Written by Steve Gorman and Peter Cooney
(Reuters) – Retired astronaut William Anders, one of the first three people to orbit the moon and who captured the “Earthrise” photo during NASA's Apollo 8 mission, died on Friday when the small plane he was piloting crashed in Washington state, media reported. Local media. mentioned.
Anders, 90, was the only person on board the plane when it went down off the coast of Jones Island, part of the San Juan Islands archipelago between Washington and Vancouver Island in British Columbia, the Seattle Times reported, citing his son Greg.
According to television station KCPQ-TV, a Fox affiliate in Tacoma, Anders, a San Juan County resident, was flying an old Air Force T-34 Mentor single-engine plane he owned.
Video footage shown on KCPQ showed a plane falling from the sky in a sharp descent before crashing into the water just off the beach.
The San Juan County Sheriff's Office did not immediately respond to a Reuters request to confirm the incident.
Anders, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and an Air Force pilot, joined NASA in 1963 as a member of the third group of astronauts. He did not go into space until December 21, 1968, when Apollo 8 launched on the first crewed mission to leave Earth's orbit and travel 240,000 miles (386,000 km) to the moon.
Anders was the “rookie” of the crew, along with Frank Borman, the mission commander, and James Lovell, who flew with Borman on Gemini 7 in 1965 and later commanded the ill-fated Apollo 13.
The Apollo 8 mission, scheduled to launch in 1969, was postponed over concerns that the Russians would accelerate their own plans for a flight around the moon by the end of 1968. That gave the crew only several months to train for the historic but high-risk mission.
During the flight, Anders took what became one of the most famous photographs in history, the Earth rising above the lunar horizon.
He also played a key role in another indelible episode from that Christmas Eve mission — the crew began reading from the Book of Genesis while Apollo 8 transmitted images of the moon's surface to Earth.
The three astronauts were hailed as national heroes when they landed three days later in the Pacific Ocean and were honored as “Men of the Year” by Time magazine.
Their mission paved the way for the first moon landing by Apollo 11 seven months later, ensuring victory for the United States in the Cold War “Space Race” with the Soviets. But it was also hailed because it raised national morale at the end of one of America's most traumatic years, in which Americans were shaken by the war in Vietnam, riots and assassinations at home.