William Anders, the former Apollo 8 astronaut who took the iconic “Earthrise” photo in 1968 showing the planet as a shadowy blue marble from space, has died. American media report this.
90-year-old Anders was killed when the plane he was piloting, a Beech A45, crashed. It ended up in the waters off the San Juan Islands in Washington state, on the American northeast coast. There were no other occupants.
Anders himself has said several times that the ‘Earthrise’ photo was his most important contribution to space travel, given the philosophical impact it had. It was the first color image of the Earth from space and changed the way people viewed the Earth. The photo is also said to have sparked the global environmental movement because it showed how vulnerable and isolated the Earth looks from space.
The three crew members of the Apollo 8 space mission were the first people to leave low Earth orbit and travel to the moon. They have not yet set foot on the moon. The crew of Apollo 11 had that privilege in July 1969, more than a year later.
William Anders said in a 1997 NASA interview that he did not think the 1968 Apollo 8 mission was risk-free, but that there were important national, patriotic, and exploration reasons for continuing. He estimated that there was about a one in three chance that the crew would not survive the mission. He suspected that Christopher Columbus had once boarded with worse chances of survival.