Volume 2, No. 17. September 13, 2002
Eric's Turn
A
higher power
I’m
always reflecting on the wrong things, it seems. This week I have been thinking
long about one of the most historical events in mankind’s history, an event
that, even with the passage of time, remains vivid in my memory. That memory
was jogged this week by Bob Rogers on the eve of his own historical moment,
receiving a public service medal from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
I was 10 years old, the time frame was Christmas 1968, we were living near Fairbanks,
Alaska, and as our family was driving home through the ice fog late one night
we listened to the car radio broadcasting the Christmas service—the reading
of Genesis’ first chapter in the Bible—by the Apollo 8 crew. Of all
the Apollo space missions, that one still remains the most significant to me,
even moreso than the moonlanding six months later, because the 8 crew were the
first to orbit the moon, the first to go to the dark side of the moon, during
which they could not communicate with earth. Three men in a tiny capsule isolated
in space. And when they emerged from the dark side, they saw something no other
humans had ever seen: the earth rising over the moon. They took a picture of
that moment.
To Rogers, the element of the space program that made the most impact on society
was not Velcro or Tang. It was four photographs: that one of the earth rising
over the “used ashtray” landscape of the moon, the photograph of the
entire earth set against the vast blackness of the universe, the man standing
on the moon, and the footprint in the moon dust.
Of the earth pictures, Rogers said: “There was the earth and there were
no lines on it. Saudi Arabia wasn’t pink and Egypt wasn’t green. It
looked beautiful. And it looked fragile.” He noted that the photo of the
astronaut on the moon not only represented man standing on another planet, but
because that man was wearing a visor and space suit, his age, race and even
gender were indistinguishable. It was a human being.
These images changed the way people on earth thought about their planet. “It’s
no mistake that the environmental movement started right after that picture
came down from Apollo 8,” Rogers said. It also gave rise to the concept
of global thinking in the form of “global market” and “global
community.”
If you’ve read this LOOP in its entirety, you might be surprised that I’m
using this commentary space on the NASA medal story rather than the one at the
top of this page. Don’t be. Two days ago as I sat in a hushed room full
of zoo and aquarium professionals, I quietly thanked the Apollo 8 crew for all
they’d done for this planet.
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