Apollo astronaut Bill Anders, renowned for capturing one of the most iconic images ever taken in space, has passed away at the age of 90.
Greg Anders, his son, informed NPR that Bill Anders died on Friday in a plane crash in Washington state. He was piloting a Beech A45 when it crashed into the waters off Jones Island. The National Transportation Safety Board is currently investigating the incident.
“Our family is devastated. He was a great man and a great pilot,” Greg Anders told NPR.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, in a statement on X, reflected on Anders’ contributions, saying, “Bill Anders offered to humanity among the deepest of gifts an astronaut can give. He traveled to the threshold of the Moon and helped all of us see something else: ourselves. He embodied the lessons and the purpose of exploration. We will miss him.”
Bill Anders made his historic spaceflight on Apollo 8, the first mission to leave low Earth orbit, reaching the moon on Christmas Eve in 1968. During the mission, while taking photographs for future lunar landing planning, Anders captured the famous Earthrise photo, depicting the Earth rising above the lunar horizon.
“Borman rotated the spacecraft, turned it around and I was the first to see the Earth coming up and I remarked, ‘Wow, look at that!'” Anders recounted to NPR in 2015. The Earthrise photo, showing Earth as a vibrant blue and white sphere against the stark lunar landscape, became one of the most recognizable images in human history.
Author Francis French, who has written extensively on NASA, noted that the photo offered humanity a new perspective on their planet. “Humanity had lived on the Earth forever,” he said, “[but] we’d never known the Earth until we looked back at it and realized how tiny and fragile and precious and finite it is. And it’s changed human thinking ever since.”
Reflecting on the image, Anders said, “The only color that we could see and contrasted by this really unfriendly, stark lunar horizon, made me think, ‘You know, we really live on a beautiful little planet.'”
Anders, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate, rose to the rank of major general in the Air Force Reserve. After his time at NASA, he served as the first chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, U.S. Ambassador to Norway, and CEO of General Dynamics.
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