnd then, during Christmas week 1968, the perspective at last changed. If you’ve never seen the moon up close-never watched it make the transition from a disk in a telescope to an arc of horizon far, far too large to fit in your window-you have no idea how gobsmacked by the experience you soon will be and so you approach it with something of a show-me shrug.īut another fact that history recorded-one vastly more important than the score of a football game-was that it was not the sight of the moon growing in the astronaut’s window that struck people most, but the sight of the Earth shrinking. That the men in space and on the ground could chatter so idly was a mark of both their surpassing cool-temperamental types washed out long before they ever saw the inside of a spacecraft or a console in Mission Control-and of the fact that the sheer, improbable novelty of what they were doing made it almost impossible to react any other way. “Mighty nice view from out here,” Borman said peacefully. (History records that he was right: the Colts beat the Vikings 24 to 14.) David Eisenhower and Julie Nixon were married yesterday in New York he was described as ‘nervous.’ The Browns took Dallas apart yesterday 31 to 20, and we’re sort of curious: Who do you like today, Baltimore or Minnesota?” In other news, eleven GIs that have been detained five months in Cambodia were released yesterday and will make it home for Christmas. “The flight to the moon is occupying prime space on both newspaper and television. 3, 1969 issue, showing Men of the Year Apollo 8 astronauts William A. “I’ve got a newspaper to read up to you.” “Let me know when it gets to be breakfast time,” said the Capsule Communicator (Capcom) in Mission Control.
(167,000 km) from home, Houston radioed up with the day’s headlines.
Until the critical moment when they’d fire their engine to ease themselves into lunar orbit, they had comparatively little to do, and so, on the morning of Dec. Finally, 80% of the way to the moon, lunar gravity would take over, speeding them up and pulling them in. For a trip that began with nothing short of an act of chemical violence-7.5 million lbs (3.4 million kg) of thrust exploding out of the bottom of a 36-story rocket, accelerating the crew to an escape velocity of 25,000 mph (40,000 k/h)-the actual moonward coast was a rather lazy thing.įor three days, the astronauts would drift away from the planet, their speed steadily slowing as the Earth tugged inexorably back on them. The entire planet was a mess-southeast Asia was in flames, Czechoslovakia was living under a Soviet crackdown, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been murdered and cities across the country had been torn by rioting.Īs it happened, three men out of the 3.5 billion human beings then at large did have the chance to get out of Dodge, and so, on the morning of December 21, the crew of Apollo 8-Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders-climbed atop their Saturn V rocket and set out for humanity’s first manned mission to orbit the moon. If you had your druthers during Christmas week 1968, you’d have wanted to get as far away from Earth as possible.
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