It was Christmas Eve, 1968, and the space race was in full flow. As people travelled to celebrate Christmas with their families on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 - Jim Lovell, William Anders and Frank Borman - circled the moon in their lonely capsule, and became the first human beings to witness the rising of the Earth over the horizon of an alien world. Apollo 8 will be remembered for countless generations to come for those first images of our fragile planet seen from space, but less well remembered is the atheist controversy that the astronauts triggered with a live television broadcast that momentous Christmas Eve, forty years ago today.

Earthrise, seen from Apollo 8, December 24th 1968

Before I even get to that, I want to put into context just how incredible this Christmas Eve was. Only sixty five years separated the launch of Apollo 8 from the Wright brothers' first powered flight. Apollo 8 was the first manned vehicle to escape the Earth, the first to enter the gravitational field of another body, the first to escape from the field of another body, and the first to safely return to Earth - any one of those achievements alone is incredible, let alone the four combined, and this was all performed by a crew who rated their own chances of survival as "fifty-fifty".

The reward for this risk was that the crew became the first human beings to see the entire Earth, and on Christmas Eve they were able to relay these pictures to one of the biggest live audiences in television history. The pictures were grainy and poor quality by today's standards, but they literally changed the perspective of huge numbers of people overnight. As people realised just how small and vulnerable the Earth was, environmentalism took root in the public consciousness, and petty concerns like war seemed more and more absurd, like ants fighting over a pale blue dot. Pope Paul VI would later tell Borman: "I have spent my entire life trying to say to the world what you did on Christmas Eve."

The first ever image of Earthrise

The atheist controversy arose from that live broadcast on Christmas Eve. Having completed several orbits of the Moon, the astronauts spoke relayed live pictures back to the huge audience at home. William Ander announced, "We are now approaching lunar sunrise and, for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you." The three astronauts then recited the first ten lines of genesis.

Back on Earth, Madalyn Murray O'Hair was furious. A leading atheist activist, she had achieved fame and notoriety after successfully taking Baltimore City Public School System to court, arguing that it was unconstitutional for her son Bill to be required to take part in Bible readingsin school. She easily won the case, and the result was the effective banning of "coercive prayer" and Bible recitation in U.S. public schools.

Somewhat inevitably, she was a target of hate and abuse from Christians for the rest of her life, describing some of the abuse in an interview with Playboy: "The neighborhood children, of course, were forbidden by their parents to play with my little boy, Garth, so I finally got him a little kitten to play with. A couple of weeks later we found it on the porch with its neck wrung."

In the same interview she showed some of the Christian hate mail she had received: "You should be shot!" ... "Why don't you go peddle your slop in Russia?" ... "YOU WICKID ANAMAL" ... "I will KILL you!" ... "Commie, Commie, Commie!" ... "Somebody is going to put a bullet through your fat ass, you scum, you masculine Lesbian bitch!" ... "You will be killed before too long. Or maybe your pretty little baby boy. The queer-looking bastard. You are a bitch and your son is a bastard" ... "Slut! Slut! Slut! Bitch slut from the Devil!" That'll give you the general idea. Oh -- just one more; I love this one: "May Jesus, who you so vigorously deny, change you into a Paul."

Undeterred by all of this, Murray O'Hair continues to fight for the separation of church and state wherever the two threatened to overlap, and so the broadcast of what was effectively a public prayer by government employees was beyond the pale. She filed a lawsuit against NASA, but the case was thrown out due to "lack of jurisdiction". Although she lost the case, NASA were very careful to avoid causing similar offense in the future.

Ultimately the Christians got their wish. Madalyn ended up chopped up into small pieces and buried on a Texas ranch, identifiable only by her artificial hip and dental records. Although she had accumulated many enemies from her campaigning, in the end it was a colleague at her organization she founded, "American Atheists", who killed her for monetary gain.

Was she right to protest the Genesis Reading? Perhaps. It would be interesting to see how prominent atheists today would react. What would P.Z. Myers say if a similar broadcast occured from some future mission orbiting Mars? It's difficult to know where I stand. On the one hand, I agree with the fundamental principle that the agency at the forefront of mankind's scientific exploration shouldn't really be spouting religious nonsense at such times. On the other hand, those three men risked life and limb to bring us those pictures, and part of me feels that they had the right to say whatever the hell they liked.

Ultimately though, it's hard not to appreciate the irony, that as the image of the pale blue dot finally reached us with its implicit message of the need for community and cohesion, we chose to associate it with a passage from one of the most divisive texts known to man.