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Neil Maher on Shooting the Moon

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."	1
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	2
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.	3
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