Daniel Harkins:
Buzz Aldrin, a Presbyterian minister, is far from the only astronaut who found their courage in God
On Christmas Eve 1968, a message was broadcast to Earth from the orbit of the Moon: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” The words were spoken by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders, as he and fellow crew members Jim Lovell and Frank Borman recited Genesis, chapter one, in a broadcast watched by one billion people.
The moving footage reveals an often ignored fact of the success of the subsequent Apollo mission to the Moon, which celebrates its 50th anniversary today: that it was one compelled by faith as much as science.
Many of the 12 men to walk on the Moon were Christian. Two moonwalkers, Charlie Duke and James Irwin, went on to devote much of the rest of their lives to their faith; another returned to Earth convinced of God’s existence, and a fourth was a Presbyterian minister.
The last of those was the wonderful iconoclast Buzz Aldrin, a man who
recently shared his paperwork from the 1969 Moon landing mission: a travel expense claim to NASA for $33.31.
It was Aldrin who ensured that one of the first acts on the Moon was a spiritual one. After landing on the surface, in the silence of the lunar module, he took out some bread and wine, and gave himself Communion. Among the first words spoken on the lunar surface were those of Christ.
Faith ran throughout the US space programme. John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, said on his return from a second voyage: “To look out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is to me impossible.”
This is not surprising. The Apollo programme was so ambitious that it took men of faith even to entertain its possibility.
Neil Armstrong, for instance, whose parents were devout Christians, defied the odds throughout his life. He flew fighter jets at a time when there was a 23 per cent probability that a Navy pilot would die in an aircraft accident. He brushed with death as a test pilot, almost died in an early space mission, and came two-fifths of a second away from death while training to go to the Moon.
Most astronauts rated the chance of the Apollo 11 crew successfully completing the mission at just 50 per cent. As the astronauts prepared to land, Apollo 11’s flight director in Houston, Gene Kranz, a Catholic, went to Mass and prayed for “wise judgment and courage”. That judgment was called upon as the lunar module descended to the surface of the Moon, and the Apollo 11 computer began sounding a mystery “1202” alarm. Kranz’s team made the call to ignore it, and the lunar module landed with seconds to spare.
Later, as the astronauts prepared to leave the Moon, Aldrin accidentally broke an engine circuit breaker, leaving them potentially stranded on the lunar surface. No doubt saying his prayers, the church minister stuck a pen in the ignition, jiggled it around and managed to start the engine.
On a cold, rational reading of the maths and probabilities, Apollo should not have succeeded. There were too many points where the mission should have failed, where the astronauts should have died – but these were rocket scientists with a faith. Without it, they may never have tried the impossible.
The influence of the religious in space continues to this day. Muslim astronaut Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor had to work out the logistics of praying to Mecca while floating above the Earth on the International Space Station.
Tim Peake, one of the few Brits to travel into space, said that while he is not religious, “there are many things in science that lead us towards the conclusion” that the universe was created from intelligent design. “From a point of view of seeing how magnificent the Earth is from space… it helps you to relate to that,” he said.
This is a common theme: astronaut after astronaut has opened up to the possibility of God once they saw the Earth from space.
Retired Catholic astronaut Mike Massimino said that as he gazed at Earth, he thought: “God must love us to give us such a beautiful home … It just makes it so obvious that God created this beautiful place.”
The Apollo greats who walked on the Moon risked their lives to do what no living creature had done before. They did it though technological achievement, mathematics and complex algorithms. But the role of faith in sustaining their efforts cannot be overlooked.
“Science and technology got me there, but when I got there and I looked back home at the Earth, science and technology could not explain what I was seeing nor what I was feeling,” Eugene Cernan, the 11th man to walk on the Moon, said.
“When I looked back home there was too much purpose, too much logic. The Earth to me was just too beautiful to have happened by accident.”