God in Space
- Steve Clark
- Jun 22, 2022
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 28, 2022
How quick history is forgotten....The astronauts on the Apollo program new the Lords dominion.
Apollo 8
On Christmas Eve, December 24, 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 read from the Book of Genesis as they orbited the Moon.
Astronauts Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman, the first humans to travel to the Moon, recited verses 1 through 10 of the Genesis creation narrative from the King James Bible. Anders read verses 1–4, Lovell verses 5–8, and Borman read verses 9 and 10.
Around the world, television sets glowed with the broadcast. One in four people on Earth—roughly a billion people spread among 64 countries—listened to the reading.
Apollo 11
Later, on the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, Buzz Aldrin took Communion on the lunar surface shortly after landing, using bread and wine he brought from his home church congregation. When he tried to speak to the flight crew operations manager and get the permission to broadcast his singular celebration of the Holy Communion service, he was answered with "keep your comments more general". Hence, over the radio he merely asked his listeners to pause and reflect on the events of the last few hours, and give thanks in their own way. He then read the specifically Christian scripture, John 15:5, off-air. However, after the Apollo team was reunited and heading back to Earth, Aldrin read aloud a second scripture that was scrawled on the same notecard but of a more universally human reference from the Old Testament,
Psalm 8:3–4, "When I considered the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him."
This reading was broadcast live to the entire Earth, just as was the Genesis 1 reading so objectionable to O'Hair, and was depicted in the 1969 documentary, Footprints on the Moon: Apollo 11 (beginning at 1:28:32), but stimulated no further antitheistic legal action.
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