SEATTLE (AP) — William Anders, the former Apollo 8 an astronaut who took the iconic “Earth Sunrise” photo showing the planet as a shadowed blue marble from space in 1968 was killed Friday when the plane he was piloting went down in the waters off Washington state’s San Juan Islands. He was 90.
His son, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Greg Anders, confirmed the death to The Associated Press.
“The family is devastated,” he said. “He was a great pilot and we will miss him terribly.”
William Anders, a retired major general, said the photo was his most significant contribution to the space program, along with making Apollo 8’s command module and service module work.
The photo, the first color image of Earth from space, is one of the most important photographs in modern history for the way it changed the way people look at the planet. The photo is credited with igniting the global environmental movement, showing how fragile and isolated Earth appears from space.
NASA Administrator and former senator Bill Nelson said Anders embodies the lessons and purpose of the study.
“He traveled to the doorstep of the moon and helped us all see something else: ourselves,” Nelson wrote on the social platform X.
Anders took the photo during the crew’s fourth lunar orbit, frantically switching from black-and-white to color film.
“Oh my God, look at that picture over there!” Anders said. “Here comes the Earth. Wow, is that nice!’
The Apollo 8 mission in December 1968 was the first human spaceflight to leave low Earth orbit and travel to the Moon and back. It was NASA’s boldest and perhaps most dangerous journey to date, and the one that set the stage for the Apollo moon landings seven months later.
“Bill Anders forever changed the way we see our planet and ourselves with his famous Apollo 8 sunrise photograph,” Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, also a retired NASA astronaut, wrote to X. “He inspired me and generations of astronauts and explorers. My thoughts are with his family and friends.”
At about 11:40 a.m., a report came in that an older model plane had crashed into the water and sunk near the north end of Jones Island, San Juan County Sheriff Eric Peter said. Greg Anders confirmed to KING-TV that his father’s body was found Friday afternoon.
Only the pilot was aboard the Beech A45 at the time, according to the Federal Aviation Association.
The National Transportation Safety Board and the FAA are investigating the crash.
William Anders said in 1997 NASA Oral History interview that he did not consider the Apollo 8 mission risk-free but had important national, patriotic and research reasons to continue. He calculated that there was about a one in three chance that the crew would not return and the same chance that the mission would succeed and the same chance that the mission would not start over. He said he suspects Christopher Columbus sailed with worse odds.
He recounted how the Earth seemed fragile and seemed physically insignificant, yet he was home.
“We were going backwards and upside down, we didn’t actually see the Earth or the Sun and when we turned around and came back and saw the first sunrise on Earth,” he said. “That was definitely the most impressive thing. To see this very delicate, colorful orb, which to me looked like a Christmas tree ornament, rising above this very bright, ugly moonscape, really contrasted.’
Anders said in retrospect that he wished he had taken more pictures, but mission commander Frank Borman was concerned that everyone was rested and forced Anders and command module pilot James A. Lovell, Jr. to sleep, “which probably made sense “.
He served as backup crew for Apollo 11 and for Gemini XI in 1966, but the Apollo 8 mission was the only time he flew in space.
Anders was born on October 17, 1933 in Hong Kong. At the time, his father was a Navy lieutenant aboard the USS Panay, which was an American gunboat in China’s Yangtze River.
Anders and his wife, Valerie, founded the Heritage Flight Museum in Washington state in 1996. It is now based at Burlington Regional Airport and has 15 aircraft, several antique military vehicles, a library and many artifacts donated by veterans, according to the museum’s website . Two of his sons helped him run it.
The couple moved to Orcas Island, in the San Juan Archipelago, in 1993 and maintain a second home in their hometown of San Diego, according to a biography on the museum’s website. They had six children and 13 grandchildren. Their present Washington home was in Anacortes.
Anders graduated from the Naval Academy in 1955 and served as a fighter pilot in the Air Force.
He later served on the Atomic Energy Commission, as US Chairman of the US-USSR Joint Technology Exchange Program on Nuclear Fission and Fusion Energy, and as Ambassador to Norway. He later worked for General Electric and General Dynamics, he said NASA Biography.
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Associated Press writer Lisa Bauman contributed to this report.
