Frank Borman, Commander of Apollo 8, died this November aged 95. He had a tremendous career in the military and aerospace, but nothing he left behind is quite as compelling as his greetings on Christmas Eve 1968 from orbit around the Moon.
Earthrise, taken by Apollo 8 crew member William Anders, Christmas, 1968
At the time everyone seemed to grasp there was something about Commander Borman’s reading from Genesis that called humanity together to take a look at ourselves and question how we do things.
Listening again to this now on Christmas eve, 55 years later one cannot help but feel drawn to the timeless poignancy of the message.
Merry Christmas, and God bless us, everyone.
Lawyers Road Review 
It reminds me of something that the late comedian, Norm MacDonald,once said: “Harrison Schmitt – nobody knows who that is. But he was one of 12 people in history who has walked on the moon. What more does a guy have to do to become famous?”
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Hard to know. Much easier to become infamous.
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Too true. When we were growing up, astronauts were our heroes. The people that we all aspired to be. Everyone knew Alan Shepard, John Glenn, Gordon Cooper, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren. They had the “right stuff”. And our generation grew up believing that the conquest of space was our future. Werner Von Braun was the head of the group at NASA planning to send astronauts to land on Mars by 1980. The hope for our salvation lay in the exploration of space and it seemed that the stars were within in our grasp.
Then the budget cuts of the seventies led to the scaling back of NASA and space exploration was no longer a human endeavor, but instead something that nameless scientists and computer geeks did safely on earth through the use of robotic probes. And the only people going to space were the space shuttle technicians whose ventures into the last frontier were never further than a few hundred miles above the earth’s troposphere. Most people cannot even name a space shuttle astronaut, let alone admire them and want to be like them.
The budget minded administrators at NASA were able to accomplish a lot in the past 50 years, but removing the human element from the equation left the public bored and lacking inspiration from the human achievement of sending brave man and women to another planet (and being able to return home again safely).
I hope to live long enough to be able to watch the first humans land on Mars in the next decade – just as I was thrilled to watch as an 11 year old boy, Neil Armstrong descend the ladder of the Eagle LEM and announce to the world that his first step was one giant leap for mankind.
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Mark Kelly. That is a guy I knew flew in a space shuttle. I know this only because of infamy; his wife and Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was gunned down by a lunatic with a pistol.
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