Earthrise: Behind the Lens

Brian Balogh: In 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders became the first people to orbit the moon. As they came around the moon for the third time, they caught a glimpse of the Earth rising over the lunar surface. One of them snapped a photo.

Nathan Connolly: In that image, the Earth is a swirling ball of blue and white, a jewel against the darkness of space. The photo became known as Earthrise, and it was reproduced across the globe in magazines like Life and Time.

Brian Balogh: Several years ago, I talked to William Anders, the Apollo 8 astronaut who captured the iconic image. I asked him about his historic lunar flight.

William Anders: Well, we were doing our job. We were fighter pilots, test pilots, and so this was all just our line of work. But to see the back side of the moon, front side up close, was all very exciting, but really in retrospect, the most exciting part was to see the Earth from a lunar perspective.

Brian Balogh: Were you surprised when the Earth just popped up in your window?

William Anders: Yes, I was. Because we were going backwards, looking down at the moon from the direction we came, that’s all we saw was the moon. It wasn’t until we reoriented the spacecraft, turned it around and faced it forward that we were able to see the Earth coming up over the lunar horizon. I called it out. I think everybody saw it about the same time. There was a scramble for cameras. I was sort of the official photographer of the flight, though I’d had essentially no training.

Brian Balogh: Why were you the official photographer?

William Anders: I don’t know. Just somebody made me the official photographer.

Brian Balogh: If you can, try to recall that first moment what you were thinking about when you looked back at the Earth.

William Anders: Well, the first moment I looked back at the Earth was going to the moon and see it shrinking as we moved away. As a matter of fact, from a lunar distance, the Earth is about the size of your fist at arm’s length, not big. So that impressed me almost immediately that our planet physically was really insignificant. But that even though it wasn’t physically significant, it was our home and therefore important to us, and we ought to learn to treat it better.

Brian Balogh: Bill, you know NASA records everything and fortunately we’re able to listen to the tape from the very moment that you and your two colleagues saw the Earth rising. We can ID you because you’re the guy asking for the colored film. I’m going to play it for you now.

William Anders: Go ahead.

William Anders: Oh my God. Look at that picture over there. There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty.

Frank Borman: Don’t take that. It’s not scheduled.

William Anders: You got a colored film, Jim? Hand me a roll of colored quick, will you?

Jim Lovell: Oh man. That’s great.

William Anders: Quick. Quick.

Jim Lovell: Down here?

William Anders: Just grab me a color.

Brian Balogh: Listening to that tape I think I detected a little bit of edge creeping into your voice, especially when you were asking for that colored film. Am I right about that?

William Anders: Well, Borman was very focused on doing our mission, which was to test out these space vehicles. I’d been assigned the job of photographing the lunar surface. The Earth was not in the flight plan at all. You might wonder why. I have, but never come up with a good answer, except we just didn’t think about it or NASA didn’t think about it. But I knew basically where the film was, so once we started taking pictures of the Earth, I just wanted to get on with it. I think I blazed a shot off with the camera I had in my hand at the time, but then managed to get Lovell or somebody to pass me a magazine of color film and slapped on the long lens and started blazing away.

Brian Balogh: You made a lot of effort to bring and then grab that color film. Why was color film so important to you?

William Anders: Well, the Earth is colorful. Black and white may be good for technical analysis. Certainly the moon you didn’t need color film. I was challenged by others, “Why take color film when the moon isn’t colorful?” But luckily we had it, and that’s what I wanted to take a picture of this beautiful and colorful planet we live on. Fortunately for me, the people down in the photo lab picked this one color one that I took that has become the iconic Earthrise picture. What I find is ironic that I just learned here recently that the Earthrise was printed upside down. In other words, they flipped it. I’ve always wondered why I couldn’t figure out the continents.

William Anders: I guess if you look at the negative through the back, you can figure it out. But I thought that was ironic because this thing’s been replicated a billion times probably, on stamps and other things.

Brian Balogh: At the time that you took this series of photographs, did you have any idea about the kind of impact it would have upon your return?

