SEATTLE — William Anders, the first Apollo 8 astronaut who took the iconic “Earthrise” photo in 1968 that showed the planet as a shadowy blue marble from space was killed Friday when the plane he was piloting alone crashed into the waters off Washington state’s San Juan Islands collapsed. He was 90.
His son, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Greg Anders, confirmed the death to The Associated Press.
“The family is devastated,” he said. “He was a great pilot and we will miss him terribly.”
William Anders, a retired major general, has said that the photo was his most important contribution to the space program and made the Apollo 8 command module and service module work.
The photo, the first color image of Earth from space, is one of the most important photos in modern history because of the way it changed the way people viewed the planet. The photo is said to have sparked the global environmental movement because it shows how fragile and isolated the Earth looks from space.
NASA administrator and former Senator Bill Nelson said Anders embodied the lessons and purpose of exploration.
“He traveled to the threshold of the moon and helped us all see something else: ourselves,” Nelson wrote on the social platform X.
Anders took the photo during the crew’s fourth orbit of the moon, frantically switching from black-and-white to color film.
“Oh my God, look at that picture there!” Anders said. ‘That’s where the earth comes up. Wow, that is so beautiful!”
The Apollo 8 mission in December 1968 was the first human spaceflight to leave low Earth orbit and travel to the moon and back. It was NASA’s boldest and perhaps most dangerous journey yet and one that paved the way for the Apollo moon landing seven months later.
“Bill Anders forever changed our perspective of our planet and ourselves with his famous Earthrise photo on Apollo 8,” Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, who is also a retired NASA astronaut, wrote on X. “He inspired me and generations astronauts and explorers. My thoughts are with his family and friends.”
About 11:40 a.m., a report came in that an older model plane had crashed into the water and sank near the north end of Jones Island, San Juan County Sheriff Eric Peter said. Greg Anders confirmed to KING-TV that his father’s body was recovered Friday afternoon.
According to the Federal Aviation Association, only the pilot was aboard the Beech A45 aircraft at the time.
The National Transportation Safety Board and the FAA are investigating the crash.
William Anders said in 1997 Oral History of NASA interview that he felt the Apollo 8 mission was not without risks, but that there were important national, patriotic, and exploration reasons to proceed. He estimated that there was about a one in three chance that the crew would not return, and the same chance that the mission would be a success and the same chance that the mission would not start in the first place. He said he suspected Christopher Columbus sailed with worse odds.
He talked about how the Earth looked fragile and seemingly physically insignificant, yet was a home.
“We had gone backwards and upside down and hadn’t really seen the Earth or the sun, and as we spun around and came around, we saw the first rising of the Earth,” he said. “That was definitely by far the most impressive thing. It was really a contrast to see this very delicate, colorful sphere, which looked like a Christmas tree ornament to me, appearing above this very stark, ugly moonscape.
Anders said afterwards that he wished he had taken more photos, but mission commander Frank Borman was concerned about whether everyone was rested and forced Anders and Command Module Pilot James A. Lovell Jr. to sleep, “which probably made sense.”
Chip Fletcher, a professor at the University of Hawaii who has done extensive research on coastal erosion and climate change, remembers seeing the photo as a child.
“It just opened my brain to realize that we are alone, but we are together,” he said, adding that it still affects him today.
“It’s one of those images that never leaves my mind,” he said. “And I think that’s true for a lot of people in a lot of professions.”
Anders served as a backup crew for Apollo 11 and for Gemini XI in 1966, but the Apollo 8 mission was the only time he flew to space.
Anders was born on October 17, 1933 in Hong Kong. At the time, his father was a Navy lieutenant aboard the USS Panay, an American gunboat in China’s Yangtze River.
Anders and his wife Valerie founded the Heritage Flight Museum in Washington State in 1996. Now located at a regional airport in Burlington, it features 15 aircraft, several antique military vehicles, a library and many artifacts donated by veterans, according to the museum website. Two of his sons helped him run it.
The couple moved to Orcas Island, in the San Juan archipelago, in 1993 and had a second home in their hometown of San Diego, according to a biography on the museum’s website. They had six children and thirteen grandchildren. Their current home in Washington was in Anacortes.
Anders graduated from the Naval Academy in 1955 and served as a fighter pilot in the Air Force.
He later served on the Atomic Energy Commission, as U.S. Chairman of the Joint U.S.-USSR Nuclear Fission and Fusion Energy Technology Exchange Program, and as Ambassador to Norway. According to him, he later worked for General Electric and General Dynamics NASA biography.
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McAvoy reported from Honolulu. Associated Press writer Lisa Baumann contributed to this report.