William Anders

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  William Anders took what many consider the most consequential photograph in human history, and he did it almost by accident. On the 24th of December 1968, the Apollo 8 spacecraft emerged from behind the Moon for its fourth orbit, and Anders looked out the window to see the Earth rising above the lunar horizon. He grabbed a camera, shot a black-and-white frame first, then called to Jim Lovell for color film. The resulting photograph, Earthrise, was later chosen by Life magazine as one of its hundred photos of the century. Anders himself summed up the mission's strange irony with one of the most quoted observations in the history of spaceflight: "We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth."

  Anders was born on the 17th of October 1933 in British Hong Kong, the son of a United States Navy lieutenant. He died on the 7th of June 2024, at the age of 90, in the same kind of aircraft he had first trained in as a young pilot. Between those two dates, he flew nuclear-armed interceptors over Iceland, managed the first chairman's office of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, ran one of America's largest defense companies, and founded a flight museum near the shores of Puget Sound. How a boy who fled Japanese bombers in 1937 became the man who photographed our planet from the Moon is the story this documentary sets out to tell.

• 2. A Childhood Under Fire

  ›

  Arthur Ferdinand Anders, William's father, was serving as executive officer of a river gunboat in December 1937 when Japanese bombers attacked and sank the vessel, wounding him in the process. Young William and his mother had already fled Nanjing by train to Guangzhou. From the porch of their hotel there, they could see Japanese aircraft bombing ships on the Pearl River just 200 yards away, and that river was their only escape route. The water was mined, bandits threatened to board any passing boat, and foreign passengers were separated from Chinese travelers by barbed wire.

  They eventually reached the Philippines and waited for news of Arthur, who was rescued by the British and sent to San Diego Naval Hospital with wounds and a staphylococcal infection. He received both the Purple Heart and the Navy Cross, but the Navy discharged him because of his injuries, though he was recalled to active duty during World War II.

  Back in the United States, the young Anders threw himself into scouting, reaching the rank of Life Scout, the organization's second-highest. As a teenager in El Cajon, California, he attended Grossmont High School, then transferred to the Boyden School, a military prep academy in downtown San Diego, where he commuted by bus from La Mesa. The school sat directly under the flight path into Lindbergh Field, and enormous aircraft such as the Convair B-36 Peacemaker flew low overhead. Anders began building model planes and became consumed by flight. He graduated from Boyden in 1951, bound for Annapolis.

• 3. Wings and Warheads

  ›

  At the United States Naval Academy, a blind date introduced Anders to Valerie Elizabeth Hoard. Midshipmen were not permitted to marry, so they wed immediately after his 1955 graduation, and eventually had six children: Alan, Glen, Gayle, Gregory, Eric, and Diana. Anders graduated with a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering and, unlike his father, chose to take his commission in the Air Force rather than the Navy, largely because a carrier cruise had convinced him that naval aviation carried too many fatal accidents.

  Flight training ran in a sequence from the piston-engine Beechcraft T-34 Mentor and North American T-28 Trojan to the jet-powered Lockheed T-33 Shooting Star. After receiving his pilot wings in 1956, Anders joined the 84th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at Hamilton Air Force Base in California, flying Northrop F-89 Scorpions loaded with MB-1 nuclear-tipped air-to-air rockets. He then transferred to the 57th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron in Iceland, where the squadron's job was intercepting Soviet heavy bombers that probed America's air defense perimeter.

  Ambition pushed Anders toward test pilot training, and he consulted Chuck Yeager, who advised him to earn an advanced degree first. Anders applied to the Air Force Institute of Technology hoping to study aeronautical engineering, but the ongoing Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program redirected him into nuclear engineering. He supplemented that coursework with aeronautical engineering classes at Ohio State University. When he graduated in 1962 with a Master of Science in nuclear engineering, the nuclear propulsion program had already been canceled, and he was assigned to the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico to manage the technical side of nuclear reactor programs.

