NEIL MAHER ON SHOOTING THE MOON

Environmental History, Jul 2004 by Maher, Neil

ON 22 APRIL 1970, the first Earth Day, citizens paraded, rallied, and protested for the environment with drawings, paintings, and illustrations-but not with photographs-of the entire Earth. No such photograph existed. In 1970, the reigning iconic image of the Earth from space was the first picture shown here, Earthrise, taken by Apollo 8 in late December of 1968. On 7 December 1972, an Apollo 17 astronaut snapped the second photograph below, which quickly replaced Earthrise as the image of Earth from space for an American public ready to "Think Globally, Act Locally."

This essay explores the connections between technology, nature, and narrative in the production and reception of these two popular NASA photographs. While both these pictures are familiar to Americans today, the stories they tell are less well known, surprisingly divergent, and indicate that whether we are hiking close to home with map and compass or rocketing toward the Moon, technology mediates our contact with the environment and in doing so shapes the stories we tell about nature. As important, these extraterrestrial tales also suggest how the relationship between nature and technology in American culture shifted during four of the most turbulent years of the postwar period.1

The technology used to create and publicize these two photographs was nearly identical. Both the Apollo 8 and Apollo 17 missions depended on three-stage Saturn 5 rockets, developed by NASA's Wernher Von Braun, to transport astronauts far enough from Earth-approximately 240,000 nautical miles-to peer back at the entire planet. Astronauts from both missions also used similar photographic equipment; Apollo 8's William Anders and Apollo 17's Harrison Schmitt each used a 70mm handheld Hasselblad camera to take the photographs, and special high-resolution color film developed by Kodak to account for the absence in space of an atmospheric filter for light. Finally, technology helped make both images famous in the United States and abroad. The new medium of television made Earthrise an instant sensation when on Christmas Eve 1968, days before NASA released the photograph in printed form, Apollo 8 astronauts beamed it back live to TV sets around the world while taking turns reading from the Book of Genesis. For Whole Earth, NASA relied instead on print media, distributing the photograph to the press just twelve hours after Apollo 17's splashdown on 19 December 1972.2

The nature framed, recorded, and promoted by these technologies was also similar at first glance. The first image, Earthrise, portrayed nature through a spectrum of color; the white swirl of clouds, the deep blue of oceans, the light brown of land, and the dark black of the space environment. Nature in Whole Earth, the second photograph, seemed like a close-up version of Earthrise. "Wispy clouds add an unreal touch over the deep-blue seas and brown continent," reported the Chicago Tribune on 24 December 1972, just days after NASA released this photograph to the press.3 Yet Earthrise contained two elements not found four years later in Whole Earth: the lunar landscape, sloping in gray from left to right across the foreground of the frame, and the terminator line dividing nocturnal from diurnal environments along the middle portion of the planet. Whole Earth in 1972 was the first photograph of the entire planet free from solar shadow.

While the technology used and the nature depicted in these photographs were similar, the narratives surrounding the images differed. For Earthrise, the story began on 15 July 1960, when John F. Kennedy accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in Los Angeles, California. Declaring to his audience that he "faced west on what was once the last frontier," the future president announced that our westward experience was far from over. As Kennedy explained, "the problems are not all solved and the battles are not all won-and we stand today on the edge of a New Frontier."4 Placing a man on the Moon before the decade ended was integral to Kennedy's vision, and the Earthrise photograph, snapped by Apollo 8 as part of its mission to map the lunar surface for possible landing sites for Apollo 11, helped convert this campaign rhetoric into political reality.5 The image, with the lunar surface in the foreground, also indicated that during the late 1960s NASA had its sights fixed firmly on the Moon.

At the time, Earthrise was only the most recent in a long line of photographs enlisting nature to support American expansion at home and abroad. As early as 1868, photographs by Timothy O'Sullivan depicting the West's natural resources aided Clarence King in securing additional funding for his Fortieth Parallel Expedition, while four years later pictures by three photographers, including William Henry Jackson, helped convince Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park. As early as 1870, this practice of photographing nature to defend the country's expansion had gone international: In that year the federal government sent O'Sullivan to Panama to photograph landscapes for possible canal routes and later enlisted scores of photographers to document and support American efforts in both the Philippines and Haiti.6 Earthrise played a similar role. By figuratively depicting Kennedy's New Frontier in its sloping lunar surface, the Apollo 8 photograph helped extend America's Manifest Destiny into the ultimate wilderness-outer space.7