Nows and Forevers

Apollo 8 is my favorite space mission — yes, I have favorites because I’m a space nerd — and I started watching this YouTube documentary. Apollo 11 will always be in the history books, but Apollo 8 was awesome and audacious, the first time humans had ever been out of Earth’s gravity and then around the moon.

Apollo 8 is a reminder of the big things we used to do in this country. All the more so since 1968 was such a horrible year overall: The deaths of Bobby Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of American soldiers at the height of the Vietnam War; the unrest in America’s cities; and constant bad headlines all the way around.

This really was a race to the Moon: Apollo 8’s mission changed in secret less than three months before launch because NASA was afraid the Russians were going to beat us to the Moon. The crew believed they had about a one-in-three chance of success. One of the crew members, Bill Anders, said one of the only two times he was ever scared on Apollo 8 was at launch. “Unbelievably violent,” he said. The Saturn V didn’t play, that’s for sure.

Jim Lovell, who died this past August at age 97, was a national treasure, which I think everyone can agree on. He and Bill Anders and Frank Borman not only became the first men around the Moon, they hit every mark. And there’s their reading “Genesis” on Christmas Eve live on TV to every corner of Earth, a mic drop of epic proportions. Plus the classic “earthrise” photo, that photo you’ve seen, that was taken by Bill Anders passing the Moon.

I was too young to see Apollo 8. I’m looking forward to two months from now, when Artemis II and its four astronauts, will lift off from Cape Canaveral and go ’round the Moon for the first time since December 1972.