[ticking] From CBS, New York, in color, “Face the Nation,” a spontaneous and unrehearsed news interview with the Apollo 8 astronauts — Colonel Frank Borman, the command pilot of the mission; Captain James Lovell, who has logged more hours in space than any other man; and Lieutenant Colonel William Anders, for whom the trip to the moon was his first voyage into space. You three gentlemen are the first men to escape from the Earth, so to speak. Is there, I’m sure you’re going to be asked this over and over again, but I think everybody wonders about it. Is there some kind of a psychological wrench, when you see the Earth actually receding, when you’re alone in the universe, and the only spot in the whole visible universe is an Earth which is so distant that it looks like — as I believe one of you said — like a quarter, or something of that sort? Is there some kind of a feeling which might seriously affect people who are not like you — trained, experienced? In other words, if you had a passenger aboard, who were not so busy, would he really feel a wrench? [music] Never thought a bit about what it might mean to people on Earth. I only know what it felt like to me. [music] What they should have sent was poets, because I don’t think we captured, in its entirety, the grandeur of what we had seen. [music] We were the first ones to see it in color from that altitude. Nobody had ever seen anywhere close to that. I mean, at best, they’d see the horizon out like this. [music] You don’t see cities. You don’t see boundaries. You don’t see countries. You don’t see people. It looks like the place is uninhabited. [music] When we went into orbit and then injected to the moon, there was absolutely no prior thinking about what the Earth would look like. Zero. And it was only when we were separated from the booster and able to turn around and sort of catch our breath and float over to the window that I say, wow, look at that, to myself. And neither Frank nor Jim had ever seen anything like that either. There isn’t that much difference between the Earth and the orbit. It’s only when you get into deeper space that you experience the total immersion in the heavens. The Earth was the only thing in the entire universe, of all this inky black void, that Earth was there with a beautiful blue hue to it. The blue marble — that’s what it looked like, a blue marble or blue agate. I had trouble orienting myself because I didn’t know which end was north, which end was up. And I worked my way down from the South Pole, Antarctica, and was able to identify continents and whatnot, and realized that, well, O.K., that brown thing off to the right was the bulge of Africa. And then, as things started popping out, I could see Florida and the tongue of the ocean down at the Bahamas, very blue. Well, I thought, oh my God, this is amazing. [music] This was the first time that we actually escaped from the Earth. And at that time, I suddenly realized that everything in life is relative. When you’re in a room, your world revolves around those walls. When you’re outside, then your world revolves around what your eye can see. And suddenly, when you’re in a spacecraft, you think in terms of oceans, of islands. [music] There was essentially zero interest in images of Earth from space. Nobody told me to take a picture of the Earth. I didn’t think about it either. NASA interest was focused on the mission, and particularly Borman, was kind of anti-photography. It was just one more thing to divert the crew to actually completing the mission, which was to go around the moon and get back alive. [music] We didn’t have any specific directions of the use of photography. We were all on the Earth, so we all knew about the Earth. But they wanted photographs of something that was unusual, closeups of the far side of the moon. And the Earth was strictly secondary. We had Hasselblad 70-millimeter cameras, with a magazine that held 200 exposures of thin-based film. Looking back at the Earth, I’m thinking, man, that’s pretty. I wonder what the right F stop would be. Well, I always took three or four. [CAMERA CLICKING AND MUSIC PLAYING] We had what today would be a very rudimentary TV system, our camera. It didn’t work all that well at first. But eventually, people on the ground were able to see something that resembled an illuminated sphere called the Earth. And it wasn’t high definition by any means. I was wrong on things at times, and I was terribly wrong on the television. I didn’t even want to take a television camera with us. That was stupid on my part. The television brought back the realities of what we were doing to the American people, with the people of the world. [music] When you’re in the space between the Earth and the moon, it’s entirely different than when you’re going around the Earth. Between the Earth and the moon, as you look out one window, if the sun is in that quadrant, you see sun, and it’s light as day. You look out the other window, and it’s pitch black, because that window is in the shadow