The jewel in the heavens was so seductive that Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders had to take a photo of it—and that photo became one of the most famous of the latter 20th century. So compelling is the glow of planet Earth rising out of darkness over the moon’s cratered horizon that it is the icon that underscored American exceptionalism during the space race with the Soviet Union. Anders photo was perfect on many levels, not least as truthful propaganda. It not only fulfilled John F. Kennedy’s campaign promise to land a man on the moon, but it brought all Americans together.
A new middle-grade book, Earthrise: The Story of the Photograph That Changed the Way We See Our Planet by Leonard S. Marcus, introduces a generation—who did not experience the incredible high of watching American astronauts blast off and splash down—to the story of a global brand and the impact it had on low to high culture. Anders’ photo is the “beauty” shot that speaks to the hopes and dreams of the world and the next frontier’s infinite possibilities. Marcus’ book encapsulates the intense emotional power this one image had and continues to have. I asked him to discuss the book, the era, the photo and our mutual passion for all things astronaut.
You are known for your work as a children’s book historian, curator and author. I think I see the trajectory of your interest from Kid Lit to space travel, but I’d like to hear what actually pulled you into this theme.
Well, a few things. I was a fifth grader and a history geek when John Glenn flew his first orbital mission. My mother, knowing how excited I was about it, let me stay home from school that day to watch the blastoff live on TV. NASA was a big part of my own childhood—and of my childhood reading. (For a while, I also drank Tang—the astronaut’s instant orange juice substitute—every morning for breakfast.) Much later, by the time I began researching children’s book history and was writing my biography of [Goodnight Moon author] Margaret Wise Brown, I understood what a powerful symbol the moon was in art and literature. In Brown’s classic picture book, the moon and stars represent everything in life that lies beyond the “here and now” world of our everyday lives. And it’s an encouragement to children to see their world as vast, mysterious and worth exploring. The moon can also represent the dream life—the hidden, deeper side of ourselves that was the source of Margaret Wise Brown’s understanding of childhood. So, the “journey” from writing the biography of the author of Goodnight Moon to telling the story of Apollo 8 feels more like “one small step” than “one giant leap,” at least for me. Finally, as a children’s book historian and critic, I am always thinking about the impact of images, and, as images go, the Earthrise photograph has proven to be one the most impactful images of all time. So that is another reason I wanted to uncover its backstory and share it with young readers, and other readers, too.
I had an astronaut fixation as a kid, too. I formed the Astronaut Fan Club, barraged the entire X-15 and NASA communities with requests for photos and printed material and assembled a rather large collection of NASA-phemera. How long has Earthrise been germinating as a graphic concept?
British historian Robert Poole has written extensively about this in a book that is also titled Earthrise. He believes that one of first graphic representations of the Earth as a ball floating in space was created by Portuguese visionary artist Francisco d’Olanda in the 1540s. He also reports that, contrary to what we were taught in school, Europeans of the Middle Ages did not believe the world was flat but already understood it was a sphere. Even so, seeing an actual portrait of the Earth in the form of a well-focused color photograph, rather than as an artist’s rendering, felt like a brand-new experience to vast numbers of earthlings from the moment Earthrise made its first appearance on the front pages of newspapers across the globe in late December of 1968, just days after the return to Earth of the Apollo 8 crew.
You write that the photo was not on the official mission agenda—that it was taken from the command capsule by Apollo 8’s Bill Anders. Do you feel that it is even more iconic than Neil Armstrong’s “One Small Step for Mankind” moment?
To me, they are both indelible, mind-shifting high points of the space program. The difference between them is that NASA officials were anxious to broadcast Armstrong’s landing on live television so as to prove to the world, in the most dramatic possible way, that we really had beaten the Soviets to the moon, just as President Kennedy had said we would. But when it came to capturing a photo of the Earth from deep space, some at NASA feared the public would dismiss the image as an instance of “space tourism”—a sideshow that didn’t contribute to the mission. Some top officials even worried that NASA’s detractors in Congress might use a photo like Earthrise as an argument against continuing to fund the space program at all.
The Mercury astronauts pose with a model rocket at a press conference in April 1959.
The photo certainly has universal appeal. I hoarded as many Mercury Seven postage stamps as I could. But the Earthrise stamp, with its “In the beginning, God …” message, rocked people’s emotions. Was there a religious connotation to your fascination with the image?
Not for me, and in fact that aspect of the astronauts’ televised reading of the first lines of Genesis as they orbited the moon has always made me very uncomfortable. It shows I guess that the astronauts and their contemporaries weren’t thinking as we tend to do now about just how diverse the world’s population is, and that it’s never a good idea to try to impose your own values on others, even by means of a well-intentioned gesture like that reading, which after all was experienced live by an estimated one billion viewers worldwide.
Your book is aimed at middle-grade readers, but when it comes to our collective fascination with space and space travel, don’t you think that any age group would be interested in Spaceship Earth?
For sure, and in writing Earthrise I was aiming to interest general readers of any age. There’s a need in a book for preteens to provide a little more historical context than would be needed in a book written for adults, but that is the only difference, and I tried as best I could to be unobtrusive about it and not let the background material get in the way of the narrative, which is a pretty dramatic one.
The only thing missing from inside the book is a large full-color print of the photograph. It is on the back, but small enough to miss its grandeur.
The Earthrise photo can also be seen, larger, as part of the front cover design and it remains one of the most easily accessed of all photos online and as a poster. NASA’s wonderful website has an extensive gallery of photographs, many of them in color and in high resolution. It’s a great resource for researchers—and for armchair astronauts.
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