CHAPTER FOUR

Richard Underwood developed the photographs that came back from Apollo 8 himself, by hand. By machine it would have taken minutes, by hand it took about five hours. ‘It was a labor of love,’ Underwood said, ‘[a] tender loving process.’ Though it was slow work, it was soon clear that the images were even better than he had dared anticipate. NASA image AS8-14-2383, what would become better known as ‘Earthrise’, was released to the press with the usual technical caption – barely descriptive, certainly devoid of poetry:

The rising Earth is about five degrees above the lunar horizon in this telephoto view taken from the Apollo 8 spacecraft near 110 degrees east longitude. The horizon, about 570 kms (350 statute miles) from the spacecraft, is near the eastern limb of the moon as viewed from Earth. Width of the view at the horizon is about 150 kms (95 statute miles). On Earth 240,000 statute miles away the sunset terminator crosses Africa. The crew took the photo around 10.40am Houston time on the morning of 24 December, and that would make it 15.40 GMT on the same day. The South Pole is in the white area near the left end of the terminator. North and South America are under the clouds.

Images

NASA released the image as the Apollo crew had seen it. The press reproduced it in the way we are used to seeing everything from Earth, as if over a horizon. We humans believe the sky to be above us because that is all of the sky that we can see, and so though we might acknowledge intellectually and occasionally that the sky is as much below us, that is not the way we feel the world to be.

The day after the crew had publicly read from Genesis from space, Edward Fiske, in an article in the New York Times, wondered if Apollo 8 had made the need for some kind of synthesis between the sacred and secular urgent. He argued for a new version of Christianity, purged of the supernatural, something more in keeping with the space age. Even the ‘secularly inclined’ BBC aviation correspondent, Reginald Turnill, had said that the reading ‘struck one instantly as stroke of genius’. Mike Collins said the same: ‘It was impressive, I thought, a stroke of genius, to relate their primordial setting to the origin of the Earth, and to couch it in the beautiful seventeenth-century language of the King James I scholars.’

Not everyone agreed. Before they had landed, Madalyn Murray O’Hair was on air accusing the Apollo 8 crew of disrespecting those who do not believe in God. For good measure she added that they had also slandered those who followed religions other than Christianity. What they had done was unconstitutional. She would have been even more incensed if she had known that Borman had recorded a prayer while in space to be played back to his church during their Christmas Eve service. The operation even had its own codeword: Experiment P-1. O’Hair invited listeners to her radio show, American Atheist Radio Series, to write in and protest, and announced that she intended to sue NASA. By then she was one of the most prominent figures in American public life. NASA took her threat seriously. O’Hair said she was inundated with letters. She was shown photographed in front of what she said were 28,000 letters in support of her protest. Borman, however, said that he personally received 100,000 letters, all bar 34 in support of the Genesis reading, and many of them denouncing O’Hair. One letter described O’Hair as, ‘Jezebel, Lady Macbeth, Lot’s wife, Mary Queen of Scots, all wrapped into one foul-mouthed atheist’. When Loretta Lee Frye, a Detroit member of the Houston-based Apollo Prayer League, started a petition in support of religious readings in space, she received half a million signatures in three months. Harold Camping, president of Family Radio, said that the campaign in support of the Genesis readings was ‘the largest voluntary commendation of an act by man that has ever occurred in our nation’s history and perhaps in the history of the world’.

At the Congress meeting that followed every Apollo mission, Borman, a Roman Catholic, began to talk about the Genesis reading. And then, aware that the nine Supreme Court justices were facing him, he said: ‘now that I see the gentlemen here in the front row, I am not sure we should have read the Bible at all’. The reference was clear. ‘The whole chamber rocked with laughter and applause.’

Borman was asked to respond to Titov’s comment about the absence of God in space, still a favourite with journalists. He said – a slight variant on the usual response – that he had not seen God either, ‘but I saw his evidence’. Bill Anders said that during the Genesis reading the thought had come to him that they were ‘trying to say something fundamental. This isn’t just another space mission; it’s a new beginning, for all of us.’ But how novel or inclusive had it been to read from the Bible? The Earthrise photograph reinforced in a humanistic way what many would have found unpalatable about the Genesis reading. The New York Times said that the photograph was a ‘humbling reminder of the world’s insignificance’; the LA Times that it ‘made introverts of us all’. Writing in the New York Times, the then fashionable poet, Archibald MacLeish, wondered if, in a matter of hours, human beings had shifted perspective, away from a conception of themselves as ‘God-directed actors at the center of a noble drama’, to one in which ‘Man may at last become himself.’ Like Fiske – whose article appeared in the same edition – MacLeish saw immediately what was philosophically (and perhaps theologically) remarkable about the experience of seeing ourselves from the outside. Ending his article with a last rhetorical flourish, MacLeish wrote: ‘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 now they are truly brothers.’ It was a point that would be made over and over again in the months and years that followed. On the Apollo 8 astronauts’ post-flight world tour Borman said that we ‘are first and foremost not Germans or Russians or Americans but Earthmen’. He said that ‘raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilences don’t show from that distance. From out there it really is “one world”.’ ‘Would it not be ironical’, said Wernher von Braun ‘– as well as instructive – if nations first learn to transcend their national interests many, many miles away from Mother Earth?’ Movingly, the comments mirror the famous speech made by Martin Luther King from the pulpit of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, a year to the day before the Genesis reading from space and the taking of the Earthrise photograph: ‘If we are to have peace on Earth . . . we must develop a world perspective. As nations and individuals, we are interdependent. It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.’ King was assassinated four months later.

Ironically it was Pope Paul VI, addressing a crowd in St Peter’s Square soon after the Apollo 8 splashdown, who made one of the most perceptive secular observations about the mission. ‘The stature of man,’ he said, ‘in prodigious confrontation with the cosmos emerges immensely small and immensely large.’ The Earth appeared insignificant compared to the seeming infinity of space that surrounds it, and yet the colourful Earth looked so different from anything else out there that it also seemed to be special. For the first time in history, humans had seen their home from the outside, and yet this new perspective, paradoxically, was a loss of perspective. Bill Anders said that his faith faltered when he heard a broadcast of ‘O Holy Night’ disintegrate as they went around the dark side of the moon: ‘If music could not survive an encounter with the universe, was there much hope for religious doctrine ? And if the church could not claim to be universal, could it claim the authority to declare transcendent laws?’ And yet man in space also seemed to highlight the need for religion, or something like it. Here, as Fiske so promptly realized, was an opportunity to forge a relationship between science and religion that was more open, braver and richer. Anne Morrow Lindbergh said that after Earthrise no one would ever look at the Earth the same way again: ‘As Earthmen, we may have taken another step into adulthood.’ And yet she wondered, too, if it might take centuries before we fully absorbed this new perspective: that there is no persepective to be had.

Soon after the Apollo 8 mission, the US Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp that reproduced the Earthrise photograph along with the words, ‘In the beginning God.’ It was the first time religious wording had appeared on a stamp since O’Hair’s landmark judgment of 1963. Bill Anders said it was the stamp that everyone swooned over. Rather than finding a new synthesis, religion and atheism in America seemed to be dividing along old lines, mirroring the Cold War between God’s America and Soviet Atheism.

Despite the avalanche of letters arriving at NASA in support of the Genesis reading, Deke Slayton was sufficiently disturbed by Madalyn O’Hair’s threatened action that he forbade religious readings or prayers on upcoming Apollo missions.