As NASA’s Artemis II mission circled the moon Monday, the world remembered a similar lunar flyby more than 50 years ago that resulted in the first color photograph of the Earth taken from space.
William Anders, who lived on Orcas Island for more than 30 years and died in 2024, took the remarkable Earthrise photo in 1968.
The crew of the Apollo 8 mission – Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Anders – were the first humans to leave Earth’s orbit and orbit the moon. The Earthrise image changed the way humans viewed the planet and is credited with inspiring environmental activism by showing how delicate and isolated Earth appeared from space.
On Monday, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen became the first humans to leave Earth orbit since the Apollo missions, which concluded in 1972. This time, the crew traveled farther from Earth than humans have ever before, surpassing Apollo 8's flyby and Apollo 13's record-setting mission.
The Artemis II mission should again produce the same kind of awe-inspiring images that the Apollo 8 crew first captured more than 50 years ago.
“The first time is always the biggest (impact), but it's been so long,” said Jim Hermanson, professor emeritus at the University of Washington’s Aeronautics and Astronautics Department. “There’s a whole generation of people who don’t remember the Apollo missions who will see this and be inspired.
It's kind of a renewal.”
The 10-day Artemis II mission is the second in a series of NASA launches that aims to land humans back on the moon and study how to use the lunar surface as a pit stop on the way to Mars.
Like the Apollo 8 mission, Artemis II is a practice run for a moon landing to test the systems and processes. In the Artemis series, NASA has planned a second test run next year, before it attempts to land humans on the moon as soon as 2028.
The Apollo 8 mission had a tight flight path for its lunar flyby and circled the moon 10 times during the six-day mission. Artemis II took a “longer, loopier” path that did not get as close to the moon, Hermanson said. It traveled around the moon once before reentering Earth orbit, and is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific Ocean on Friday.
The longer mission is a test of the system’s duration, in preparation for lunar landings and eventually traveling to Mars, Hermanson said.
Scott Pace, the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, similarly said Artemis II was like “taking a new car out on a long road trip, so you’re trying to test all these little details.”
The entire program is like a “relay race,” Pace continued. “This is a major step in a long-standing effort over decades to think about returning to the moon.”
The Artemis II crew will get a different view of the Earth and the moon than their Apollo 8 predecessors, since the spacecraft will be farther away. But they will similarly scramble to take photos and share detailed visual observations to help NASA learn more about the lunar surface.
Up close, Pace said the moon isn’t as grey as it looks from Earth. Different concentrations of minerals create subtle nuances that the astronauts should be able to see.
“The human eye can be a pretty powerful device,” Pace said. “The scientists are excited; they’ve been able to ask questions they haven’t been able to ask for decades.”
The Artemis II mission has been filled with relics that commemorate the first lunar flyby. The crew brought on board a patch that flew on Apollo 8, sent to the Artemis II astronauts by Lovell’s family. Lovell, who died in August, recorded a message for the Artemis II crew to pass the torch of moon exploration to this next generation.
“Welcome to my old neighborhood,” he said in the message shared on Monday morning, the sixth day of the Artemis II mission. “It’s a historic day and I know how busy you’ll be, but don’t forget to enjoy the view.”
Koch, the first woman to leave Earth orbit and travel to the moon, commemorated the Earthrise photo specifically.
Anders' image “has been instrumental both to our crew as our ethos and values but also just personally to me,” she said during a livestream inside the spacecraft Monday. “I had the photo up in my room as a kid, and it was part of what inspired me to keep working hard to achieve the things I dreamed about.”
Anders took the photo after the Apollo 8 crew had been traveling “backwards and upside down” and hadn’t seen the Earth or sun in some time, he recalled in a 1997 NASA oral history interview. When the crew “rolled around … and saw the first Earthrise, that certainly was, by far, the most impressive thing,” he said.
Anders said the colorful planet looked like a “Christmas tree ornament coming up over this very stark, ugly lunar landscape.”
In another NASA interview, Anders, who retired from the Air Force as a major general, said he had fought to have a long lens and colored film on board, which proved instrumental in snapping over a dozen pictures of the Earth from space.
Anders died in June 2024 after a plane he was piloting alone crashed off the coast of Jones Island, just west of Orcas. He was 90 years old.
Former NASA administrator Bill Nelson said at the time that Anders offered humanity “the deepest of gifts an astronaut can give.”
“He traveled to the threshold of the Moon and helped all of us see something else: ourselves. He embodied the lessons and the purpose of exploration,” Nelson wrote in a statement.
In one more nod to Earthrise, the crew of Artemis II packed a round, smiling stuffed moon wearing a baseball cap on board the spacecraft. The plush moon served as a zero-gravity indicator, or a way to tell when the spacecraft reached microgravity, the technical term for the weightlessness of outer space.
The stuffed moon, named Rise and designed by an 8-year-old from California, showed half of Earth’s surface, just like Anders’ famous image.
This story includes material from The Seattle Times archives.
© 2026 The Seattle Times. Visit www.seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
