Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, the First Manned Flight to Another World Author: Bob Zimmerman Segment 7: Christmas Eve in Lunar Orbit: Earthrise and a Genesis Reading
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 7 September 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
Book Title: Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, the First Manned Flight to Another World Author: Bob Zimmerman
Segment 7: Christmas Eve in Lunar Orbit: Earthrise and a Genesis Reading
On Christmas Eve, Apollo 8 entered lunar orbit, firing its SPS engine behind the moon with no communication. The crew initially found the moon's surface disappointing, describing it as "a skull" or a "sandbox." However, they captured the iconic "Earthrise" photograph; Frank Borman took a black and white image, while Bill Anders took the famous color one after scrambling for film. During a historic Christmas Eve telecast—the first from lunar orbit, broadcast in black and white—the astronauts, after much deliberation, read the first twelve verses of Genesis from the Old Testament, aiming to share a message of goodwill to the world.
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| 0:00.0 | Building a coffee business? |
| 0:01.9 | Serving the best Americano in town is up to you. But winning back time and growing your business, leave that to sum-up. Take orders and payments anywhere with the new SumUp terminal. Turn occasional customers into regulars with a free loyalty program. And with the SumUp point of sale system, you'll always know when you're running low on your best-selling blends. Visit sumup.com.com. to learn more. I'm John Batchel with Bob Zimmerman. |
| 0:22.2 | The book is Genesis, the story of Apollo 8, the first man flight to another world. |
| 0:27.5 | Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, on board Apollo 8, going round and round the moon. A little |
| 0:34.6 | disappointing, but they're taking photographs that are spectacular, |
| 0:42.9 | one of Earthrise that you've all seen on stamps. You see it everywhere. It's so commonplace. |
| 0:49.6 | There's a small debate about who took what photograph. Bob settles it by saying one was in color and one was in black and white. Which is which, Bob? I can't remember. Yes, during the moment when the earth rises occurring, there was multiple earth rises, |
| 0:58.2 | but this one, they happened to be looking right at the earth coming up because of issues |
| 1:03.9 | with controlling the capsule. |
| 1:05.3 | So they all saw the earth coming up, and they suddenly realized that the camera program |
| 1:09.2 | didn't include getting an earth rise. |
| 1:10.9 | So they scrambled to get a picture. |
| 1:12.9 | And the camera at the moment had black and white film in it. |
| 1:15.5 | Anders was in charge of taking pictures. |
| 1:18.8 | Borman grabs the camera and takes a quick black and white picture. |
| 1:22.3 | And it says, there was a little friction between the two of them about who's in control. |
| 1:26.4 | Anders says, hey, I'm supposed to do that. |
| 1:28.5 | And so they quickly scrambled to get color images, film into the camera, |
| 1:32.7 | and then Anders takes the famous color picture we've all seen. |
| 1:35.9 | I must point out that it is always framed incorrectly on Earth. |
| 1:40.3 | It's always framed with the horizon on the bottom. |
| 1:43.0 | If you look at the cover of Genesis, |
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