A Tin Can Inspires Hope
How Apollo 8 Saved America - and the World - in the Turbulent Year of 1968
For those of us who weren’t born yet or who were too young to remember, the fate of American society in 1968 was perhaps at its weakest since the Civil War. We were literally tearing at the seams. This was the year that saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. This was the year of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which put American troops on the defensive, and forced CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite - the most trusted man in America at the time - to declare the war was a lost cause. More American soldiers would die (16,899) in Vietnam this year than any other. This was the year of constant riots in urban neighborhoods as black communities struggled with both internal and external conflicts of decay, racism and injustice. This was the year President Johnson announced he would not seek a second term as president, sending the Democratic Party into a frenzy, dividing its cohorts among the establishment and the emerging New Left, culminating in violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. This was the year the counterculture movement made new inroads into mainstream American culture. New fashion trends were considered provocative and flaunting sexuality. The Beatles had dropped acid and behind the scenes of writing new music were slowly drifting apart. Otis Redding was dead, but his posthumous song, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” was fast becoming an all-time classic. And the Cold War, with the threat of nuclear annihilation, remained ever present; no more so than the Space Race between Soviet cosmonauts and our American astronauts in Cape Kennedy, Florida. The original Star Trek was ending its television run, but Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered in movie theaters. The last James Bond movie, 1967’s You Only Live Twice, had been rewritten (by Roald Dahl) from its source material to involve a plot of international theft of American and Soviet rockets. The popular television show, I Dream of Jeannie, depicted an astronaut who is pursued by a beautiful love-struck genie.
We were obsessed with outer space. 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still remains a classic because the futuristic story signaled the greatest threat did not come from deep space but from our own planet, i.e., ourselves, a foreshadowing of how three men orbiting the Moon seventeen years later would invoke reflection. The 1950s matinee and drive-in horror films of outer space monsters evolved as the Soviets beat us into space with first Sputnik in 1957 and then Yuri Gagarin’s historical flight in 1961, being the first human to launch towards the stars. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy’s proclamation to land an American on the Moon by decade’s end inspired the country, with the successes of both the Mercury (John Glenn being the first (third in space) American to orbit the Earth) and Gemini (Ed White being the first American to perform a spacewalk aboard Gemini 4) projects. By the mid-1960s, the entire world was captivated by the growing urgency of who would be the first to land on the Moon. Yet the Americans remained one step behind the Soviets, who seemed to be advancing at a faster rate. The hope was this would change with the launch of the Apollo program.
The cult of personality has always been something attached to American culture, though this is not to say we invented it. Following World War II, aviation pilots remained at the forefront of these cultural heroes, no more so than legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager. But with the start of the US government’s space program, and the invention of NASA, soon, astronauts would become the real rock stars of our cultural admiration. There was Elvis and the Beatles, no doubt, but then there were the all-American astronauts assigned to brave death in order to beat the Russians to the Moon. It was a carefully cultivated image, part experience and part photo-op. The original Mercury Seven astronauts all were capable test pilots and passed the new rigors of astronaut training (see 1983’s The Right Stuff) to gain this elite status. The template was then passed on to new candidates for the future programs: current or former military pilots, white (as nearly all pilots were at the time), skilled in mathematics and engineering, and having a smile worthy of a cover portrait on Time Magazine. This formula propelled the image of the American astronaut, along with NASA’s success, into the Apollo program’s intent of landing on the Moon.
Then, the tragedy of Apollo 1 nearly crippled the entire program. On January 27, 1967, a fire inside the command module capsule killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee while they sat locked inside atop the launch pad in Florida. Several factors played into the catastrophe, including the inability of the crew to open the hatch from the inside. Grissom had been the second American in space in 1962, and while Apollo 1 was intended to showcase the new machinery that would be developed and used to ‘eventually’ put someone on the Moon, the situation nearly undid all the momentum the American space program had achieved since 1958. Inquiries were made, and the relentless schedule, while continued, was addressed by NASA and many fellow astronauts who personally knew the three crewmen vowed to not let their deaths be for nothing.
