A beautiful short film about what it was like for the astronauts who saw the whole earth for the first time.
Wednesday marked the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, an event that was largely inspired by the impact of seeing photos of the earth from space taken by the crew of Apollo 8. In 1968 that three person crew left earth's orbit for the first time with the goal of flying around the moon. No one considered, even for a minute, that they would be able to see the earth in space. The mission's commander, Frank Borman, said later: "What they should have sent is poets, because I don’t think we captured in its entirety the grandeur of what we had seen." The poet Archibald MacLeish said of seeing the photographs: “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 now they are truly brothers.”
This film is especially poignant as the earth's people learn to live with a pandemic that effects us all.
Film: Earthrise, by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee