While orbiting the moon on the Apollo 8 mission in December 1968, the astronaut William Anders took a photograph of the Earth rising over the lunar surface, and the image created a psychological shock back home. It was a striking color shot of the planet hanging as a sphere in a dark void. Some have called this the true beginning of the environmental movement; the biophysicist John Platt remarked that the image may have been “worth the cost of the whole Apollo project.”