The plane, a vintage Air Force T-34 Mentor owned by Anders, went down into the waters off the San Juan Islands, according to flight data and FAA records obtained by FOX 13 Seattle.
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Anders snapped the iconic 1968 “Earthrise” photo of the Earth in December 1968 while on Apollo 8, the first lunar orbit mission.
The Air Force veteran spent 26 years working for the government, including as the executive secretary for the National Aeronautics and Space Council and as the lead commissioner for all nuclear and non-nuclear power for the five-member Atomic Energy Commission.
From me last year, First to the Moon: Documentary Commemorates Apollo 8, First Flight to Leave Earth Orbit. “As Charles Murry and Catherine Bly Cox wrote in their brilliant 1989 book Apollo, it can be argued that [Apollo 8] was an even more historic mission than [Apollo 11,] the first manned moon landing: ’Reflecting on it years later, Mike Collins wondered whether the most historic moment in the Apollo Program might have occurred not on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men on the moon, but at 9:41 A.M. C.S.T., December 21, 1968. On that morning, Collins was CapCom. If it hadn’t been for a bone spur requiring surgery the preceding July, Collins would have been up there himself—he had been a crew member on Apollo 8 until the surgery had made him lose too much training time. Collins had been reassigned to a later mission, Apollo 11.'”
