Bill Anders flew as lunar module pilot on a mission with no lunar module
Apollo 8 was supposed to test the lunar lander close to Earth. The lander arrived with more than a hundred serious defects, so NASA sent the crew around the Moon without it. That left William Anders holding the title of lunar module pilot with nothing to pilot, and he ended up taking one of history's most famous photographs instead.
On the fourth pass around the Moon in December 1968, the crew watched Earth rise over the lunar horizon, the first people ever to see it. Anders called out, snapped a black-and-white frame, then asked Jim Lovell for colour film and took the picture known as Earthrise. Life magazine later chose it among its hundred photos of the century, and Anders came to see it as a reminder that humanity's only home is fragile. He summed up the mission by saying the crew went to explore the Moon and discovered the Earth.
Getting there involved a strange week. Anders had hoped to become a test pilot and applied to the Air Force's research pilot school, while also applying to NASA, which for once did not require test pilot experience. On his thirtieth birthday, 17 October 1963, Deke Slayton told him he had been chosen as an astronaut. Three days later Chuck Yeager informed him that the test pilot school had turned him down.
His route to that point was unusual too. Born in British Hong Kong, he was a small child in Nanjing when war with Japan broke out; his father was wounded when Japanese bombers sank the gunboat he served on, and Anders and his mother escaped down a mined river to the Philippines. He later trained in nuclear engineering because the Air Force was then pursuing nuclear-powered aircraft, a program cancelled before he graduated in 1962.
After NASA he chaired the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, served as ambassador to Norway, and held senior posts at General Electric and Textron before leading General Dynamics as chairman and chief executive from 1991. He died in June 2024 when the vintage trainer plane he was flying crashed near the San Juan Islands.
Source: William Anders
