William Anders

William Anders was born October 17, 1933, in the British colony of Hong Kong. Four years later, on December 12, 1937, Japanese aircraft attacked the US gunboat Panay on the Yangtze River, where his father, Lieutenant Arthur Anders, served as executive officer. Severely wounded and unable to speak, the elder Anders kept directing the ship's machine guns in writing and helped supervise the evacuation before it sank, and later received the Navy Cross for it. The family returned to the United States and settled in San Diego, where the son grew up set on flying. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1955, switched to the Air Force, and flew nuclear-armed interceptors through the tensest years of the Cold War before earning a master's in nuclear engineering in 1962.

NASA picked Anders in October 1963, one of 14 chosen from 720 applicants. Five years later, on Apollo 8, he flew as lunar module pilot on the first crewed flight to leave Earth orbit and circle the Moon, with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell. On the fourth lunar pass, Anders swung his camera toward the horizon and took Earthrise, the photograph of a blue planet rising over gray lunar ground that Life later ranked among the century's hundred most influential images. He never flew in space again. He became the first chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1975, then ambassador to Norway in 1976, before moving into industry to run GE's nuclear division, then Textron's aerospace operations, then General Dynamics as chairman and CEO, where he sold off nearly three billion dollars in assets and quadrupled the stock.

The Earthrise photograph turned Anders into an unlikely environmental icon, commonly credited with helping inspire the first Earth Day in 1970, taken almost by accident as the spacecraft rotated past the view. He was uneasy about the mission's purpose even at the time. "We came all this way to explore the Moon," he said afterward, "and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth." In later decades the unease hardened into open contempt for the program that made him famous. He called sending astronauts to Mars "stupid" and "almost ridiculous," argued NASA could not manage a return to the Moon if it tried, and said the agency had become a jobs program for congressional districts rather than a serious scientific enterprise. His own Apollo 8 crewmate, Frank Borman, publicly disagreed with how far he took it.

Anders died June 7, 2024, when the vintage Beechcraft he was flying alone crashed into the water between Jones Island and Orcas Island in Washington's San Juan Islands. He was 90. Witnesses saw the plane enter a dive and catch fire before it went down. Federal investigators found no evidence of an aerobatic maneuver, only that a flyby he had made many times before went wrong. His son Greg confirmed the death. NASA's administrator credited him with giving humanity its first look at itself from outside, and the photograph remains the most reproduced image the space program ever produced, printed on a US postage stamp within five months of the flight that made it.

William Anders's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Earthrise artwork
  Photograph commonly credited with helping inspire the modern environmental movement 1968
• Apollo 8 mission
  First crewed flight to leave Earth orbit and circle the Moon 1968
• Nuclear Regulatory Commission other
  Served as its first chairman after the agency split off from the AEC 1975
• Heritage Flight Museum other
  Founded in Bellingham, Washington, to preserve historic military aircraft 1996
• General Dynamics restructuring company
  Sold off nearly three billion dollars in assets as chairman and CEO 1993

• October 17, 1933 aged 0 Born in British Hong Kong
• December 12, 1937 aged 4 His father, wounded, helps direct the defense and evacuation of the USS Panay
• 1955 aged ~22 Graduates the Naval Academy and marries Valerie Hoard
• October 18, 1963 aged 30 Selected as one of 14 astronauts in NASA's third class
• December 24, 1968 aged 35 Takes the Earthrise photograph during Apollo 8's fourth lunar orbit
• January 19, 1975 aged 41 Becomes first chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
• 1991 aged ~58 Named chairman and CEO of General Dynamics
• 1996 aged ~63 Founds the Heritage Flight Museum
• June 7, 2024 aged 90 Dies in a plane crash near Orcas Island, Washington

• Frank Borman 1928–2023
  Commander of Apollo 8, the first mission to orbit the Moon, and later CEO of Eastern Air Lines. crewmate
• Jim Lovell 1928–2025
  Commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, whose calm leadership brought the crew home safely. crewmate
• Wernher von Braun 1912–1977
  German-American aerospace engineer who led the development of the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the Moon. launched aboard his rocket
• Neil Armstrong 1930–2012
  Astronaut who commanded Apollo 11 and became the first person to set foot on the lunar surface. contemporary