William Anders: No. Frankly, I did not. I was just out there doing my job. Here was a new target and that’s why I told Lovell, “Don’t worry. This may be the first Earthrise, but they’ll be hopefully eight more in our orbit. So we can get a good one later.” I think we probably did take some later, but of course it was the first Earthrise that had all the historic significance.

Brian Balogh: Yes. In fact, you said quite famously that, “We came all this way to discover the moon and what we really did discover is Earth.”

William Anders: Well, that didn’t take long to realize that the moon had been pulverized by meteoritic bombardment through the eons. It was just a big mess. I described it as dirty beach sand where a lot of people’d been walking in the sand and having barbecues there and getting charcoal spread around. I caught a lot of heck from poets on that one. Here was our home planet looking beautiful, serene, delicate, looking peaceful. There was no country divisions. It was sort of weird to think that, well, on one side of it people are trying to kill folks on the other side of it. Why don’t we try to get together?

Brian Balogh: Did seeing the Earth from the moon change any of your political views?

William Anders: Well, yes. I must say, it made me realize that the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe and that religions and things like that who were based on Earth being particularly special had a certain flaw in them. I have yet to fully square that, but there’s a heck of a lot more Earths out there than even a supercomputer can keep track of.

Brian Balogh: Expectations were so high in the 1960s for what might come of the space program in general, the Apollo missions. How do you assess what we’ve accomplished and where have we fallen short?

William Anders: Well, I think people have lost track and NASA has not faced up to the fact that Apollo was a Cold War policy by Kennedy. It’s been coded, given it a patina of exploration, but that really wasn’t what the American taxpayers were paying for. They were paying to beat those dirty commies. When the flag went into the moon, thanks to Neil and Buzz, that basically satisfied the objective of what Apollo was all about. Now, of course, it became a jobs program for NASA after that. So that, plus everybody’s excitement about the exploration phase of it that there was, propelled NASA to keep going.

William Anders: We would have had 30 lunar landings if Nixon and others hadn’t pulled them up short. I think the lesson that I’ve learned from that is admit what your real goal is and why, and don’t try to kid yourself that just because you’ve made one objective that has been supported by the public, that you therefore are destined to and will be funded for making some other destination.

Brian Balogh: Bill, if you could visit one place on Earth or beyond that you haven’t been to yet where would it be?

William Anders: Well, if I wasn’t paying for it-

Brian Balogh: You’re not paying for it. BackStory has a huge travel budget. You name the place.

William Anders: I don’t think it would be worth it to everybody else. I’d have voted for Apollo 35 if I could have landed. But from a responsible, by that time working in Washington, policymaker I just didn’t think it was worth it. Eventually humankind will go to Mars. I think the talk that we hear lately from the enthusiasts is massively premature. We don’t have the equipment. We don’t know how to solve the radiation problem. Zero G for that amount of time is tough. I hope that the talk of going here in five years or something like that doesn’t eventually turn people off. But sooner or later, earthlings will go to Mars, and I hope they do it as earthlings, not jingoist Americans trying to beat the Chinese, trying to beat the Russians, to beat the Cubans.

Brian Balogh: Thanks so much for joining us.

William Anders: Thanks, and keep up the good work.

Brian Balogh: Apollo 8 astronaut, William Anders, is a retired major general in the United States Air Force.

Brian Balogh: So Nathan, where were you when the first men landed on the moon?

Nathan Connolly: I was about nine years before being born actually, Brian.

Brian Balogh: I remember very vividly not only the moon landing, but the buildup to it, the first suborbital flights, the first orbital flights. We’d be sitting in class in school and the public address system would come on. They’d follow the very brief space flights initially or portions of them on the public address system in school. Now, you know that’s important. Did they still have a public address system when you went to school?

