Bill Anders, the first person to photograph the Earth from the Moon, dies

On Friday, June 7, 2024, Bill Anders, who was a member of the Apollo 8 crew and one of the first three people to walk on the Moon, died in a plane crash. Surprisingly, despite being 90 years old, Anders was still flying airplanes. And one. In this case, it is a Beechcraft T-34A (A45) Mentor, a former USAF trainer that belonged to the aviation museum he ran with his son Greg (Heritage Flight Museum in Burlington, Washington). Born in 1933, William Alison Anders graduated from Annapolis and went on to a stellar career as a US Air Force pilot (ironically, one of the aircraft he trained on was the T-34). As part of his Air Force career, he studied electrical and nuclear engineering. Although he wanted to become a test pilot under Chuck Yeager, before achieving this, he was selected as a NASA astronaut on October 14, 1963, as part of the space agency’s third group.

Anders was able to gain access to NASA because the requirement for applicants to be test pilots was eliminated for the third group of astronauts. Now it was enough that these were military pilots, just with a lot of experience and, if possible, with advanced degrees, requirements that Anders more than met. Aldrin and Anders, who held the rank of captain at the time, were the only pilots selected by NASA to work on engineering tasks. His first role on Apollo would be to study the effects of radiation on humans. In 1966, Anders was temporarily assigned to reserve duty for the second manned flight of the Gemini program, along with Frank Borman and Charlie Bassett (the latter soon died in a plane crash). Deke Slayton then replaced him on Gemini 11 with Neil Armstrong, a position that, barring last-minute setbacks, prevented him from participating in the Gemini program’s mission.

After the Apollo 1 accident, Anders was still assigned to the prime crew of the third manned Apollo mission as Lunar Module (LM) pilot, with Frank Borman as commander and finally Mike Collins as command module pilot. Shortly thereafter, Anders led the investigation into the LLRV lunar module simulator accident that nearly killed Neil Armstrong during training. In 1968, Mike Collins temporarily retired as an active astronaut to have a vertebral problem in his neck surgically corrected. His place was taken by Jim Lovell, Collins’s understudy. For his part, Collins was assigned to Armstrong’s crew (Fred Hayes joined Armstrong’s crew during his recovery).

But in the summer of 1968, an event occurred that changed Anders’ life forever. NASA headquarters decided that, even though Apollo 8 was only the program’s second manned mission, it would go to the Moon, primarily to thwart any Soviet attempt to preempt the 7K-L1 (Probe) program. . Of course, it would not have been possible without the lunar module due to the delays accumulated with the first LM block. The next crew to fly were Jim McDivitt, Dave Scott and Rusty Schweickart, but all three had carefully prepared for the low-orbit flight, during which they would test all of the lunar module’s systems. So Slayton felt there was no point in wasting all this training on sending them on a mission without a lunar module, and opted to send Borman, Lovell, and Anders to Apollo 8. Bormann and Anders trained with the LM, but not with the lunar module. intensity of McDivitt and Schweickart, who had planned to fly much earlier.

So Anders was chosen to take part in the first space mission, which would leave the gravity of the Earth and head to the Moon. Paradoxically, Anders was not at all happy about the prospect of entering the history books. Because? Well, because I would fly as a lunar module pilot on a mission without a lunar module. In the proud world of Apollo pilots, the lunar module pilot was the lowest rank after commander and command module pilot. But being an LM pilot without being able to fly an LM was a completely humiliating situation. Of course, his fellow missionaries jumped at the chance to address the issue and joked that all Anders had to do on Apollo 8 was sit down and pretend like he knew what he was doing.

Apollo 8, the second manned mission of the program and the first for Saturn 5, launched on December 21, 1968. Ultimately, not a single Soviet 7K-L1 spacecraft was able to defeat them. Although Alexey Leonov and Oleg Makarov were preparing to fly around the Moon, the 7K-L1 program was far from the minimum level of safety for a manned flight. Over the six-day mission, Borman, Lovell and Anders orbited the Moon ten times, demonstrating the reliability of the Service Module’s SPS engine and the maturity of the CSM systems. What they didn’t know was that if there had been an accident like the one on Apollo 13, the three men would have died beyond repair. Once in lunar orbit, it was Anders who began reciting Genesis during a broadcast that took place shortly before leaving for our planet on Christmas Day. The crew of Apollo 8 were the first people to see the far side of the Moon with their own eyes.

Anders will also go down in history with the famous Earth Dawn photo (Earthrise). No one warned the astronauts that they would be able to witness the wonderful spectacle of the “dawn” of the Earth behind the edge of the Moon, flying over the far side. Anders was left open-mouthed when he saw the blue marble of our planet disappearing beyond the lunar horizon, and warned his two companions. In doing so, he took a black and white photograph using his Hasselblad 500 EL camera equipped with a 250mm telephoto lens, which is the original image of Erthrise. This was the first photograph of the Earth taken by a person from lunar orbit:

Then he lost sight of him through one of the two side windows. Anders asked Lovell for color film and at 16:36 UTC on December 24, 1968, he took a second photograph of the Earth, this time in color, from one of the two forward windows intended for docking with the lunar module. This color image, although not the first, went down in history as Earth Dawn. A few seconds later, Anders took another similar color photograph, but even less famous.

After the successful mission, Anders served as backup to Mike Collins as command module pilot, but he knew that without experience in the Gemini program and the inability to demonstrate his skills on the lunar module, the chances of being named commander of the Apollo mission were diminishing. practically did not exist. If he had been lucky, he might have been assigned to the mission as a command module pilot, but it was quite normal that he did not want to risk going to the Moon again to repeat what was achieved on Apollo 8. After Apollo 11 Anders left, NASA joined the National Space Council, and in 1973 he became a member of the Atomic Energy Commission. Three years later, he spent nearly two years as US Ambassador to Norway. Beginning in 1980, he held various management positions in the private sector, including companies such as General Electric and General Dynamics, until his retirement in 1994. Since then, Anders has devoted himself to various charitable initiatives and the creation of his museum of vintage military aircraft.

Two craters on the far side of the Moon bear his name: one 40 kilometers in diameter outside the large Apollo crater, and another almost the same size, christened by the IAU in 2018 with the name “Anders’ Eratrix”, which appears in the legendary photo of the same name. It was Anders who described the Apollo program very well in one sentence:

“We have come from far and wide to explore the Moon, and the most important thing we have discovered is the Earth.”

Hell Astra