In seven months or so, folks will be making a big deal of a quite worthy event in spacefaring. But…
Christmas Eve 1968, for the first time, human eyes saw earthrise. Apollo 8, the real first trip of men to the Moon, orbited the satellite on that date.
A grainy, 1960s vintage TV satellite feed brought home the first sights and sounds of humans flying over and looking at another world, describing what they saw and felt, and seeing the Earth as a small thing floating in the darkness. And then these men, these warriors by career and engineers by education, stopped reporting scientific observations, and closed with the reading of The Creation.
That flight may get slighted in the shadow of the great achievement of the following July but that was quite the Christmas Eve treat for many in that generation, including a certain 7-year-old boy who got his mind blown. And who, from inside a later self, remembers, and wants to wish “a Merry Christmas to all on the Good Earth”…