of the spacecraft. Well, the dark side was like a night without a moon on a high Arizona desert. The skies are enormously illuminated by stars, more stars than you can imagine. [music] The moon is orbiting this way, and we’re aiming for the front of the moon, the leading edge of the moon. The moon is going, as I recall, something like 3,000 miles an hour. And when we get behind the moon, we fire the rocket to slow us up, so we will be captured by the lunar gravity. If we hadn’t fired that rocket, we would have just gone back and slingshotted back to the Earth. Apollo 8, Houston, one minute to LOF. All systems go. As we came into the shadow of the moon, suddenly it was infinitely black. And I looked out, and there were stars everywhere. And then as I looked out my side window, suddenly the stars stopped, and there was this black hole. And the hairs went up on the back of my neck. And then I realized that that was the moon, blocking out the stars. It was really black. And that brought up a animalistic feeling. Well, we were looking at a portion of the moon that human eyes had never seen before. The moon might have been what the Earth looked like before life, like we were back at the beginning. I can remember feeling that way. It was a poignant moment. Space is black, black, ink black, velvet black. There is no color to space, just as there is no color to the moon. The moon is all shades of gray. [music] My job was to make sure the spacecraft kept running. And oh, by the way, if I had any time, I was the photographer, as well. I was the guy stuck with the camera. It was a tangential job. And once I could show that the spacecraft was working well, my job was to take pictures of those craters. It wasn’t a Ansel Adams, propose it just right, shades of gray. It was take the goddamn crater and move on to the next one. I started out setting up the cameras and taking pictures according to my photographic flight plan. No matter how closely you looked, it was crater upon crater. It was interesting, but after about an hour, I’m thinking, you know, it’s kind of boring. [music] We had been spending all these revolutions looking at the moon. Then as we come around this, an uninviting place, we look up, and there’s the Earth. It’s 240,000 miles away. It was small enough, you could cover it with your thumbnail. And everything we held dear — our families, our country — everything I held dear was back on that blue planet. That was a sense of, ah, how in the world could this little ball exist in this vast universe of nothing? The fact that the lunar horizon was so ugly and stark, that amplified the beauty of the Earth. We were all awestruck by the difference, the beauty of the Earth and its color against the blackness of space. [music] We had never had any discussion of taking an Earthrise picture before the flight or during the flight. And yet, when we came over the moon on this flight, we looked up, and there was this beautiful blue ball in the background. It awestruck us immediately. Get that picture. This is the best picture we’ve got of the whole flight. It gave a contrast. It said that, hey, here are people looking from a different planet, looking back at what is our home. [music] When I looked at the Earth on the way back and had time to be a little more contemplative, underscored and got me thinking, really for the first time, we’re just a small piece of a almost infinite universe. Before the flight, I was a Catholic and had communion from my old parish priest. But I must say that my faith was somewhat undercut as I looked back at the tiny Earth, and I imagined that if the Earth was the size of a golf ball at one lunar distances, at 10 lunar distance, it was down to a B.B. And a hundred lunar distances, where it’s hardly going anywhere in space, it’s like a grain of sand. I got to thinking, is that really the center of the universe? [music] Well, I was around the moon, and I saw the Earth. I realized suddenly how insignificant we all are, just tucked away in space around a rather normal star, the sun, probably just one of billions of stars in the universe. I personally thought that everybody would like to have that view as we did, to see the Earth as it really is. I believe all three of us had an emotional reaction to seeing the Earth. The dearest things in life were back on the Earth — my family, my wife. [music] The target for the re-entry was something like a mail slot, if the mailman had delivered your letter from 20,000 miles away. If we were too steep, we would burn up. And if we were too shallow, we’d skip out, like skipping a stone on water. It always reminded me of flying inside of a neon tube. It was so bright. And every once in a while, you’d see chunks of the heat shield go flying by. [music] [music] [splash] [helicopter engine] I really don’t know what I can say in a situation like this. We’re very grateful for your participation. You stayed out here over Christmas. A lot of attention gets focused on the flight crew, but there’s a great vast