Dec. 21, 1968

Good morning and welcome back to the Rational Protagonist.
Well I had grandiose ideas about this weekend’s blog, but unfortunately for me my son, doing the bidding of his viral overloads, saw it fit to cough in my face last week, thus completing the life cycle of acute viral nasopharyngitis. In other words, I caught a cold.
It was my intention to do a blog on the question wither human nature was inherently good or bad, and I had come up with some pretty interesting stuff, but that will have to wait. Instead, I looked at the date today and remembered one of the most amazing human accomplishments happened today, 40 years ago.
It was the fall of 1968 and the arms race and space race were in full swing. On launch pad 39a the Saturn V rocket that contained the Apollo 8 space craft sat silently, almost pensively, waiting to unleash hell. Miles away the crew of Apollo 8, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders, were just informed that the mission that they trained for, to take the command module into low earth orbit and run some tests, had just been scrubbed. This would be the first manned Apollo launch and mission control wanted to run it a bit conservative after the crew of Apollo 1 died horribly in a fire the year before. Instead the crew was informed that they would be doing just the opposite, they would be taking the risk of a lifetime. There new mission was to fly to and orbit the moon. This was to be the first manned voyage to achieve a velocity sufficient to allow escape from the gravitational field of planet Earth; the first to enter the gravitational field of another celestial body; the first to escape from the gravitational field of another celestial body; and, the first manned voyage to return to planet Earth from another celestial body. Sounds simple? Remember they were flying an untested spacecraft for the first time, not even 10 years after the first man went into space, to a destination 384,403 km away.
December 21st, 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 sat atop the Saturn V rocket 360 feet high, hissing like some gigantic bomb, filled with liquid oxygen, hydrogen, and Kerosene, and waited. At 7:51 am the monstrous engines shuttered to life, each producing more thrust then the three space shuttle engines combined. The five F-1 engine equal 160,000,000 horsepower, about double the amount of potential hydroelectric power that would be available at any given moment if all the moving waters of North America were channeled through turbines. More people worked on the Saturn V rockets than built the pyramids.
And they were on their way.
At about 55 hours and 40 minutes into the flight, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to enter the gravitational sphere of influence of another celestial body. And at 69 hours, 8 minutes, and 16 seconds after launch the SPS ignited and burned for 4 minutes and 13 seconds, placing the Apollo 8 spacecraft in orbit around the Moon. It was the 24th of December 1968. They were a scant 50 miles from the lunar surface.
As the crew settled down and spent their time observing the barren lunar surface, an event happened, something that no one foresaw, but what should have been obvious. An event so powerful that it would change the way humanity viewed itself forever.
At the limb of the lunar horizon a shape started to form, a blue white blob, barely larger than your thumbnail at arms length, started to detach itself from the horizon. They were the first human beings to ever witness an earthrise. Each struggled for a view, photographs were taken.
Archibald MacLeish wrote : "To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know that they are truly brothers."
Now 40 years later I wonder, how has this changed us? The plaque left by the Apollo 11 astronauts reads “we came in peace for all mankind”, not for America, not for North America, not for Christianity, or Judaism or, Islam, but for ALL Mankind.
I should only hope that in my son’s life time, just perhaps, he shall see people that are made of such stuff.
"We close with good night; good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you -- all of you on the good Earth."