Engineers Who Love Poetry
Why We Need Humans in Space
Among the (admittedly lesser) casualties of the war with Iran has been the Artemis II mission, whose recent trip to the moon was largely drowned out by the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz. Those news stories that did make it through rightly pointed out that this was the first trip to the moon since Apollo 17, in 1972. Much less attention was paid to the question of why we should send humans into space at all. Why not just send robots?
The best arguments in favor of human space travel emerged not during the historic Apollo 11 mission with its giant leap for mankind, but during Apollo 8, the first time that humans left terrestrial orbit and circled the moon, much as Artemis II did last month. One such argument was Earthrise, the photograph of the blue planet rising over the horizon of the barren moon, which has rightly become an icon of a globalized world, the fragility of our ecosystem, and the loneliness of our shared home. It was an entirely unexpected picture taken on the spur of the moment by one of the astronauts, William Anders.
All three astronauts brought back something even more unexpected: unusual experiences expressed in striking words. The astronauts on Apollo 8 rose to the historic occasion of their mission by capturing their unique experiences through what might be called the first space poetry. I wrote about this in the opening section of my book The Written World and want to share it here to remind everyone why it was important to send thinking, feeling, and speaking humans into space—as opposed to just dogs and apes, as had been the case before.
The unusual words astronauts found in December 1968—and ever since—to communicate what it feels like to be in space have another significance for us today, in the age of AI: these words demonstrate better than anything I can think of why it matters whether something was written by a human and rooted in actual experience—in this case, a truly novel experience for all of humankind.
With this in mind let me tell you what happened that December of 1968:
“Apollo 8. You are Go for TLI. Over.”
“We understand we are Go for TLI.”
By late 1968, terrestrial orbit had been going on for over a decade. Apollo 8 was the latest mission and had just spent two hours and twenty-seven minutes circling the earth without a major incident. But Frank Borman, James A. Lovell and William A. Anders were on edge. Their ship was about to attempt a new maneuver, TLI, trans-lunar injection. At any moment, they would speed up to 24,207 mph, faster than anyone had ever traveled before. But speed wasn’t what had them worried. They were pointing away from earth, ready to shoot straight into space. They were going toward the moon.
The mission of Apollo 8 was simple. They wouldn’t land on the moon; they didn’t even have a landing vehicle on board. They were to see what it was like, identify an appropriate landing site for a future Apollo mission, and bring back documentary photos and film material that experts could sift through.
Trans-lunar injection proceeded as planned, and Apollo 8 was heading into space. The farther they got, the better they could see what no one had ever seen before, the earth. Borman interrupted procedures to call out the landmasses that were rotating below him: Florida; the Cape; Africa. He could see them all at once. He was the first human ever to see the earth as a single globe.
As the earth was receding, getting smaller and smaller, the moon started to grow, but the astronauts had trouble seeing it because the windows kept fogging up, and it was almost impossible to position the capsule so that the camera could capture the moon. The picture quality wasn’t good. Ground control realized that they needed the astronauts to rely on a simpler technology: the spoken word. “We would like you, if possible, to go into as much of a detailed description as you poets can.”
Becoming poets was a task for which their training hadn’t prepared them and to which they brought no particular skills. They had made it through the ruthless selection process of NASA because they were the best fighter pilots and knew something about rocket science. Anders had gone to the Naval Academy and then joined the Air Force, where he had served as an all-weather interceptor at Air Defense Command. But now he needed to come up with the right words. He singled out the “lunar sunrises and sunsets.” “These, in particular, bring out the stark nature of the terrain,” he said, “and the long shadows really bring out the relief that is here and hard to see in this very bright surface that we are going over right now.” Anders was painting a stark picture of bright light hitting hard surfaces making precise shadows—perhaps his job as all-weather interceptor helped. He was becoming a poet in the great American tradition of imagism, perfectly suited to a stark and brilliant thing like the moon.
Lovell had also gone to the Naval Academy, after which he had joined the Navy; like the others, he had spent most of his life on air bases. In space, he showed a predilection for another school of poetry: the sublime. “The vast loneliness up here of the moon is awe-inspiring,” he ventured. Philosophers had reflected on the awe that nature could inspire; waterfalls, storms, anything grand, too grand to be neatly captured and framed, would serve. But they could not have imagined what it would be like to be out there, in space. It was the ultimate sublime, the awe-inspiring experience of vastness that was certain to dwarf them, crush them, make them feel small. Just as these philosophers had predicted, this experience made Lovell relish the safety of home. “It makes you realize just what you have back there on earth. The earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space.” Dr. Wernher von Braun, the Nazi who had become an American and who had built the rocket for Apollo 8, must have understood; he liked to say that a “rocket scientist is an engineer who loves poetry.”