Nathan Connolly: They did actually. One of my earliest memories of that system was watching a liftoff, but it wasn’t of a walk on the moon at that time. It was actually the Challenger disaster, as a child, because we were so captivated as kids in schools. The magic of that moment where we had a teacher in this case going into space. It was an extraordinary moment and a sad chapter of American history. The tragedy of America’s space program was something that was piped right into the schools.

Nathan Connolly: In a lot of ways, my youth has a kind of connection in fits and starts with exactly this question about what is a priority around space and also really the Cold War spending stuff that the space race helps to initiate. I mean I remember in January of 1987 being part of a mass march that my mom dragged me along to as part of the waning nuclear freeze movement at that time. The group was marching on then Cape Canaveral. But I do remember in a lot of ways the concerns about uses of government resources being very much what was on the table for a lot of the folks in the crowd at that time.

Brian Balogh: That’s so interesting because we know that I’m significantly older than you. There was a lot of discussion about the uses of that technology when I was 10 years old, but it was all about the wonderful things that were going to spring forth from NASA. And of course, we were focused on things like Tang that, am I allowed to say, horrible-tasting orange juice substitute. You know, Nathan, we’re both from Florida. Only the real thing matters. But that Tang was just it tasted terrible, but it swept the nation in part because supposedly it’s what the astronauts drank.

Brian Balogh: The next thing I remember being associated with NASA was VELCRO. I mean how could you do anything today without VELCRO? Well, we owe that to NASA. It turns out that, in fact, NASA was just instrumental in the development of computers. It was the major purchaser for the components of computers. It was directly responsible for developing key parts of computering, from the mouse to miniature cameras that today we all carry around in our cell phones. So yeah, NASA was more than space, but let’s code this all good stuff, helping, solving problems. It was going to help with desalination. It was going to even solve urban problems with its technology.

Nathan Connolly: Yeah. I mean the magic of whatever humanity’s next chapter was was going to be found in space. That was certainly fed by popular culture. But it was also responded to and rebutted in popular culture. I mean you think of somebody like Gil Scott-Heron who in 1970 he releases an album, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. On that album is a very important piece of poetry called Whitey on the Moon. Heron is very much attentive to the poverty in places like Harlem and the kinds of money that’s being spent, and there isn’t any magic to the space program.

Nathan Connolly: In fact, that’s seen as being the next frontier that those who have the resources and the wealth and the history to get away and escape to the next frontier are going to leave everybody else behind on this impoverished planet. Again, it never turned into obviously a mass movement against the space program, but I do think it was an important soundbite or sounding off of the period about what are, in fact, the costs of all the innovation or the arrival of VELCRO or other kinds of novelties that may come out of space age investment.

Nathan Connolly: The other thing that is, I think, critical about rethinking the space race, and this has happened a lot recently is, of course, imagining what exactly were the civic benefits that came out of the space race, or at least some of the challenges and the questions that were always embedded in America’s race to, say, outdo the Russians in technology, for example. I mean we’re both familiar with Margot Lee Shetterly’s really impressive accounting in Hidden Figures, where she talks about Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson as three really extraordinary mathematicians who basically overcome racial discrimination and gender discrimination but work within NASA to help them achieve this tremendous success.

Nathan Connolly: It’s a total reframing of how American greatness actually happened. Again, I also think it’s important to keep in mind that there’s no shortage of love for the beyond among a cross-section of American society. I mean I take my kids to the National Air and Space Museum and it’s just as magical for them as kids of color as it would be anybody else. So I have to, in a lot of ways, congratulate NASA in a cultural sense for unlocking a certain kind of magic for subsequent generations of young people to imagine what’s the next great frontier for the country, for the world, for the species frankly.

Brian Balogh: That’s absolutely right. It is interesting that this work, like Margot Lee Shetterly, is just being done now or in the last five or 10 years. We’re recovering these stories. It does lend a little more credence to the notion that this initiative to put a man on the moon was a unifying force in American culture. Would you agree with that?

