From here, it was no longer possible to pick out countries or even continents; all a person could see was Earth, and it occurred to Anders, in this last week of 1968, this terrible year for America and the world, that once you couldn’t see boundaries, you started to see something different. You saw how small the planet is, how close all of us are to one another, how the only thing any of us really has, in an otherwise empty universe, is each other. As Apollo 8 came around the limb of the Moon and readied to reconnect with home, it seemed to Anders so strange—the astronauts had come all this
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