Bill Anders died yesterday at the age of 90. He was solo piloting a small aircraft when it crashed into that big watery, island-y area north of Seattle just after noon. I like to think an old bird like him died happy, doing exactly what he loved to do, rather than wasting away in a nursing home or a hospital bed.
Anders was the NASA astronaut who snapped one of the most famous photographs in history, that of the Earth rising over the Moon’s horizon as his Apollo 8 spaceship orbited our natural satellite. Here are two shots of “Earthrise,” as it came to be known, in sequence (the second, color image is the one made famous) as well as a Hasselblad camera similar to the device Anders used on Christmas Eve, 1968:
That first black and white image was taken by Anders’ crewmate Frank Borman while Anders scrounged around the capsule looking for a roll of color film. Anders’ shot was displayed in newspapers and on TVs all over the world. It was the first time the billions of us alive at the time could see our world as it is: a colorful ball set in a lonely void of blackness.
I recall thinking it was such a shame the Apollo 8 crew, also including Jim Lovell, couldn’t land on the Moon, considering how far they’d travelled and how close they’d come to its surface. I didn’t realize at the time that Apollo 8 took off without a lunar module. It was the first human space mission to escape the gravity of the Earth. It took the ship 68 hours to get to lunar orbit. On the way, Apollo 8 reached a speed of 24,593 miles per hour. Fortunately, no trans-lunar traffic cops were on duty those days or Command Module pilot Lovell would be on the hook for a hefty fine.
Anyway, Anders’ death got me to thinking about the US crewed space program, in full swing back then. Here’s a fascinating, if rather unsavory fact about the Gemini and Apollo missions, most of which lasted days and even weeks. When US Navy frogmen reached the splashed-down capsules and popped the doors open, they were hit with a blast of awful stench. NASA had yet to figure out how to eject the astronaut’s piss and shit and so said excreta remained on board throughout the mission.
NASA’s found a way, since then, to off-board urine but has yet to come up with a way to shoot the solid stuff off into space. With the US hoping to launch a Mars mission within the next few years, a trek that’s been estimated to last anywhere from eight to 34 months, they’d better get that done soon
And you thought keeping your own bathroom clean was an miserable task.
