244 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
In 1957 the Soviet Union launched the world’s first
artificial satellite. The news of Sputnik landed like a
bomb in Cold War America, and triggered fears
of Soviet scientific and technological superiority. The
Eisenhower administration redoubled its efforts to
close this perceived gap, and the following spring
established the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA). Across the country,
a generation of American students—urged on by
their leaders, teachers, and parents—rushed into the
sciences. The Cold War now reached into outer space.
Within months of his inauguration, President
Kennedy pledged to land a man on the moon
by the end of the decade. NASA’s Mercury and
Gemini missions successfully launched manned
spacecraft into orbit, laying the groundwork for
the more ambitious goal of reaching the moon.
By the mid-1960s, unmanned flights brought back
detailed photographs that were used to generate
comprehensive maps of the lunar surface, thereby
ending a reliance on telescopes that had stretched
back for centuries.
The Apollo 8 mission of 1968 was the first to
send astronauts to the moon. Initially planned to
orbit the earth, it was redesigned at the last minute
in response to reports that the Soviets were about
to go further. With this change, Apollo 8 became
the first mission to leave earth’s orbit, capturing
the imagination of the entire world. Launched on
December 21, it capped an extraordinarily divisive,
violent, and confusing year. The January Tet Offensive
had forced a reckoning over the United States’
chaotic mission in Vietnam, and led President
Johnson to end his bid for a second term. Martin
Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated in April,
just months before presidential candidate Robert
Kennedy was killed. The Democrats had torn one
another apart at their August convention in Chicago,
paving the way for Richard Nixon to win the White
House in November.
In this context, the effect of the Apollo 8 mission
should not be underestimated. On December 24,
the astronauts read from the Book of Genesis, and
wished everyone back home a Merry Christmas. But
even more moving was what the crew themselves
THE PROMISE OF AEROSPACE
NASA, “Earthrise,” photo from
Apollo 8 mission, 1968, and
“Lipton Lunar Space Map,”
Apollo 11 mission, 1969
saw on that day. Orbiting the moon, they could not
contain their glee as the earth rose over the lunar
horizon, giving them an unprecedented view of
their home planet in the distance. The astronauts
were startled: they had been so focused on the
lunar mission that they had thought little about the
perspective it might bring to the earth itself. They
hurried to capture the moment with their cameras.
NASA subsequently released the images to the
public. Quickly dubbed “Earthrise,” the photograph
shown above was the first humanly recorded view of
earth from space. The orientation of the photograph
shown here is technically correct, with the North
Pole at the top and the sunset moving longitudinally
from east to west. The photograph is commonly
reproduced, however, with earth “rising” above the
moon, mimicking a familiar perspective of the sun
and moon from earth.
The photograph first appeared in newspapers
on December 30, then flooded color magazines
in subsequent weeks. It resonated immediately,
an evocative picture of a small and distant earth.
From this perspective, the conflicts that consumed
humanity seemed to pale next to a much larger,
even metaphysical reality. A year later, the emerging
environmental movement appropriated the
photograph to signal the planet’s fragility. From the
Whole Earth Catalog to the first Earth Day, “Earthrise”
became not just a symbol but a call to action.
The breathtaking mission of Apollo 8 was soon
overshadowed when the astronauts of Apollo 11
landed on the moon the following summer. That
exhilarating event fueled even greater enthusiasm
for outer space, as shown in this souvenir map issued