but cooperative atmosphere, more was achieved successfully in a shorter time for less money.
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This short weeklong journey to the moon also marked a crucial moment in both American and world history. In America, Apollo 8 put a positive, life-affirming exclamation point on what had been an ugly, violent year, with its political assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy as well as numerous urban riots and racial tension. In many ways, this mission signalled the actual end of the cultural sixties.
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Worldwide, the experience of Borman, Lovell, and Anders illustrated for the first time how priceless the earth is to the human race. We have forgotten that before Apollo 8, no human had ever seen the earth as a globe. Now, suddenly, the human vision of the earth changed, and our mother planet became like all the others, a very small, lonely object in space.
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Other cultural consequences, from a surge in environmentalism to the end of the Cold War, can be traced back to that single moment when Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders read the opening words of the Bible.
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For these reasons, I felt compelled to write this book. Hopefully I will not only succeed in giving these explorers their long overdue credit, but will also remind people of why we went to the moon in the first place. As Frank Borman said, "The Apollo program was just another battle in the Cold War." And, as writer Eric Hoffer noted, "It was done by ordinary Americans."
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