Astronaut Bill Anders

Apollo astronaut Bill Anders, who took one of the most famous images of all time in space, has died at the age of 90.

His son Greg Anders told NPR that his father was killed in a plane crash in Washington state on Friday. He was piloting the Beech A45 when it plunged into the water off Jones Island. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) says it is investigating the crash.

“Our family is devastated. He was a great man and a great pilot,” he told NPR.

In a statement to X, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Bill Anders “gave humanity one of the greatest gifts an astronaut can give. He traveled to the threshold of the moon and helped us all see something else: ourselves. He embodied the lessons and purpose of exploration. We will miss him.”

Bill Anders flew into space only once. It was a nerve-racking journey, as it was the first time humans had left low Earth orbit. The 400,000-kilometer flight reached the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, and air traffic controllers in Houston wanted to know what the moon looked like up close.

Gray. The astronauts thought it just looked gray – then mission commander Frank Borman turned the capsule over and they got a different perspective.

“Borman turned the spacecraft around, flipped it over, and I was the first person to see the Earth rising, and I said, ‘Wow, look at that!'” Anders told NPR in 2015.

The earth was blue and white, rising above the barren lunar horizon.

The crew had taken pictures to plan future moon landings, but most of them were black and white.

As he rushes to capture the image, Anders can be heard on the onboard recorder asking fellow astronaut Jim Lovell: “Give me a roll of paint quickly. Would you? … Quickly. Quickly.”

Anders wasn’t sure what aperture setting to use to get both the moon and the Earth in focus. “So,” he recalled in 2015, “I went like a machine gun and just turned the f-stop. And as it turned out, one of those images was chosen by NASA as an iconic Earthrise image.”

This photo was immortalized on a postage stamp and on countless magazine and newspaper covers. To this day, it remains one of the most famous images ever taken by humans in space.

Author Francis French has written several books about NASA. He says the photo gave people on Earth a new perspective on their planet.

“Humanity has always lived on Earth,” he says, “(but) we never knew the Earth until we looked back and realized how small and fragile and precious and finite it is. And that has changed human thinking ever since.”

Anders said he understands why so many people love this image: “The only color we could see and the contrast with this really unfriendly, bare lunar horizon made me think, ‘You know, we really do live on a beautiful little planet.'”

Anders graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and rose to the rank of major general in the Air Force Reserve. After NASA, he served as the first chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, served as U.S. Ambassador to Norway, and became CEO of General Dynamics.