He recounted how earth looked fragile and seemingly physically insignificant, yet was home.
“We’d been going backwards and upside down, didn’t really see the Earth or the Sun, and when we rolled around and came around and saw the first Earthrise,” he said.
“That certainly was, by far, the most impressive thing. To see this very delicate, colourful orb which to me looked like a Christmas tree ornament coming up over this very stark, ugly lunar landscape really contrasted.”
Anders was born in 1933 in Hong Kong, according to the New Mexico Museum of Space History, where he was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1983. At the time, his father was a Navy lieutenant aboard the USS Panay, which was a US gunboat in China’s Yangtze River. Anders and his mother fled during the 1937 Japanese attack on Nanjing.
Anders and his wife, Valerie, founded the Heritage Flight Museum in Washington state in 1996. It is now based at a regional airport in Burlington, and features 15 aircrafts, several antique military vehicles, a library and many artifacts donated by veterans, according to the museum’s website. Two of his sons helped him run it.
The couple moved to Orcas Island, in the San Juan archipelago, in 1993, and kept a second home in their hometown of San Diego, according to a biography on the museum’s website. They had six children and 13 grandchildren.