• 4. The Third Group

  ›

  On the 5th of June 1963, NASA announced it would recruit ten to fifteen new astronauts for Project Gemini and Project Apollo, and for the first time in the program's history, test pilot credentials were preferred but not required. That rule change made Anders eligible. He was one of 34 finalists called for interviews, and on his birthday, the 17th of October 1963, Mercury Seven astronaut Deke Slayton called to tell him he had made the cut as part of NASA's third astronaut group. Three days later, Yeager called with less welcome news: Anders had not been selected for the Aerospace Research Pilots School.

  At NASA, Anders worked on dosimetry, radiation effects, and environmental controls. In September 1966, he served as backup pilot for Gemini 11, with Neil Armstrong as backup commander. The conventional stepping-stone logic would have placed him on a Gemini 13 mission, but Project Gemini ended with Gemini 12, removing that path. Anders and Armstrong then became the first astronauts to fly the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle.

  Because Anders and several colleagues in his group lacked test pilot certification, they were assigned to Apollo crews as Lunar Module pilots, the lowest-ranking crew position. That limitation would shape the trajectory of the most famous mission of his career, and ultimately make it more consequential than any landing could have been. On the 22nd of December 1966, he was assigned to the third Apollo mission, under commander Frank Borman.

• 5. Apollo 8 and Earthrise

  ›

  By August 1968, CIA reports indicated the Soviet Union might attempt a crewed flight around the Moon before year's end. The Apollo Lunar Module that had been scheduled for the December mission had arrived at Kennedy Space Center in June 1968 with more than a hundred significant defects, and there was no prospect of it being ready to fly. NASA devised a bolder alternative: send the command and service module alone to orbit the Moon. Commander Frank Borman said yes without hesitation when asked if he wanted the assignment. Anders, as Borman later described him, was a devout Roman Catholic, slightly built, and "one hell of a worker" who avoided the usual astronaut socializing and concentrated with intense focus on the technical demands of the job.

  When the spacecraft emerged from behind the Moon on its fourth orbit, on the 24th of December 1968, the Earth came into view above the lunar surface. The color photograph Anders captured was later picked by Life magazine as one of the hundred photographs of the century. Anders described the view with precision: he asked listeners to imagine themselves in a darkened room with only one visible object, a small blue-green sphere about the size of a Christmas-tree ornament. "Rather than a massive giant," he said, "it should be thought of as the fragile Christmas-tree ball which we should handle with considerable care."

  The crew also broadcast a live reading from the Book of Genesis on Christmas Eve, heard by a worldwide audience. The command module splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on the 27th of December after a flight lasting 147 hours and 42 seconds, touching down just 2 nautical miles from the recovery ship. Due to the combined effects of Special and General Relativity, the three astronauts had aged approximately 150 microseconds less than people on Earth during the voyage. In October 2018, the International Astronomical Union formally named a crater in the photograph "Anders' Earthrise."

• 6. Policy, Regulation, and Diplomacy

  ›

  On the 16th of May 1969, President Richard Nixon nominated Anders to become executive secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, described at the time as the highest government post ever offered to an astronaut. The Senate confirmed him on the 19th of June, though his duties on the Apollo 11 backup crew kept him from assuming the role until August. The council included the NASA administrator, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Transportation; the Vice President chaired it.

  Anders grew pessimistic about the space program's direction. He opposed development of the Space Shuttle, arguing instead for concentrating NASA's resources on the Skylab space station. He also argued that a smaller shuttle would be a wiser choice than a larger one, but the larger version was approved because it would generate more jobs in California. Frustrated by the council's lack of influence, he recommended in 1972 that it be abolished; it was dissolved on the 30th of June 1973.

