In 1968, in a space race against the Soviets, and truly unprepared for the voyage, NASA launched Apollo 8 to orbit the moon, and astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders became the first humans to leave the bonds of Earth. They would reach their destination on Christmas Eve.
On Dec. 24, at 8:30 p.m. Houston Time, as more than a billion people on earth watched their TVs, CBS interrupted their normal programming. “This is Apollo 8, coming to you live from the Moon,” Borman said.
If in any year America needed Christmas most, it may have been 1968. From 1965 through January 1968, 20,000 American lives had been lost in Vietnam.
On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated. In May, a television documentary noted there were 10 million hungry people in the U.S. On June 5, presidential candidate, Robert Kennedy, was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in L.A.
On August 28, thousands of anti-war protesters rioted outside the Democratic convention in Chicago when it declined to add an antiwar plank to its platform. Among the millions who watched the violence on television, most wondered if America could be put back together again.
In October at the Olympic Games, two Americans bowed their heads and raised a fist in a Black Power salute during “The Star-Spangled Banner,” polarizing America; and in November, Jimi Hendrix sang Dylan’s lyrics, “There must be some kind of way out of here.”
Two weeks before launch, Borman asked a friend, Si Bourgin, to help compose what would be the first broadcast from the moon. It was finally a friend’s wife, Christine Laitin, who made the suggestion which was forwarded to the astronauts. From that day till transmission, it remained a secret.
At the end of that famous transmission, Anders solemnly spoke: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep…And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.”
Lovell continued the passage. “God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters’…And God called the firmament Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.”
Borman concluded, “And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.
“…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.”
Inside Mission Control in Houston, no one moved.
Then one after another began to cry. Walter Cronkite at CBS fought back tears as he came back on the air. All over the night world, people went out of their houses and looked up, trying to see the three men who had just spoken, knowing they couldn’t be seen, but trying all the same.
Of the thousands of telegrams that poured in, one, from an anonymous stranger, stood out.
It read: THANKS. YOU SAVED 1968.
Every Christmas, Christian Faith owes a carol to the One who created the Moon “the lesser light to rule the night:” THANK YOU, LORD. YOU SAVED THE WORLD.
- Log in or Subscribe to post comments.