Why Apollo 8 read Genesis from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve 1968, the Apollo 8 crew of Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders read the first ten verses of Genesis on live television from lunar orbit. They chose the passage before launch, after NASA’s only instruction was to do “something appropriate.”

The reading is sometimes described as a spontaneous moment of inspiration. It wasn’t. “We were told that on Christmas Eve we would have the largest audience that had ever listened to a human voice,” Borman later recalled. “And the only instructions that we got from NASA was to do something appropriate.”

Borman’s crewmates had no ideas, so he asked friends, and the record of who chose Genesis is split. Letters held by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Archives show that Simon Bourgin, a U.S. Information Agency official who had toured with astronauts, suggested the opening of Genesis and coached Borman on delivery:

“don’t be preachy, say it in your own way, say what has universal appeal and cut out when you are through saying it.” (Simon Bourgin to Frank Borman)

Astronomy magazine’s account credits a different source: Christine Laitin, a veteran of the French Resistance and wife of Joe Laitin, a public affairs officer under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, who asked, “Why don’t you begin at the beginning?” Lovell reasoned that the passage underpinned many of the world’s religions, not only Christianity.

The broadcast from Apollo 8’s lunar orbit, the most-watched of its time, reached an estimated half a billion to a billion people, roughly one in four humans then alive. The crew read the King James text in turn and closed by wishing everyone “on the good Earth” a merry Christmas.

Not everyone approved. Atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair urged people to protest to NASA and later sued; the suit was dismissed. Her campaign produced nearly 30,000 complaint letters, while a countercampaign backing the astronauts generated more than 8 million letters of support between 1969 and 1975. The Apollo 8 stamp issued in May 1969 printed “In the beginning God…” beneath Anders’s Earthrise photograph.