Friday night I had the great pleasure to meet Orly Orlyson and to watch the US premiere of Cosmic Birth, the remarkable documentary that he co-directed, at the Explorer’s Club in Manhattan. Orly is an entrepreneur and the founder of The Exploration Museum in Húsavík, Iceland – a museum dedicated to the history of human exploration. 

In addition to exhibits on Viking exploration and on the race to reach the South Pole, the Exploration Museum features exhibits on the Apollo astronauts. What does the Moon landing have to do with a museum in Húsavík, an Icelandic town 30 miles from the Arctic Circle? It so happens that when NASA searched the globe for the most similar terrestrial landscape to the moon on which astronauts could train, they chose the lava fields outside of Húsavík. During the summers of 1965 and 1967, 32 astronauts trained on the basaltic outcroppings in preparation for landing on the lunar surface.  

Now, just over 50 years since the astronauts first traveled to Iceland and then to the moon, Cosmic Birth follows some of these Apollo astronauts back into the Icelandic highlands where they reflect on their epic missions to another world.

As fascinating and alluring as the moon has always been, the real lesson from these great voyages of discovery may have been captured in a series of photographs taken by Apollo 8 lunar module pilot Bill Anders during the first human trip around the moon on Dec. 24, 1968. The photographs showed the earth rising, a blue sphere wreathed in white clouds, above the barren lunar surface. The photographs became known as “Earthrise.”

In a very real sense, it was as if the astronauts and millions who would see the photographs were seeing the earth for the first time.  In the documentary, Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart describes that moment as a form of “cosmic birth,” the moment of separation when we can see our mother Earth for who she truly is. 

Here is a trailer of the documentary:

Cosmic Birth (2019) Official Trailer