Earthrise: The Story of the Photo that Changed the World | Short Film Showcase

From CBS New York in color, Face the Nation: a spontaneous and unrehearsed news interview with the Apollo 8 astronauts Colonel Frank Borman, the command pilot of the mission, Captain James Lovell, who has logged more hours in space than any other man, and Lieutenant Colonel William Anders, for whom the trip to the moon was his first voyage into space.

"You three gentlemen were the first men to escape from the earth, so to speak. I'm sure you're gonna be asked this over and over again, but I think everybody wonders about it: Is there some kind of a psychological wrench when you see the earth actually receding? When you're alone in the universe, and the only spot in the whole visible universe is an earth which is so distant that it looks like, as I believe one of you said, like a quarter? As I'm thinking that, sir, is there some kind of a feeling which might seriously affect people who are not like you, trained experienced? In other words, if you had a passenger aboard who were not so busy, would he really feel a wrench?"

"I never thought a bit about what it might mean to people on earth. I only know what it felt like to me. What they should have sent was poets, because I don't think we captured in its entirety the grandeur of what we had seen. We were the first ones to see it in color, you know, from an altitude nobody had ever seen anywhere close to that. I mean, at best, they'd seen the horizon out like this; you don't see cities, you don't see boundaries, you don't see countries, you don't see people. It looks like the place is uninhabited."

"When we went into orbit and energy injected to the moon, there was absolutely no prior thinking about what the earth would look like. Zero. It was only when we were separated from the booster and able to turn around and sort of catch our breath and float over in the window did I say, 'Wow, look at that' to myself, and neither Frank nor Jim had ever seen anything like that either."

"There isn't that much difference between the earth and the orbit. It's only when you get into deeper space that you experience the total immersion in the heavens. The earth was the only thing in the entire universe of all this inky black void. The earth was there with a beautiful blue hue to it, the blue marble—that's what it looked like, a blue marble. I was having trouble orienting myself because I didn't know which end was north, which end was up. I worked my way down from the South Pole, Antarctica, and was able to identify continents and whatnot and realize that, well, okay, that brown thing off to the right was the bulge of Africa. And then as things started popping out, I could see Florida and the tongue of the ocean that the Bahamas—very blue. I thought, 'Oh my God, this is amazing.' This was the first time that we actually escaped from the earth, and at that time I suddenly realized that everything in life is relative. When you're in a room, your world revolves around those walls; when you're outside, then your world revolves around what your eye can see."

"And some, me, when you're in a spacecraft, you think in terms of emotions of islands."

"There was essentially zero interest in images of Earth from space. Nobody told me to take a picture of the earth; I didn't think about it either. NASA's interest was focused on the mission. When particularly Borman was kind of anti-photography, it was just one more thing to divert the crew to actually completing a mission which was to go around the moon and get back alive. We didn't have any specific directions on the use of photography. We were all on the earth, so we all knew about the earth. They wanted photographs of something that was unusual, close-ups of the far side of the moon, and the earth was strictly secondary."

"We had Hasselblad 70 millimeter cameras with a magazine that held 200 exposures of thin-based film. Looking back at the earth, I'm thinking, 'Man, that's pretty. I wonder what the right f-stop would be?' Well, I always took three or four. We had what today would be a very rudimentary yet TV system. You don't have a less cover."

"It didn't work all that well at first, but