Nowhere was this process more obvious than in the environmental movement. As nature photographer Galen Rowell said in 1995, Bill Anders’ photograph of an earthrise over a barren lunar surface was “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.”264 Every edition of The Whole Earth Catalog displayed this picture on its inside cover, describing it as
The famous Apollo 8 picture of earthrise over the moon that established our planetary facthood and beauty and rareness (dry moon, barren space) and began to bend human consciousness.265
Even the S.D.S., which had never shown any interest in technological matters except to condemn companies like General Electric and the Rand Corporation for doing research for the Defense Department, became suddenly aware of environmental issues soon after Apollo.266
Nor were political movements alone in discovering a new awareness of our home world. As Carl Sagan wrote in 1975, “It is impossible to look at such pictures without acquiring a new perspective on our world.”267Humanity had seen the earth for the first time as a planet, the globe’s blue seas and swirls of white clouds giving it a colorful beauty and exuberance seen nowhere else. And as the only place in the universe known to sustain life, this “fragile Christmas tree ornament” beckoned to both the astronauts and to the population at large as a safe haven, a place that must be protected from harm at any cost.
Almost every astronaut to go to the moon after Apollo 8 said that the earth appeared delicate and fragile. Borman, Lovell, and Anders, however, said it first, and they said it when the greatest number of people was listening. Their words, and the images their took, shook society as much as Khrushchev’s words and actions had in the 1950’s.
Combined with an increased social desire to use government for moral ends, the images brought back from Apollo motivated environmental activism as never before. Though the movement had existed long before Apollo 8, environmental policy until this time had rarely used the federal government to enforce regulation. The National Park Service was created, and certain scenic areas of the United States were set aside for posterity, but national environmental legislation was uncommon and limited in scope.
Within two years of this first lunar voyage, however, the country celebrated its first Earth Day, and Congress passed both the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Air Act, establishing the E.P.A. and beginning a nationwide drive to make environmentalism a moral goal. The sudden, almost instantaneous skyrocketing of federal environmental laws.268
The irony of this profusion of legislation is how little such an approach differed from that of Nikita Khrushchev’s. As he believed, “Centralization was the best and most efficient system . . . [Everything] had to be worked out at the top and supervised from above.”269
* * *
Apollo 8’s effect on American society had other short-term consequences as well. “It certainly would not be a very inviting place to live and work,” Borman had said while in orbit around the moon. For most of the Twentieth Century, people had dreamed not only of exploring the moon, but of bringing humanity to it to live. Now the first humans to see the moon up close found it too inhospitable for their taste.
Less than four months before the Apollo 8 mission, the National Academy of Sciences urged NASA to eliminate almost all manned exploration and replace it with unmanned missions. “The ability to carry out scientific observations at a distance is developing so rapidly that I don’t see any unique role for man in planetary exploration,” noted Gordon MacDonald, chairman of the academy panel that issued the recommendation.270 While few paid much attention to this recommendation before Apollo 8, afterward the calls to adopt it were many and insistent. For the first time since the nation was founded, respected and powerful voices were saying that sending explorers to open up vast new territories, to take daring and courageous chances for the sake of human advancement, was not in the interests of the United States.
And people listened. It was as if this nation of pioneers had become terrified by what had been shown during those televised broadcasts from the moon, and its citizens no longer wished to accept the challenge of bringing life to a barren world like the moon. Interest in space exploration waned and the space program wound down. When Jim Lovell flew on Apollo 13 sixteen months later, no television network was much interested in covering the mission, until something went wrong. By the late 1970s, the United States essentially had no operating space program, flying no manned missions from 1975 through 1981. In fact, in 1979 NASA launched only three satellites, two small short-term atmospheric research probes and one astronomical X-ray telescope.
Even today, our plans for the human exploration of space are entirely limited to earth orbit. The idea of sending humans to another planet seems hard to fathom. After taking that brave leap to another world thirty years ago, we have become strangely fearful, and are once again hugging the coasts of earth, unwilling to brave the “oceans” that surround us in order to visit the planetary “islands” that exist nearby.
* * *
The vision of the earth given to us by Apollo 8, “a grand oasis in the big vastness of space,” did more than merely energize the environmental movement: it encouraged the concept of a single human culture. Before Apollo 8, the earth had always been seen as that far horizon line, a flattened curve beyond which lay alien cultures and foreign lands. Each culture competed, sometimes peaceably, sometimes not, to exert its influence on human history.
After Apollo 8, however, the human vision of our mother planet changed. The image of a “bright, blue marble” in the starkness of the void was far more compelling than anyone had dreamed. The day after the astronauts read from Genesis, the New York Times printed a short commentary by poet Archibald MacLeish, in which he gave his interpretation of the Apollo mission.
