“Roger,” astronaut Jim Lovell radioed to mission control in Houston on Christmas morning 1968, “please be informed there is a Santa Claus.” Lovell’s revelation confirmed Apollo 8’s departure from lunar orbit. The night before on Christmas Eve, he, Frank Borman, and Bill Anders – the first humans to orbit the moon – enthralled a global primetime television audience with extraordinary celestial footage, before sending us off to bed by taking turns narrating the Bible’s depiction of creation.
So, let’s go around the moon and back. I’m Joel Rhodes “Telling History.”
NASA’s Apollo 8 mission launched on December 21, 1968 achieving the necessary escape velocity of 35,000 feet/second which made it the first human spaceflight to leave low Earth orbit and the first crewed spacecraft to reach the Moon, some 240,000 miles away. Space race pressure was on that holiday season. With Kennedy’s ambitious deadline of reaching the moon before decade’s end fast approaching, the Soviets had sent, not one, but three unmanned ships there already. Circumstances now motivated NASA to accelerate Apollo’s lunar flight timetable after the fiery disaster of Apollo 1 – claiming the lives of astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee – had stalled the program for months.
Apollo 8 reached the moon in three days, and for next twenty hours orbited ten times without landing. On December 24th, 1968, Lovell, Borman, and Anders became the first humans to observe the moon’s mysterious far side. As the astronauts came back around from the dark – regaining radio contact – they beheld the splendor of “Earthrise,” our cloudy, blue planet climbing over the lunar horizon just as the moon does back on Earth. And in a whitish glow of the unexpected “Earthshine” – far brighter than moonshine – the crew described the moon’s surface as grey, an observation soon disputed by Apollo 10 who thought it to be brown. Later, from the surface, Apollo 11 settled the question: the moon’s color depends on the sun’s angle.
Spending Christmas circling the moon, Apollo 8’s sleepless crew carried out their detailed and thorough mission objectives. And then on Christmas Eve, Lovell, Borman, and Anders read verses from the first chapter of Genesis. This worldwide telecast, in real time, reached all continents, and probably one billion people.
Their solemn narration, wedded with the majesty of the Earthrise photography, provided awe-inspiring – dare I say divine - perspective and proportion on what had otherwise been one hell of a year. In February 1968, the Tet Offensive exposed the nation to the reality that something had gone terribly wrong in Southeast Asia. The strain over Vietnam exploded on streets and campuses. The once formidable Lyndon Johnson announced in March his decision not to seek reelection. Martin Luther King died on April 4. His assassination and rage in America’s ghettos ignited intense urban rioting. In May, French students battled riot police along homemade barricades, almost bringing down the government of Charles de Gaulle. Senator Robert F. Kennedy fell on June 5. Bloody conflict and mayhem rocked the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August. Then in October police and soldiers massacred hundreds of unarmed protesters peacefully demonstrating in Mexico City’s Plaza of Three Cultures.
Yet, for a moment, all was calm, all was bright. While signing off, Apollo 8’s crew wished nearly one-third of humanity, “Good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you – all of you on the good Earth.”
