Books |
Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth
Robert Poole
By
Published: Jan 20, 2009
Category:
Non Fiction
Christmas Eve, 1968. Apollo 8 was making history. The American astronauts had left Earth’s orbit. They’d seen the dark side of the Moon. Now, on their fourth circuit around the Moon, they experienced another “first”.
“Oh my God, look at that picture over there,” Frank Borman said.
“What is it?” Bill Anders asked.
“It’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!”
And, through tiny windows, the three astronauts watched the Earth rise — a ball of color in a sea of black and white space.
NASA had planned the mission with granular precision, but not this, not the memorializing with film. Anders realized that if there was ever a photograph worth taking, this was it. A black-and-white camera was produced. Snap! And then they took the color shot.
“Earthrise” turned out to be the most powerful photo ever taken.
It’s hard to believe, but until the mid-1960s, no one really knew the color of the Earth. And although the first rockets to leave the planet gave a new sense of our home, really seeing the Earth whole wasn’t a priority — the only reason Apollo 8 went to the Moon instead of merely orbiting the earth in 1968 was that the CIA had learned the Russians were planning a lunar fly-by. That was all the motivation NASA needed; after Sputnik, beating the Russians in space was a government priority. The Moon, for our government, was “a battlefield in the Cold War.”
So there was no thought of taking pictures of the Earth. In fact, there was so little concern about photography that season at NASA that we don’t have a shot of Neil Armstrong, the first man off Apollo, walking on the Moon. (The pictures you’ve seen are of Buzz Aldrin, the second man.)
But minutes after the launch of Apollo 8, the flight took on a flavor that had nothing to do with military might or propaganda.
“This must be what God sees,” Frank Borman thought, looking back at his home planet as Apollo 8 floated toward the Moon.
That was just preamble to his reaction to the view of the earth from the Moon: "It was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life, one that sent a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me.”
So Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth is more than the story of one picture — it’s about the effect of that picture. Before the American space program, there was a strain in science fiction that the Earth was destined to die. It was, by this way of thinking, man’s destiny to explore space — and colonize it.
After Apollo 8, a different view emerged: that the function of space exploration is to remind us that the direction we need to go is homeward. The poet Archibald MacLeish regarded that photo as a tipping point: "To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know that they are truly brothers."
History moved fast. Months later, that photograph was the cover of The Whole Earth Catalog.
A year later, America environmentalists organized the first Earth Day. And then came a movement that grows bigger each year.
“Earthrise” tells many stories. As you’d expect from a Yale University Press publication, you get a capsule history of the Moon, the space program and the Cold War. You get surprises galore: Robert Poole persuasively argues there was no “missile gap” and that the United States was winning the missile race all along. What you don’t get: a Tom Wolfe narrative. Well, there are other rewards, like this revelation: “In the depths of the Cold War, peace broke out in space.”
Our most common human longing is for peace. “Earthrise” takes that longing and, through the experiences of three men who could never be described as mystical, gives it a credible focus. That is, it makes planetary consciousness something you can appreciate without being a stoned-out hippie, a raving environmentalist or a crank. As Bill Anders put it, he was "immediately almost overcome by the thought that here we came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home planet, the Earth."
That could be the most powerful thought of the Twentieth Century. No wonder it moved so quickly from the Moon back to Earth and travels now, faster and faster, around the globe.
To buy “Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth” from Amazon.com, click here.
To see photographs of the Earth as seen from the Moon, click here.
