Volume 8, Number 4     July/August 2000

New Views for A New Century

By Peggy Wilhide
Associate Administrator for Public Affairs
NASA Headquarters

Thirty years ago, NASA and the rest of the world learned firsthand the power of the recorded image. The lesson came on Christmas Eve of 1968, at the end of a year that, until then, was known more for its upheaval, tragedy and turbulence than for its serene visions of cosmic importance. The image, taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, was the famous photograph of the Earth rising above the arid, lifeless horizon of the Moon. It became an instant classic, one of the most important images of the 20th century and certainly among a handful of the most influential photographs in human history. Perhaps it was our surprise that contributed to the power of the image. No one, certainly not the crew members nor the NASA planners back on Earth, had given much thought to what the home planet would look like from a lunar distance. All eyes were on the propulsion system of the Apollo Command and Service Module, on all the things that had to go right, on that one lone engine that had to work perfectly to put the astronauts into lunar orbit. It was only after that event, when they swung around the far side of the Moon, that the power of that image hit them, and later, all of us. The photo made the front page of newspapers and the covers of magazines. A few weeks after the flight, someone sent a telegram to Apollo 8 Commander Frank Borman that said simply, “You saved 1968.”

For several years, Walter Cronkite’s evening newscast used the “Earthrise” photo as a backdrop. The poet Archibald MacLeish was moved by the photograph and wrote, “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now that they are truly brothers.”

Stewart Brand published The Whole Earth Catalog with that picture on the cover. Others credited the photograph with inspiring the ecology movement and the first Earth Day in 1970. And today, 32 years later, TIME has published a coffee table book, “Great Images of the 20th Century.” Of course, “Earthrise” is the cover photo. That one photograph came to symbolize not just the entirety of Project Apollo, but also stood for a whole decade, even a whole century.

We who are a part of NASA’s air and space program sometimes take for granted the immense wealth of imagery that has been gathered in our 85-year history. Elsewhere in this issue, you will read about a commercial investment in the power of that archive, and of a venture NASA has embarked upon to digitize and distribute as widely as possible the wealth that lies within our vaults. It is an innovative agreement, forged by a highly talented team of NASA employees and a group of visionary investors from the private sector who could see the possibilities of combining the best of NASA’s photographic holdings with the immediacy and accessibility of the Internet. Most of the work will be done with minimal investment of public funds, and NASA will retain its rights to the images and the ability to make them available in the public domain.

By digitizing large portions of the archive and providing cutting-edge, high-definition TV footage of the space program's activities, NASA and its new partner will take an important step toward preserving it for future generations. And instead of limiting the public’s access to a small fraction of the collection, thousands of previously unseen images will become available over the Internet in the years ahead. This has been an objective of NASA’s for years, but would not have been possible on this scale without private investment. As NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin said, “Our first dollar is for safety, and our second dollar is to make sure our spacecraft work properly. There often is not enough to do many of the other things we would like.”

In time, the new views that come to us from our aeronautical research, studies of the Earth and from our spacecraft in this new century will find their way into a vast digital archive, available to all at the click of a mouse. And somewhere within that collection, you can be sure, future generations will find meaning, inspiration and the 21st century successor to the “Earthrise” of Apollo 8.