Anders also served as a backup pilot for the Apollo 11 mission, the namesake effort that led to the first moon landing on July 24, 1969.
After Anders retired from the space program in 1969, the former astronaut worked primarily in the aerospace industry for several decades. He also served as U.S. ambassador to Norway for one year in the 1970s.
But he is best remembered for the Apollo 8 mission and the iconic photos he took from space.
“During Apollo 8 in 1968, Bill Anders gave humanity one of the most profound gifts an astronaut can give: He traveled to the threshold of the Moon and helped us all see something else: ourselves. said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. name.
In a previous interview, he explained that he took the shot after receiving “a little bit of photography training.”
He said: “We were in lunar orbit, and it flipped upside down and we couldn't see the Earth for the first few rotations. Then we twisted the spacecraft to make it go forward and suddenly out of the corner of my eye I saw this. The colors – it was shocking.
“So I just took a picture, moved it, took a picture, moved it.”
Former astronaut Mark Kelly, now a senator from Arizona, said Anders was “an inspiration to me and generations of astronauts and explorers. My thoughts are with his family and friends,” he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. said in .
