Apollo 8: The first lunar orbital mission came nearly 60 years ago, in 1968, and briefly calmed a planet in chaos. I was 15 at the time, and there was no Internet, no mobile phones, and global news was broadcast only once daily. It was an election year. In a broken South, George Wallace emerged as an unrepentant segregationist candidate. In the space of three months, the leading Civil Rights activist, Martin Luther King Jr., and the most outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, Robert F. Kennedy, were shot dead. As north Vietnamese troops pressed on with a devastating offensive, President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek reelection. With hundreds of weekly deaths and despite the presence of half-a-million American troops, the United States was losing the war, or so said the respected CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite. In Paris, students joined workers in massive anti-government demonstrations that seemed on the verge of overturning the existing social and political order. Cold War tensions were also high. In August, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia to quash a pro-democracy movement and warned the west against any interference.

The Democratic party’s political convention saw pitched battles between hardline police and radical protesters. Hundreds were arrested, and Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley as well as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover spoke of sedition. In November, Richard Nixon was elected president, saying he spoke for the “silent majority” just as this president speaks for a malignant minority of one.

I mention these events to bring into sharper relief what the three NASA astronauts accomplished during their mission. In scratchy voices heard around the world —there were no video links at the time — they read passages from the Book of Genesis. It was near Christmas and, for the first time in that chilling year, the world felt a sense of peace, harmony, and hopeful humanity. It was as if these three men speaking from so far away had reached the suburbs of the universe, making the interstellar city beyond inevitable. Would that this new group of lunar astronauts could transmit something of the same sentiment, but that seems unlikely in a world fractured beyond even Genesis’ ability to heal.