A Christmas Eve Message From the Moon

On Christmas Eve 1968, three men floating above the Moon gave the world a gift it didn't know it needed. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders - the crew of Apollo 8 - had just become the first humans to orbit another world. That evening, they turned on the cameras and spoke to everyone back home.

The year had been one of the darkest in American memory - NASA itself would later call 1968 "one of the most turbulent, tragic years in American history." Into that darkness came a live broadcast from lunar orbit: images of the cratered Moon rolling past below, and Lovell's awestruck words: "The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth."

The crew had been told they would have the largest audience that had ever listened to a human voice - roughly a quarter of the world's population was watching or listening. NASA's only instruction: do something appropriate.

Borman would later recall the moment: "We were told that on Christmas Eve we would have the largest audience that had ever listened to a human voice. And the only instructions that we got from NASA was to do something appropriate." So the crew reached for the oldest words they knew - and read them to the largest crowd in history.

What they chose has become legend. Taking turns, the three astronauts read from the opening verses of the Book of Genesis. Anders began: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth..." Borman closed by wishing everyone "on the good Earth" a merry Christmas.

Earlier that day, Anders had captured the mission's other immortal moment. As the spacecraft came around the Moon, Earth rose over the lunar horizon - a blue-and-white marble in black space. "Oh my God, look at that picture over there! There's the Earth comin' up. Wow, is that pretty!" The photograph, "Earthrise," became one of the most reproduced images in history and helped spark the modern environmental movement.

The crew splashed down safely in the Pacific on December 27, recovered by the USS Yorktown. Seven months later, Apollo 11 would land on the Moon.

Why it matters: Apollo 8 went to the Moon and discovered the Earth. As Anders later put it, the astronauts had trained to explore the Moon and ended up seeing home with new eyes - fragile, borderless, and worth protecting. On the darkest Christmas Eve of a dark year, they reminded a divided world what it shared.

Photo: NASA/Bill Anders, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).