‘Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs'

At 05:33 Eastern Standard Time on 7 December 1972, one of the three United States astronauts aboard the spaceship Apollo 17 on its coast towards the Moon shot a sequence of eleven color photographs of Earth with a handheld Hasselblad camera. Twelve hours after the spacecraft’s splashdown on Christmas Eve, the film sequence was developed at the Manned Space Center in Houston. Doug Ward, National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Director of Public Affairs, examined the printed sequence with a view to issuing part of the mission’s three- to four-thousand frame photographic record for the waiting press. One of the images – number AS17-148-22727, taken at some 21,750 nautical miles from the Earth (Figure 21.1) – caught his photojournalist’s eye. ¹ It captured, center-frame and with perfect resolution, the full terraqueous disk without a solar shadow or ‘terminator’. The whole Earth, geography’s principal object of study, had been photographed by a human eyewitness. Fig. 21.1 The whole earth (NASA AS17-148-22727). Apollo 17 photograph of Earth from space, December 1972 https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315832555/36fd3086-551f-46b7-aad4-5a98e6dcd0a6/content/fig21_1_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>