Astronauts shared this message from space on Christmas Eve

Published: December 16, 2024

Astronauts shared this faith-filled message from outer space on Christmas Eve

By Movieguide® Contributor

For the Apollo 8 astronauts, no message was more appropriate to read to the estimated billion people listening than the creation story from Genesis as mission commander Frank Borman looked back at “the good earth” from lunar orbit.

A NASA officer told Borman faces the mission “more people will listen to your voice than any human’s in history.”

Unsure of what he and fellow astronauts James Lovell and William Anders might say during the historic journey as the first humans to orbit the moon, the lifelong Episcopalian took advice by Christine Laitin, a wife of a friend of a friend, to go “back to the beginning” and read from Genesis.

Then on the Christmas Eve broadcast in 1968, each one of Genesis was read with Anders starting:

We are now approaching a moonrise. And to all people on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we’d like to send you.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void; and darkness was over the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the waters. And God said: Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.

James Lovell, who is a Presbyterian, followed Anders, says:

And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said: Let there be a vault in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament and separated the water that was under the firmament from the water that was above the firmament. And it was so. … And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Borman, who died aged 95 in 2023, concluded the message from the Saturn V Command Module:

And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the pool of water he called sea. And God saw that it was good.

And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, merry Christmas, and God bless you all, all of you on the good earth.

Borman was more moved by seeing the Earth rise from the moon’s horizon than the moon itself, like him called “a vast, lonely forbidding existence, vast expanse of nothingness, looking rather like clouds and clouds of pumice.”

“It was the most beautiful, heart-wrenching sight of my life, one that sent a rush of nostalgia, of pure homesickness, coursing through me,” he said to see the earth. “It was the only thing in space that had any color on it. Everything else was either black or white. But not Earth.”

Less than a year later, on July 20, 1969, astronauts would once again seize the opportunity to glorify God from outer space as the world watched in awe. When the Apollo 11 mission sent the first men to the moon, Buzz Aldrin, an ordained Presbyterian minister, took communion after the lunar lander Eagle landed on the lunar surface.

Aldrin blanket the Lord’s Supper was appropriate, “symbolizes the idea that God revealed himself there too, when man reached out into the universe. Because there are many of us in the NASA program who truly trust that what we do is part of God’s eternal plan for man.”

He even managed to read a scripture when he returned home despite NASA requesting that he not read any Bible passages due to a lawsuit, which was eventually dropped by atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair over the Apollo 8 reading of Genesis- the passage.

Aldrin read from Psalm 8:3-4: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have determined; What is man that you think of her? And the Son of Man, that you visit him?”