After three full orbits, as they appeared from behind the Moon, commander Frank Borman rolled the spacecraft around. It was then that lunar module pilot Bill Anders unexpectedly caught sight of Earth rising from behind the lunar horizon. \u201cOh, my God! Look at that picture over there!\u201d he exclaimed in amazement. \u201cHere\u2019s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!\u201d<\/p>\n
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Earth looked like a colourful Christmas bauble of blues and browns, sprinkled with white, set against the black of space and the grey, forbidding lunar landscape. Anders snapped a photograph with black and white film, though he knew it couldn\u2019t capture the beauty of this exceptional sight.<\/p>\n
He hustled command module pilot Jim Lovell. \u201cYou got a colour film, Jim? Hand me that roll of colour quick, would you.\u201d One of the two pictures he then took was the first colour earthrise photograph taken by a human. It became one of the 20th century\u2019s most iconic images, thought by many to be a catalyst for the environmental movement. Apollo 8 had arrived six hours earlier.<\/p>\n
![\""Earthrise\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2018\/12\/GettyImages-1219740971-03bb624.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413"\" "\\"\"Earthrise\\"")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>As it passed midway around the lunar far side, over mountain tops lit by a setting Sun, its main engine had fired, slowing sufficiently to remain in the Moon\u2019s gravitational clutches. Apollo 8 had taken Borman, Anders and Lovell to where no men had gone before. They would make ten revolutions of this hostile, battered world before relighting their engine to come home. It was a moment that kept managers awake at night, because if it failed they would be stuck orbiting the Moon forever.<\/p>\n
Who were the Apollo 8 astronauts?<\/h3>\n
Apollo 8\u2019s crew were all high-achieving military pilots. Borman was in charge: a straight-talking, hard-driving man.<\/p>\n
His first spaceflight was on Gemini 7 in late 1965. Just over a year later, in January 1967, he had suffered the loss of his closest friend, astronaut Ed White, when an oxygen-fed fire consumed the Apollo 1 cabin during a test. Borman testified before Congress on NASA\u2019s push to recover from the setback. To him, Apollo was a battle in the Cold War against the Soviets and he brought a military mindset to his preparations.<\/p>\n
Borman\u2019s hard edge was in contrast to friendly and gregarious Jim Lovell, the command module pilot. As a boy, Lovell had dreamed of spaceflight and had kept faithful to this dream throughout his military and test pilot career. An easygoing man, he was the perfect foil to Borman, which helped when they spent two weeks sharing the cramped confines of Gemini 7. His role on Apollo 8 was as the ship\u2019s navigator, sighting on the stars like a celestial mariner to guide the ship through space.<\/p>\n
Bill Anders brought an academic science background to the trio. He was the \u2018rookie\u2019, having never flown in space before. Officially, he was the lunar module pilot, though he had no lunar module \u2013 the odd-looking lander of future Apollo missions was not yet ready to fly. Instead, he was to monitor the spacecraft\u2019s systems and act as photographer. To some, Anders seemed like a younger Borman, and he took the mission\u2019s propaganda role very seriously.<\/p>\n
- Read more |<\/strong> Yuri Gagarin: 8 things you (probably) didn\u2019t know about the first man in space<\/strong><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>
For six days, they were cooped up inside the command module, a cone of three by four metres. It sat at one end of the service module, a cylinder with a rocket nozzle at the opposite end. This combined command\/service module (CSM) was only one part of the Apollo system. The other was Anders\u2019 missing lunar module. Its absence was the reason that Borman and his crew found themselves around the Moon at Christmas.<\/p>\n
What happened before Apollo 8?<\/h3>\n
There were many difficulties in the Apollo story: some tragic, most technical. By mid-1967, Kennedy\u2019s deadline of placing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade was approaching, and NASA was in a dark place. It was running out of time to individually test the three rocket stages of the gargantuan Saturn V \u2013 the new launch vehicle being built to send men to the Moon. NASA instead opted to test the rocket stages exhaustively on the ground, then fly the whole lot in one go, so-called \u2018all-up\u2019 testing. But the Saturn V would have to prove itself twice before carrying humans.<\/p>\n
NASA\u2019s more general approach was to fly a progression of missions that would lead to a lunar landing. It began in November 1967 with Apollo 4, the first test of the Saturn V. The rocket acquitted itself astoundingly well, barely missing a beat as it ascended to space. Its second flight, Apollo 6, was not as smooth: the Saturn V\u2019s first stage chugged in a pogolike manner that would have shaken a crew senseless. Worse, two of the five second-stage engines failed.<\/p>\n
From arms race to Space Race<\/h4>\n
The mushroom clouds at Hiroshima and Nagasaki<\/a> in 1945 signalled both the end of WW2<\/a> and the dawn of the atomic age<\/a>, from which emerged the Cold War. The two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, knew that with the terrifying destructive power of nuclear weapons they could not risk all-out war, but that did not prevent an arms race in a tense competition for supremacy. Both sides strived to demonstrate how they had the superior weapons technology, delivery systems and, ultimately, political ideology.<\/p>\n
The launch of Sputnik in 1957 \u2013 around the time they also tested intercontinental ballistic missiles \u2013 gave the Soviets a distinct advantage and spread fear in theb US. If the Russians could put a satellite into space, then they could launch rockets with nuclear warheads. This led to an unfounded belief in a \u2018missile gap\u2019, not helped by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev\u2019s boast that his country was \u201cturning out missiles like sausages\u201d.<\/p>\n
The US needed to respond, so poured huge amounts of money and resources into sending up their own satellites and eventually astronauts. Space became an arena for the Cold War. The race to the stars had all the opportunities to demonstrate technological and national prowess \u2013 along with a lurking threat \u2013 but without the nuclear Armageddon.<\/p>\n