DEPART DOING SOMETHING YOU ENJOY.

Forty years ago, Detroit turned its downtown streets over to Formula motor racing, something that went on in Chicago over the weekend.  Among the human interest stories that came out back in the day was a conversation between a driver and a spectator, something along the lines of the spectator asking, "Isn't that dangerous?"  The driver responded, "Do you intend to die in bed?" following up with "How do you get into that thing each evening?"  The message being something along the lines of the post's title.

So it might have been with Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders.

The former Apollo 8 astronaut best known for taking the iconic “Earthrise” photo, who died last month while piloting a plane over the waters off Washington state, was doing a flyby near a friend's house when the fatal accident occurred, federal authorities said Tuesday.

William Anders, whose “Earthrise” photo showed the planet as a shadowed blue marble from space in 1968, had texted a friend to say he planned to do a flyby near her house on the western shore of Orcas Island, the National Transportation Safety Board said in its preliminary report.

The friend said Anders' flybys were not unusual, according to the NTSB. She said that he typically did two flybys, and while he sometimes rocked the airplane wings, "he never performed any kind of aerobatic maneuvers.”

Around 11:37 a.m. on June 7, the friend began to hear the “familiar” noise of his airplane, the NTSB said. Shortly after, she saw the older-model Beech A45 overhead traveling north along the shore in front of her house.

She briefly lost sight of the plane as it flew behind trees. When she saw it come back into view it was heading south and flying over the water. After it passed by, she saw the left wing drop and thought it was part of his routine. But the wing continued to drop as the plane plummeted toward the water below.

The early classes of astronauts were recruited from test pilots, and having the right stuff to take risks is what made "Earthrise" and the moon landings possible.  News accounts give the make of the plane as a Beech A45 or as a T-34 Mentor, once a test pilot, always a test pilot.

Rand "Transterrestrial Musings" Simberg, who knew General Anders, offers a retrospective.

He was the astronaut who took the iconic photo of the whole Earth from the Moon on his trip around it on Apollo 8, which was the actual moment when we won the space race. And it became the icon for the environmental movement, for good or ill.

I consider myself privileged to consider him a friend, and I’ll explain why anon, but for now, farewell, yet another hero of that era, who (unlike many of his Apollo cohorts) understood how important commercial space was.

Commercial space is still space, and the risks of exploring are still real.  R. I. P.