Bill Anders, a legend in the aerospace world, is being remembered after a tragic plane crash near Orcas Island in which he died at the age of 90.
Even if you didn’t know the name Bill Anders, he almost certainly helped shape the way you view our planet.
He was one of three men who first circumnavigated the moon in 1968 as part of the Apollo 8 mission.
During that Apollo 8 mission, Anders took the photo called “Earthrise”. It is the first photo of the Earth from the moon.
Anders dedicated his life to flying, spending time in an airplane of some sort over eight different decades.
KIRO 7 spoke with Steven Barber who built monuments for several Apollo missions and he says that while Anders’ death is tragic, he died doing what he loved.
“As terrible as it is, there is a poetic beauty in that he was a man who was in weightlessness for days and took the greatest photograph in the history of mankind, and at the end of his life gravity pulled him back. in the earth, so there’s a juxtaposition of that,” Barber said.
Barber recently completed a Sally Ride monument, she was the first American woman to fly in space and is working on a monument to the Apollo 8 mission and hopes to unveil it in a museum soon.
