Episode 42: Earth-Rise the Story of 1968's Apollo 8 (Special Edition)
George H.W. Bush 1990 - 1991 The Sweep of History
English - September 01, 2021 09:00 - 22 minutes - 15.6 MB - ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsPolitics News History politics history government republican democrat independent speeches world war 2 vietnam war lyndon johnson Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
As we cover so much of the tumultuous year of 1968, we thought we would add one of its brightest moments too.
As the country struggled with Civil Rights, assassinations, civil unrest, and a war in Vietnam we also moved closer to a dream that stretched back to the beginning of life itself. As long as man has been capable of looking into the heavens we have dreamed of walking on the moon. By December of 1968, we were in reach of that dream becoming a reality at last.
During the week of Christmas the first manned mission to the Moon occurred when the Apollo 8 Saturn rocket took off to the moon. In it were Astronauts Frank Bormann, William Anders and Jim Lovell, their mission was to go to the moon, take some pictures for potential landing locations for later flights, and return home safely, alive and well. They did that and much, much more.
In the ultimate of ironies, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a space race to get to the moon, they had spent billions of dollars, and developed all types of technology to discover what was there on the moon but when this mission was done the discovery would actually be the Earth instead. For it was on this flight with just a little bit of color film in an old 1960's technology camera that we finally got to see what the Earth looked like from Outer Space.
Earth-rise is now the most widely distributed photograph in the history of the World and it was taken on this mission, during the most divisive, tumultuous year in modern history, yet for that brief week, these three men on a mission to the moon brought the country and the world together.
And from the Lunar orbit of the Moon, on Christmas Eve 1968, they read a special message to the widest audience in communications history, from a book written nearly 2700 years before....
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