DAY 714 | Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders dies at 90 in plane crash

"He travelled to the threshold of the Moon and helped all of us see something else: ourselves"

Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, who snapped one of the most famous photographs taken in outer space, has died in a plane crash at the age of 90.

Officials say a small aircraft he was flying crashed into the sea off Washington state.

Anders - who was a lunar module pilot on the Apollo 8 mission - took the iconic Earthrise photograph, one of the most memorable and inspirational images of Earth from space.

Taken on Christmas Eve during the 1968 mission, the first crewed space flight to leave Earth and reach the Moon, the picture shows the planet rising above the horizon from the barren lunar surface.

Anders later described it as his most significant contribution to the space programme.

Speaking of the moment, Anders said: "We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing that we discovered was the Earth."

The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said the 90-year-old was flying a Beechcraft A A 45 Mentor. The agency said that the plane crashed off the coast of Jones Island (Washington, US). Video footage appears to show the plane on an aerobatic maneuver before impact. 

Anders is best remembered for the Apollo 8 mission and the iconic photograph he took from space.

"In 1968, during Apollo 8, Bill Anders offered to humanity among the deepest of gifts an astronaut can give. He travelled to the threshold of the Moon and helped all of us see something else: ourselves," Nasa Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.

In a previous interview, Anders described taking it after being given "a little bit of photography training".

He said: "We were in lunar orbit, upside down and going backwards so for the first several revolutions we did not see the Earth and then we twisted the spacecraft so it was going forward and suddenly out of the corner of my eye I saw this color - it was shocking.

Frank Borman, the commander of NASA's 1968 Apollo 8 spaceflight, whose astronauts became the first men to orbit the moon, died on November 7, 2023.

Apollo 8 Crew
From left to right: James Lovell (Command Module Pilot), Bill Anders (Lunar Module Pilot), Frank Borman (Mission Commander)

Sources: BBC News, Max Matza; MNC, June 8, 2024. Photos: NASA

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