Fast forward a year and a half later, the Apollo program continued, and NASA was about to put its mega-project, the Saturn V rocket, loaded with a crew into space for the very first time. Commanding a height of 363 feet, and costing $185 million per launch (equivalent to $1.23 billion in 2020, multiplied by 15, the number of rockets built because they were non-retrievable once used), it was the greatest technological investment the US government had done up until that point. All would be riding on if that rocket could carry humans to the Moon. And carry it did.
On December 21, 1968, Apollo 8 took off from Cape Kennedy with one mission: be the first to circle the Moon. It took nearly three days to reach the Moon’s orbit, and once they did, the crew of Bill Anders, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell knew they were embarking on something quite magical. Perhaps the most enchanting of these moments came upon Apollo 8’s first orbit, having circled past the dark side of the Moon and the radio silence from Earth that it brought, when suddenly over the horizon, a familiar blue dot appeared like no human being had ever seen before. As Jim Lovell would say in an interview in 2018, “I could put my thumb up to the window, and completely hide the earth…Everything I ever knew was behind my thumb.” With a handheld camera scheduled to record the rocky surface below, Bill Anders instead raised the camera to the window and clicked off a few images of what become known as “Earth Rise,” the iconic shot of our home resting above the Moon in a blackened universe. For thousands of years, as long as humans looked up at the Moon and wondered; with our view of the stars, of our place in all of this uncertainty, it had always been from a single frame of reference. Now, seeing the Earth, our home, from a distance, floating all alone in the blackened space, it realigned how we saw ourselves in the stars. And this transformation started with a photograph.
But perhaps Apollo 8’s most enduring moment came on Christmas Eve. As was popular at the time, the national news ran live broadcasts from the crew inside the capsule. It was a way for the astronauts to reassure their worried families that they were alive and well, and reassure the world that human beings were actually doing it. Here, on Christmas Eve, with the world listening, the crew took turns reading Books 1-10 of Genesis. This was not done to invoke a religious meaning to the mission, but to invoke a message of peace and of a single human race, now made all the more clear by three men with time to reflect in exceptional circumstances. The moment symbolized the potential of humanity. Was destroying ourselves our fate, or were we capable of greater things? There need not be war or hatred or violence. There could be peace, now represented by the silence of space and the euphoria of touching the stars, literally. If Heaven could be reached by mortals, surely these brave three astronauts risking all were closer now than anyone had ever been before. Perhaps their voyage had deeper meaning, after all? They would return safely to our home world a few days later, closing out 1968, a year that history would document as one of America’s most turbulent, with an exhale for restitution in a world that could know peace.
The crew, like all astronauts, received their share of fan mail. One telegram kept it simple. “Thank you Apollo 8. You saved 1968.”
So, in uncertain times, when life can throw moments that seem overbearing and feelings of despair encroach or the weight of neglect can be a suffocating malaise of self-pity and sorrow, remember that all is not lost just because today has beaten you down. Tomorrow gives you a chance to rise and try again. And try you must. Our spirits demand doing. That’s how you beat back the darkness, that’s when the madness will subside and the high watermark of envy will evaporate. Hope is a good thing, perhaps the best of things (a wiser Andy Dufresne once said). That was the symbolic message of Apollo 8’s orbit. It gave hope to the world in an otherwise rotten year. And while we might be deprived of a floating tin can full of astronauts orbiting the Moon at the moment, know that it doesn’t take much to inspire hope. It takes faith in believing better times are on the horizon, perhaps tomorrow or maybe the next day. But surely, they will arrive. We are a stubborn bunch, and faith is a stubborn thing making impossible demands. A mortal leaping across the canyon will surely end in death, eh Dr. Jones? 2020 has been an exhausting roller coaster of broken tracks and repetitive motion sickness for everyone. And yet here we stand, together. Sometimes, believing in the impossible to happen is the only way it ever can. Call it faith, call it luck, call it Karma. All it takes is believing. I choose to believe 2021 will be much better than 2020. In the spirit of Christmas, having faith is precisely how miracles come true.
I’ll leave you with Apollo 8 Commander Frank Borman’s closing remarks.
“And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”
See you in 2021.