reservoir of people that support us, and I guess we all did this. And we appreciate your help very much. Thank you. [cheering] Everything that I held dear was on this Earth. And I got off the airplane, and there it was — my family and my co-workers clapping and cheering. That was a very, very — that was probably the most emotional part of the flight for me, is the homecoming. People were going nuts. But just getting home was a rewarding experience. There was a sense of accomplishment, a sense of euphoria that we actually did it, and it’s completed. And just think — we were there. And now we’re back again. We always somehow could not help knowing the enormity of what we did. I knew that, with NASA, that everybody was elated. And I was, too. But the accolades that suddenly came to us, it was much greater than, at least, I expected. [music] Now, the question that we always receive — what was the most indelible view? What do you bring back? What do you remember after this flight? And I must confess that all of us, when we saw the Earth rising over the lunar landscape, that this was it. The picture that Bill took of the Earth from Apollo 8 became sort of the trademark of the mission. Everywhere we went, we presented that photograph, all over Western Europe, all over the Soviet Union. It was sort of widely admired. I think people could identify with it, because they were on that blue marble. Photograph itself was the thing that everybody liked. I mean, it represented Apollo 8. And it could be almost like saying it was the fourth astronaut, because it was there, and it did the job. One frame had showed exactly our existence. So the one overwhelming emotion that we carried with us is the fact that we really do all exist on one small globe. And when you get out 240,000 miles, it really isn’t a very large Earth. When people had time to contemplate all that and let it sink in, that’s what really made the Earthrise picture one that was considered such a valuable picture for the 20th century. I don’t take much philosophical, artistic credit for that. I just happened to be there, had the camera, and wanted the color film, and took the picture. Being unlikely poets, or not being poets at all, we have to turn to a very distinguished poet. And if I may, I’d like to read to you an excerpt from Archibald MacLeish, because I think it captures the feelings that we all had in lunar orbit. “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful, and that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold, brothers who know now that they are truly brothers.” Gentlemen, since you’ve now established yourselves, by your own admission, as philosophers, I’d like to ask you a kind of a philosophical question. Do you think it’s changed something in you? I notice, for example, you always refer now to the good Earth. You’re hardly able to say Earth without saying ‘good Earth,’ as though you had gotten some new affection for this ball. I don’t think it’s changed anything in me, but it certainly has amplified a feeling, a basic feeling, that I’ve had for many years about the Earth. I think it first started when Jim and I flew on Gemini, and you realize that these boundaries we have are really artificial ones. Well, you mentioned about the Earth receding. And that feeling of mine, that perhaps, we wouldn’t get back there — which, of course, would be natural — if you could only transform that into everybody on the Earth, that they really don’t understand and realize what you have here until you leave it. I may be naïve, but I think that we will eventually, through the space program and through the space exploration, away from the Earth and away from the totally nationalistic interest, we may, in some way, develop a closer relationship here among the people. I firmly believe that. [music] I don’t think the Apollo program, as yet, brought as worldly a view, interlocking view, to humankind that I had hoped. And even today, when I hear people chanting that we ought to go on to Mars, I’m thinking, well, why don’t we get our act together here on Earth first, and go to Mars as human beings, not as jingoistic Americans or Chinese or Russians or Indians. Let’s just do it as human beings. It makes me feel a little bit disappointed. We did something that ended up showing the Earth and its people exactly how we existed, where we are, that we were really, here on Earth, a spacecraft, and we were all astronauts. And whether we liked it or not, like we were in spacecraft, having to work closely together to accomplish the mission. Down here, we seem to not be able to do that. It was a very, very sobering look to see this beautiful, little blue marble in the middle of all that darkness. And you realized how lonely we really are on this wonderful Earth. And I think it gave a lot of people hope and transcended national boundaries. Of course, things got back to normal rapidly. But at least for an instant in history, I believe that people looked upon themselves as citizens of the Earth. [music]