NASA has shared an interview with retired astronaut Bill Anders, who took the iconic Earthrise shot during the Apollo 8 lunar mission in December 1968.
The video (below) landed on NASA’s YouTube channel just before Saturday’s Earth Day, an annual event that seeks to inspire people to work together to protect our precious planet from environmental harm.
Asked to tell the story behind the stunning image of Earth, captured as Anders and fellow crewmembers Frank Borman and James Lovell flew by the moon, the 89-year-old American said he’d been given only a “little bit of photography training” with the modified Hasselblad 500 EL camera that he took to space.
“We were in lunar orbit, upside down and going backwards, so for the first revolutions we didn’t see the Earth and I didn’t really think about that,” Anders said.
“And then we righted ourselves, you know, heads up, and twisted the spacecraft so it was going forward, and while Frank Borman was in the process of doing that, suddenly I saw in the corner of my eye this color. It was shocking.”
Film captured by the crew, shared in Anders’ interview, shows the extraordinary moment when Earth appears over the moon’s horizon. Upon witnessing the stunning view, Anders can be heard saying: “Oh my god, look at that picture over there. There’s the Earth coming up.”
Anders suddenly realizes that it’s a photo opportunity that he doesn’t want to miss, and asks Lovell to pass him a roll of color film “quick.”
The astronaut said he “put the long lens on and started snapping away,” adding that he changed the camera’s settings slightly with each shot in the hope that at least one of the frames would be correctly exposed.
Pondering Earth Day and how the famous photo continues to have an impact, Anders repeats one of his favorite lines about the 1968 space voyage: “We went to the moon to explore the moon, and what we discovered was the Earth,” adding: “[The photo] makes people think, the fragile little ball that we live on.”
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.