Apollo 8 Christmas message 1968

RIP Frank Borman

RIP Frank Borman (1928-2023)

Astronaut Frank Borman died aged 95 on November 7.

Before the Apollo 8 mission he was told by NASA to work out something significant to say on the Christmas Eve broadcast from space.

Borman was stumped.

He asked his Jewish friend Simon Bourgin for help. Bourgin, a former editor at Newsweek, was also stumped, so he asked another friend, an official in the Bureau of Budgets, whose wife, Christine Laitin, a former ballerina and a member of the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation, suggested that the astronauts “go back to the beginning” and read the Creation account from Genesis. The idea was passed back to Borman, who liked it and wrote it into the NASA mission plan.

This Christmas message was seen on television by one out of every four people on earth.