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.271
Now the earth was no longer seen as land over which nations could claim control. While borders might exist in the differences and diversity of human culture, the planet itself was one.
Frank Borman’s own words over the next few months illustrate this change. A man who had spent his life defending the American idea of freedom could not help but espouse the idea of world peace and cooperation in his public tour following the mission. “I look forward to the creation of an international outpost on the moon,” he told an audience in Paris.272 In Germany he said that space exploration “will teach us that we are first and foremost not Germans or Russians or Americans but earthmen.”273
Borman said this with the same cheerful goodwill that had led him to speak words in lunar orbit to include as many people as possible. Furthermore, he spoke in the conviction that somehow the Soviet dictatorship had to be defeated, and perhaps by offering a carrot instead of a stick he might help in that defeat.
Nonetheless, his words contributed to the idea that there was no qualitative difference between the free capitalist American vision and the state-run, communist vision, that the defense of individual freedom was less important than world peace and world cooperation. In the ensuing years this idea has grown so strong that it has almost become impermissible to be proud of our traditions, our unique freedoms and successes.274 Instead, cultural pressure insists that we promote the idea that borders are unimportant and all souls and cultures must be merged into a single global village, as seen from Apollo 8.275
And yet, does this “one world” vision accurately portray our earth-bound existence? Or is human experience far more complex?
Less than two months after landing in the Pacific, Frank Borman and his family were touring Europe as representatives of the U.S. Government. They visited London, Paris, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal. In Rome, Pope Paul VI sat and spoke with them for over an hour.
In West Berlin, Borman found a changed city from his last vis
it in 1949. The ruins were gone, the poverty and starvation forgotten. Instead he saw a vibrant city filled with skyscrapers and wealth.
And yet, the Cold War still dominated the view out his hotel window. Despite the vision of single, unified earth that Apollo 8 portrayed, here was illustrated a contrast that was as stark and plain as night and day.
One night the Borman family went for dinner in their hotel’s penthouse restaurant. From their table they had a clear view over the city. To the west was a bright and glittering jewel, the lights of West Berlin twinkling gaily. To the east was darkness and stillness, the drab streets of East Berlin cloaked in gloom. And at the dividing line was a barbed wire and concrete wall, lit by guard towers and searchlights.
Despite its appearance as a single globe from the distance of the moon, up close that blue-and-white earth still held upon it some brutal differences.
14. THIS IS NOW
FAMILY
On January 30, 1998 Jim and Marilyn Lovell joined their son Jay, now forty-two, for the groundbreaking of a new restaurant in the northern Chicago suburb of Lake Forest. Marilyn found the site, Jim financed the construction, and Jay would be the chef.
While Jim Lovell had always known what he wanted to do with his life, Jay Lovell had spent many years searching for something that would infuse his life with a similar joy. After graduating from the Houston Academy of Art he became an illustrator, working first at NASA, and then for the Houston Chronicle. Then he tried running his own graphic design company, but found the work unfulfilling, both financially and creatively.
He had always loved cooking, and one day decided he’d like to try doing this for a living. He applied and was accepted to the Culinary School at Kendall College in Evanston, Illinois. To his delight and pleasure he quickly found himself ranked first in his class. Soon he was an executive chef, winning awards at several different high-class restaurants in the Chicago area.
Now he and his father were business partners. Their restaurant, “Lovell’s Lake Forest Inn” opened in the fall of 1998, celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the flight of Apollo 8. In it the Lovell family showcases Jim Lovell’s space career and Jay Lovell’s cooking talents. “This restaurant will be open for as long as I am alive,” says Jay.
For Jim Lovell, the flight of Apollo 8 made remarkably little difference to his life. As soon as the parades and parties ended, Jim returned to the program. Why stop now, after getting within seventy miles of the moon’s surface? he thought. He became a backup to Apollo 11, which put him in the ideal position to get the assignment as commander for Apollo 13, scheduled to land on the moon sometime in the next two years. He would then become the fifth man to walk on the surface of another world.
Unfortunately, halfway to the moon Apollo 13’s oxygen tank exploded. To get the men home alive and unharmed demanded tremendous patience and technical skill, both by the astronauts themselves and their colleagues at NASA.
This meant, however, that Jim Lovell would never walk on the moon. In the 1970’s the American space program was dying, and Jim could see that it might be years, if ever, that he would fly into space again. He decided it was time to leave NASA and try his hand in private enterprise. He went looking for something new to do with his life.
For four years he was president of a tugboat business in the Houston area. Then he joined a telecommunications firm, selling business phone systems in the Southwest. He and Marilyn moved back to the Midwest where they both had grown up, and built a home in the suburbs north of Chicago. As the years passed, the Lovells faded into the pleasant but obscure life of middle America. Once in a while a reporter would call to ask them about Jim’s Apollo missions, but in general it seemed the country had lost interest in space. Jim and Marilyn watched their children grow up and go out on their own, becoming ordinary Americans in the never-ending, always changing American landscape.
