Short answers, pulled from the story.
William Anders was a United States Air Force major general, NASA astronaut, nuclear engineer, and businessman, born on the 17th of October 1933 in British Hong Kong. He is best known for taking the Earthrise photograph during the Apollo 8 mission in December 1968, showing Earth rising above the lunar horizon, later chosen by Life magazine as one of its hundred photos of the century.
Apollo 8 flew in December 1968 and was the first crewed mission to leave low Earth orbit and orbit the Moon. Anders served as Lunar Module pilot alongside commander Frank Borman and Jim Lovell; he took the iconic Earthrise photograph, participated in the Christmas Eve live Genesis reading broadcast to Earth, and the mission splashed down on the 27th of December 1968 after 147 hours and 42 seconds.
After NASA, Anders served as executive secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, a commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission, the first chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and United States Ambassador to Norway. He later held senior roles at General Electric and Textron, then became chairman and CEO of General Dynamics from 1991 to 1994.
William Anders died on the 7th of June 2024 at the age of 90, when the vintage Beechcraft T-34 Mentor he was piloting crashed into the waters of north Puget Sound between Jones Island and Orcas Island. Witnesses reported the plane entered a nosedive before crashing and catching fire.
Earthrise is a color photograph taken by William Anders during Apollo 8's fourth lunar orbit on the 24th of December 1968, showing the Earth rising above the lunar surface. It was chosen by Life magazine as one of its hundred photos of the century, and a crater seen in the image was named "Anders' Earthrise" by the International Astronomical Union in October 2018.
Anders became vice chairman of General Dynamics in January 1990 and chairman and CEO on the 1st of January 1991. He restructured the company by selling nearly $3 billion in assets including the F-16 military aircraft division, reducing the workforce from 98,600 to around 35,000 and cutting the company's debt from $430 million to $183 million, while the share price quadrupled. He retired as CEO in 1993 and as chairman on the 4th of May 1994.