  Nixon wanted to keep Anders in the administration, and on the 6th of August 1973 appointed him to the five-member Atomic Energy Commission. AEC chair Dixy Lee Ray made him lead commissioner for nuclear and non-nuclear power research and development, and he also chaired the joint US-Soviet nuclear fission and fusion technology exchange program. When the AEC was split on the 19th of January 1975, President Gerald Ford appointed Anders the first chairman of the newly formed Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a post that gave the NRC its own safety research capability independent of the Energy Research and Development Administration. Anders stayed long enough to make the NRC's decision-making process substantially more transparent than the AEC's had been. His wife Valerie's interest in Norway, sparked during the Apollo 8 world publicity tour, led him to accept an ambassadorship there; he served from the 13th of April 1976 through the 18th of June 1977.

• 7. General Dynamics and the Corporate Turnaround

  ›

  After leaving government, Anders spent time as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute before joining General Electric in September 1977 as vice president and general manager of its Nuclear Products Division, responsible for fuel, equipment, and instrumentation for boiling water reactors in San Jose and Wilmington, North Carolina. GE sent him to Harvard Business School in August 1979 for its six-week Advanced Management Program. On the 1st of January 1980, he moved to lead GE's Aircraft Equipment Division, running more than 8,500 employees across five locations in the northeastern United States from headquarters in Utica, New York.

  In 1984, Anders left GE for Textron, where he eventually became senior executive vice president for operations, though he and the CEO did not get along well. A benefit of the role was access to Bell helicopters, a Textron subsidiary. Throughout his civil service and corporate years, he had remained in the Air Force Reserve, maintaining active flight status in NASA Northrop T-38 Talon aircraft, and retired from the reserves as a major general in 1988.

  Anders became vice chairman of General Dynamics in January 1990. On the 1st of January 1991, he became chairman and CEO. The quarter before he arrived had been the worst in the company's history, with a loss of $858 million between October and December 1990. Almost immediately after he took over, the canceled A-12 Avenger II program forced the company to write off $700 million and lay off about 3,500 workers at the Fort Worth plant. Anders responded by selling assets worth nearly $3 billion, including the missile-systems business, the Cessna subsidiary, and on the 9th of December 1992 the military aircraft division that made the F-16, sold to Lockheed Corporation for $1.5 billion. The workforce shrank from 98,600 to around 35,000. The company's debt fell from $430 million to $183 million. Shareholders received $600 million in dividends. Though annual sales dropped from $10 billion to $3.5 billion, the share price quadrupled. Anders retired as CEO in 1993 and as chairman on the 4th of May 1994.

• 8. Heritage, Legacy, and the Final Flight

  ›

  In retirement, Anders and Valerie bought a house in Anacortes, Washington, overlooking Puget Sound and Burrows Island, then added a second home in Point Loma, California, when the northwest winters proved unwelcoming. He established the William A. Anders Foundation to support educational and environmental causes, and in 1996 founded the Heritage Flight Museum in Bellingham, Washington, which later moved to Skagit Regional Airport in Burlington. His son Greg served as vice president, executive director, and webmaster; his son Alan handled maintenance; and Valerie served as secretary.

  The honors accumulated over decades. A crater on the Moon was named for him in 1970; he was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1983, the International Air and Space Hall of Fame in 1990, the United States Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1997, and the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2004. In March 2023, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum awarded him the Michael Collins Trophy for Lifetime Achievement.

  A sample of Anders's Genesis reading from Apollo 8 was used in the track Let There Be Light on the album Songs of Distant Earth by Mike Oldfield. Robert John Burke played him in the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. Anders appeared in the 2005 PBS documentary Race to the Moon, part of the American Experience series. He also confirmed in a C-SPAN appearance that he had fallen asleep while waiting for the Apollo 8 launch.

  On the 7th of June 2024, Anders was piloting a vintage Beechcraft T-34 Mentor, the same model he had trained in as a young Air Force officer, when the plane entered a nosedive and crashed into the waters of north Puget Sound, between Jones Island and Orcas Island. His son Greg confirmed his death and the recovery of his body. By the time he died, Anders had logged more than 8,000 flight hours. The Earthrise photograph he almost missed taking now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art and is credited by environmental historians as a catalyst for the first Earth Day in 1970.