What they should have sent was a poet, by Sally Ashton

Frank Borman, Apollo 8, the first mission to orbit the Moon   

. . .except Borman later said he hadn’t said that, so maybe it was just what everyone else said he’d said. Or wished he’d said, wished so hard that someone decided he had said it? Because if you say something enough times. . .He definitely said, “the last thing I would have wanted on our crew was a poet,” though this was years and years later. What he most remembered from halfway between the Moon and Earth was watching Earth rise out of the ink black of space, lifting over the Moon’s bleak, dead landscape. A blue marble. A blue agate. “What they should have sent,” Frank Borman did say, “was poets because I don’t think we captured in its entirety the grandeur of what we had seen.” The astronauts thought what they’d seen—Earth alone in empty space—would change everything. “It was small enough,” he added, “you could cover it with your thumbnail.”

He just didn’t want a poet trying to fly the thing.

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