Finally, Jim decided to sit down with writer Jeffrey Kluger and write Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13. Even if he couldn’t fly again, perhaps in telling a new generation the thrilling story of his last flight to the moon he could generate some new interest in space exploration.
The Lovell family, 1997. Jim and Marilyn Lovell are in the back row,
on the left. Barbara Lovell stands in front of Marilyn, with Jay
Lovell to the right in the center of the picture. Susan Lovell
is in front of Jay wearing a vest, and Jeffrey Lovell is directly
behind Susan in the black shirt. Credit: Lovell
The book became a movie, Apollo 13, and eventually sold over a million copies. Though Jim Lovell would certainly not take full credit for the recent renewal in American space exploration, he surely has the right to claim some of the accolades.
* * *
For Lovell, the flight of Apollo 8 did little to change his religious beliefs. “Going to the moon to me was not a religious event,” he explains. To him, if you believed in God you could find Him anywhere, either on earth or in a tiny capsule floating in the darkness of space. Two hundred forty thousand miles was “just a drop in the bucket” for an entity that had created the entire universe.
To Bill Anders, however, his journey to the moon radically changed his outlook on life and religion. Ironically, while the world was celebrating the astronauts’ affirmation of spirituality, the flight had undercut Anders’ own faith in Catholicism. The vast emptiness of space made the Catholic rituals he had obeyed faithfully since childhood seem insufficient to him. “We’re like ants on a log,” he explained. “How could any earth-centered religious ritual know what God’s truth is?”
His doubt made it impossible for him to perform these rituals with his same past sincerity. Consequently, he simply stopped doing them. He ceased attending church.
This change caused some family problems, though fewer than might have been expected. Valerie herself had had increasing doubts about their religion, even before the flight. She disagreed with the Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception. Even more disturbing to her was her knowledge of women who had been able to shop around and find a Catholic priest who would sanction their use of birth control pills. Such arrangements made Valerie doubt the Church’s sincerity.
Yet she also wondered how she as a parent could raise her children without some greater guiding principles for explaining right and wrong. “Without religion you lose the security of a church helping you raise a child. You’re left on your own, trying to explain a lot of difficult ideas without support.”
Valerie worried that Bill’s abandonment of religion might alter the sanctity of their marriage. They had been married in accordance with the Church’s rules, “until death do us part” as it were. Would those rules still hold if they no longer believed in Catholicism?
They talked about it at length. Finally they decided that they could still lead an upright, virtuous life, even if they did so without the Catholic Church. Bill would honor their marriage, regardless, Valerie knew. As astronaut Walt Cunningham had written, Anders belonged (as did Frank Borman) to the “end of the spectrum [of] guys so straight that you didn’t know whether to admire them or have them stuffed and shipped to the Smithsonian Institution as the last of a vanishing species.”276
The Anders family 1995. Left to right, Glen Anders is second on the left, standing with Valerie to his right holding grandchild.
To her right wearing a white hat is Greg Anders. Diana Anders wears ten gallon hat in center. Bill Anders, in white hat and vest
stands with Alan Anders to his left behind him and Gayle Anders to his right wearing white hat. Eric Anders is on far right.
Credit: Anders
When their last child, Diana, was born in 1972, they raised her outside any organized religion, dealing with the problems this caused as they came up. “Diana would wonder why her friends were going to church, and we weren’t,” Valerie explained. She told her daughter that just as Valerie’s parents had allowed her to choose her faith, the Anderses were allowing Diana to do the
same.
While Bill Anders very much wanted to walk on the moon like Jim Lovell, the likelihood of his doing so was slimmer. After Apollo 8 he was assigned to the position of command module pilot, working backup for Apollo 11 and prime crew on Apollo 13. This assignment meant, however, that the best he could hope for was to watch the others go down and land while he remained in lunar orbit. It didn’t seem worth the risk to go back to the moon, merely to go around it again.
Furthermore, President Nixon had offered him a position in government as executive secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council. There he would have the ability to directly influence future space policy. Anders took it, and before too long was immersed in the political world of Washington. In 1973 he was appointed a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, and shortly thereafter became the first chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Later he served as ambassador to Norway.
Then he entered the private sector, working for a variety of companies in the military and airplane construction industry. Eventually he moved up the corporate ladder to become C.E.O. of General Dynamics, trimming that company’s overhead and selling off many of its non-profitable divisions.
Today Bill Anders is retired, and spends his free time flying airplanes for fun. And if asked, he would go to the moon in a heartbeat. Indeed, he has applied to NASA to follow John Glenn back into orbit.
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