Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon

by Robert Kurson

Earthrise was the most beautiful sight Borman had ever seen, the only color visible in all the cosmos. The planet just hung there, a jewel on black velvet, and it struck him that everything he loved—Susan, the boys, his parents, his friends, his country—was on that tiny sphere, a brilliant blue and white interruption in a never-ending darkness, the only place he or anyone else had to call home.

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.