Finally, there was Borman, their commanding officer. Borman had graduated from the United States Military Academy, entered the Air Force and become a fighter pilot. On board Apollo 8, he waxed eloquent: “It’s a vast, lonely, forbidding-type existence, or expanse of nothing.” Lonely, forbidding, existence, nothing: it sounded like Borman had been hanging out on the Left Bank of Paris, reading Jean-Paul Sartre.
By the time the three astronauts had become poets, they had arrived at their final destination: they were circling the moon. With every rotation, Apollo 8 disappeared behind the moon, where no one had ever been before, and they lost radio contact with earth each time. There was much nail biting in Houston, the Texas headquarters of ground control, during their first fifty-minute absence. “Apollo 8, Houston. Over.” “Apollo 8, Houston. Over.” Mission control kept calling, sending radio waves into space, but with no response. One, two, three, four, five, six times. The seconds, the minutes passed. Then, on the seventh try, they got an answer: “Go ahead, Houston. This is Apollo 8. Burn complete.” Ground control was audibly relieved and exclaimed: “Good to hear your voice.”
Over the next fifteen hours, the astronauts kept disappearing and reappearing, changing their position, maneuvering the capsule, trying to get some sleep, before they prepared to make their return to earth. Returning would require them to fire up the rocket on the dark side of the moon, without radio contact, in order to escape from the pull of the moon and gain enough momentum to make it back home. They had only one shot at it; if they failed they would be orbiting the moon for the rest of their lives.
Before that maneuver, they wanted to send a special message to earth. Borman had written it down on a fireproof piece of paper beforehand and had even made them rehearse. Not everyone seemed equally into the idea. Before the broadcast, Anders said, casually: “May I see that blurb – that . . . thing?” “The what, Bill?” Borman asked, somewhat passive-aggressively. This was not how he wanted them to be talking about their upcoming performance. “The thing we’re supposed to read?” Anders replied, more carefully. Borman let it go. All that mattered now was the reading itself.
They returned from the dark side of the moon and announced to Houston, “for all the people back on earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.” And then they read that message, even though they had fallen behind schedule and still faced the perilous final burn and return voyage to earth. Anders, the space imagist, began:
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth; and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said: ‘Let there be light’ and there was light. And God saw the light, and that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness.
Despite their rehearsal, there was confusion about who was going next. Lovell thought that it was Borman and didn’t want to take the slip of paper. “You got it, Frank.” But Borman wanted to be last. “No, it’s your . . .” Lovell finally understood. He took the piece of paper, entirely weightless, and read:
And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters. And let it divide the waters from the waters.’ And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament and the waters which were above the firmament, and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Now it was Borman’s turn, but he had his hands full. “Can you hold this camera?” he asked Anders. But Lovell was closer and took it so that Borman could grab the piece of paper:
And God said, ‘let the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear,’ and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.”
Back on earth, the audience was spellbound, all 500 million of them. It was the most-watched live transmission in the history of the world.
There had been doubts about the wisdom of sending men to the moon. Scientifically, an unmanned space probe would have been good enough. Or NASA could have used a chimp, which they had already done on previous missions. The first American in space had been Ham, a chimp from Cameroon, captured and sold to the United States Air Force. Between the Russians and the Americans, a whole zoo had been sent up there, as if on some Noah’s Ark: chimps; dogs; turtles.
But while the human Apollo crew didn’t contribute much to science, it did contribute to literature. Ham the chimp from Cameroon would not have shared his impressions about space. He would not have tried his hand at poetry. He would not have had a message upon reappearing from the far side of the moon. He would not have thought of reading the creation myth that expressed something of the experience of having left the orbit of the earth, having shot straight out into space and having been captured by the gravitational field of the moon. Seeing earth rise from afar was the perfect position for reading the most influential creation myth dreamt up by humans.
I am glad that as of spring 2026 we’re back in the neighborhood of the moon. The astronauts aboard Artemis II brought back new impressions and new images, including Earthset, a photo of earth setting into the horizon of the cratered moon, the perfect companion piece to Anders’s Earthrise.
In the right circumstances, with the right experiences, we can all become photographers, poets, and artists. It’s what we’re made to do.
Agreed. The formula is something like: human + extraordinary experience = poetry.
Fantastic reflection. Thanks for this, Martin. Something wonderful to think about.