Out of this world | 13 December 2018

Take yourself back to (or try to imagine) Christmas 1968; a year full of disturbances, dashed hopes and extreme violence at home and abroad. On 21 December, a huge explosion occurred; not, for once, a herald of catastrophe but at Cape Kennedy, where the engines of the Saturn V rocket, ‘the most powerful machine ever made’, were ignited, launching the Apollo 8 mission. Three astronauts in a tiny metal box were thrown up into space. Three days later, on Christmas Eve, they would broadcast back to the world images that would change for ever the way we see our planet.

As they orbited the moon, the first astronauts to do so, they saw the Earth gradually appearing above the surface of the grey, colourless, ‘distressed’ lunar landscape; a blinding light, ‘the only thing in space that had any colour to it’. Technology, at the service of dreams and ambitions, was used to alter understanding and then beamed across the world.