Astronauts Shared This Faith-Filled Message From Outer Space on Christmas Eve
By Movieguide® Contributor
For the Apollo 8 astronauts, no message was more fitting to read to the estimated billion people listening than the Genesis creation account as mission commander Frank Borman looked back at “the good Earth” from the moon’s orbit.
A NASA officer told Borman ahead of the mission “more people will be listening to your voice than to that of any man in history.”
Unsure of what he and fellow astronauts James Lovell and William Anders could say during the historic trip as the first people to orbit the moon, the lifelong Episcopalian took the advice of Christine Laitin, a wife of a friend of a friend, to go “back to the beginning” and read from Genesis.
Then on the Christmas Eve 1968 broadcast, each read from Genesis with Anders starting:
We are now approaching a lunar sunrise. And for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send you.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
James Lovell, who is Presbyterian, followed Anders, saying:
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: And it was so. … And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Borman, who passed away at 95 in 2023, concluded the message from the Saturn V command module:
And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he seas: And God saw that it was good.
And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good earth.
Borman was more moved by seeing the Earth rising from the moon’s horizon than the moon itself, which he called “a vast, lonely forbidding type existence, great expanse of nothing, that looks rather like clouds and clouds of pumice stone.”
“It was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life, one that sent a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me,” he said of seeing earth. “It was the only thing in space that had any color to it. Everything else was either black or white. But not the Earth.”
Less than a year later, on July 20, 1969, astronauts would again take the opportunity to glorify God from outer space as the world watched captivated. When the Apollo 11 mission sent the first men to the moon, Buzz Aldrin, an ordained Presbyterian minister, took communion after the Eagle lunar lander touched down on the moon’s surface.
Aldrin felt communion was appropriate, “symbolizing the thought that God was revealing Himself there, too, as man reached out into the universe. For there are many of us in the NASA program who do trust that what we are doing is part of God’s eternal plan for man.”
He even managed to read a scripture on the return home even though NASA requested that he not read any biblical passages due to a lawsuit, eventually dropped, by atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair over the Apollo 8 reading of the Genesis passage.
Aldrin read from Psalm 8: 3-4: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou has ordained; What is man that thou art mindful of him? And the Son of Man, that thou visitest Him?”
READ MORE: CHUCK NORRIS HIGHLIGHTS THE DEEP FAITH OF APOLLO ASTRONAUTS
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