Nathan Connolly: I would in some ways. I mean I think there is nationalism that gets wrapped up in this. I think there are ways in which politicians become really effective at talking about the collective benefits of the investments in NASA, and the space race is part of military forms of industrialization and expansion across the country. Congressional districts are awash in these kinds of dollars, especially in the South, places like Alabama, certainly Florida, Atlanta. But I do also think that there are ways in which thinking about the next big theater of American innovation and of challenge and transgression in some ways, again, moves the eye off of existing fissures on the ground so there’s a way in which the papering over of certain conflicts is another feature of the obsession with the beyond.

Nathan Connolly: But I do think it’s important to at least give a nod to the fact that we require innovation as a human species to survive. In theory, many of the ideas that we are now grappling with in terms of conservation and saving this planet are also connected to ideas about exploring other places in the universe. I got to ask you, given your perspective as someone who witnessed the moment 50 years ago. This particular commemoration, does it feel any different from other 50th anniversaries? Is there something driving this that isn’t like, say, the good old days or a pining for an America that was less complicated? I mean is there something about the nostalgia around space exploration that isn’t as latent as other kinds of attempts to look back and remember American greatness from a half century ago?

Brian Balogh: Well, yes, because I was one of those people who challenged the greatness in real time. I mean if we’re talking about 1969, I wasn’t quite as precocious as you, but I was out there protesting against a number of things when I was in high school. I was literally one of those who viewed NASA as a fake, phony sleight of hand to divert resources that might have been going to solve the city’s problems, an issue that I was particularly interested in. Now, I’m the first to say, I think that was a little bit naïve, but I have retained a certain degree of skepticism about technology being able to solve our problems, even being able to help us in the Cold War.

Brian Balogh: I mean we learned very early after Kennedy announced that we’re going to put a man on the moon, we’re going to beat the Russians to the moon. We learned pretty quickly that the Russians really were not interested in going to the moon at all.

Nathan Connolly: I guess the question of the commemoration is perhaps best framed around what the next 50 years might bring. In other words, is it possible to create a sense of, just in the smallest sense, national morale and buy-in and consensus around a social issue or a civic aim for the country as a whole? I mean Kennedy certainly did something, even if it didn’t remove the problems of disenfranchisement in the South or the problems of gender equity in the workplace by a long way. There was something about the utterings that came from his podium that seemed to at least make it feel like there was a shared mission in some respects.

Brian Balogh: Well, look Nathan, you’re the youthful hope for the future. So I’ll ask you-

Nathan Connolly: I hope not.

Brian Balogh: Yeah, yeah. Sorry to say. At least on this program. Do we need another gigantic national initiative equivalent to the determination to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade in the ’60s?

Nathan Connolly: This is from my own vantage point as a historian and thinking a lot about what we’ve just outlined in terms of all of the shadowy areas around the shining initiative of going to the moon. Maybe we should just have instead of a space program, at least as a consensus builder, an Earth program. This feels pretty straightforward in terms of what science can do, how nations can work together, thinking a lot about different forms of engineering and innovation. Frankly, so much can be gained in space exploration by figuring out really basic things like how atmosphere works or how to reduce carbon or thinking about sustainable food options. I mean-

Brian Balogh: Or how to provide clean water?

Nathan Connolly: Right. No, exactly right. I mean if we can solve, say, the water problem in Flint, Michigan then we can probably take a step closer to solving the water absence on Mars. These are the kind of links that I think a lot of people could afford to see done. Rather than imagining us moving to other barren parts of the galaxy or the solar system, making sure that this corner doesn’t become barren itself is obviously a really important piece of that. We have a lot of help by virtue of Mother Nature in keeping this thing rolling.

Nathan Connolly: I think it’s possible. I do think, however, that there should be some acknowledgement of what it would take to create a new bipartisan moment around an Earth program that I think would at least be akin in its broad support during the ’60s to what the space program enjoyed.

Nathan Connolly: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Nathan Connolly: Special thanks this week to the Johns Hopkins studios in Baltimore, and to all the listeners who submitted their stories. Sorry we couldn’t include them all, but we always like hearing from you.

Brian Balogh: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Brian Balogh: Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 16: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.