Earthrise: The Most Famous Photo of Earth
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, the year was 1968, and the world below was coming apart. Wars raged overseas, cities burned, and faith in the future seemed to flicker. Yet hundreds of thousands of miles away, three astronauts aboard Apollo 8 were witnessing something extraordinary. As their capsule emerged from the Moon’s shadow, astronaut Bill Anders looked out the window and saw the Earth rising above the lunar horizon. He lifted his camera—and in that quiet instant, Earthrise was born. The image would soon be embraced by the peace movement, printed on posters, and carried in protests. But the irony is that it was born out of war—the Space Race, a direct contest with the Soviet Union that began in fear and rivalry. From conflict came a photograph that united the world in wonder. Our own Lee Habeeb shares the story behind this iconic image.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:14.0 | This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. |
| 0:18.5 | Up next, a story I found particularly fascinating. It's called Earthrise. Here's the story. |
| 0:28.1 | The year 1968 was by any measure a bad one for America. Senator Robert Kennedy and Reverend |
| 0:36.5 | Martin Luther King were assassinated that year. |
| 0:39.3 | Race riots swept the nation, and America was being torn apart by an ever-escalating presence in Vietnam. |
| 0:49.5 | By all accounts, the event that saved 1968 from an endless barrage of bad news |
| 0:55.9 | was a journey that propelled three men nearly a quarter of a million miles from the Earth. |
| 1:02.0 | That journey to space and the iconic photograph that would come to define it, Earthrise, |
| 1:08.2 | provided a moment of celebration, joy, and even hope, in a nation desperately |
| 1:13.4 | in need of all three. How did one of history's most iconic photographs come to be? |
| 1:22.0 | Ironically, the very forces that impelled America to send troops to Southeast Asia |
| 1:27.4 | propelled America into space, |
| 1:30.3 | our global struggle with our communist adversary, the Soviet Union. |
| 1:39.5 | America's race to space was set in motion when President John F. Kennedy commanded NASA to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade and before the Soviet Union. |
| 1:50.1 | By 1968, America was losing that race and perpetually seemed to be a step behind the Russian space program. |
| 1:58.5 | The Apollo 8 mission, thanks to some aggressive updates and flight alterations, |
| 2:03.3 | finally put America in the lead. |
| 2:06.9 | The Apollo 8 crew hurtled into space on December 21st on a Saturn V rocket that stood over |
| 2:13.8 | 360 feet tall, the same height as a 36-story building, propelled by the nearly 160 million |
| 2:22.7 | horsepower produced by its five F-1 engines, and reached the moon in a mere three days, and on Christmas |
| 2:31.4 | Eve Day. |
... |
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