Apollo 8 Genesis Reading Lawsuit and the Supreme Court

The Apollo 8 Genesis reading lawsuit was O’Hair v. Paine, a 1969 federal case in which atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair sued NASA administrator Thomas O. Paine over the astronauts’ Christmas Eve 1968 broadcast from lunar orbit, in which the crew read the first ten verses of Genesis to an audience estimated at half a billion to a billion people. A federal district judge in Texas dismissed the case, the Fifth Circuit affirmed, and the U.S. Supreme Court turned it away for want of jurisdiction. The suit lost on every level, but it changed how NASA handled religion on the missions that followed.

What the Astronauts Actually Did

Apollo 8 launched on December 21, 1968, carrying commander Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders on the first crewed mission to orbit the Moon. NASA gave the crew a Christmas Eve television slot and told them to say something appropriate, without a script.¹ On the evening of December 24, 1968, the three astronauts pointed their camera at the lunar surface and took turns reading Genesis 1:1–10. Borman closed the transmission: “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”²

Who Filed the Suit

Madalyn Murray O’Hair was already the country’s best-known atheist activist. Her earlier case, Murray v. Curlett, was consolidated with Abington School District v. Schempp when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8–1 in 1963 that mandatory prayer and Bible readings in public schools violated the Establishment Clause.³ She founded American Atheists that same year and ran it from Austin, Texas.⁴ The Apollo 8 broadcast gave her a new target.

The Claims in O’Hair v. Paine

In 1969, O’Hair and her son filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas against NASA administrator Thomas O. Paine and the United States. The case was docketed as Madalyn Murray O’Hair, et al. v. Thomas O. Paine, et al., Civil Action No. A-69-CA-109.⁵ Her complaint raised four distinct constitutional theories:

An Establishment Clause claim that NASA had directed the astronauts to read the Bible, amounting to an official endorsement of Christianity, and that tax dollars should not have paid to carry a Bible aboard the spacecraft.⁵
A Free Exercise Clause claim that the broadcast violated her own right to “recognize no religion at all.”⁶
A claim that NASA had deliberately scheduled Apollo 8 to coincide with Christmas for religious reasons.⁵
A related challenge to Buzz Aldrin’s possession and use of consecrated communion bread and wine during the Apollo 11 lunar landing.⁶

How the District Court Ruled

On December 1, 1969, U.S. District Judge Jack Roberts granted the government’s motion to dismiss for failure to state a cause of action.⁵ The case had briefly been assigned to a three-judge panel that included Circuit Judge Homer Thornberry and District Judge Adrian A. Spears, but the panel decided the matter did not warrant three-judge treatment and returned it to Roberts alone.⁷

Roberts addressed each theory. On Free Exercise, he held O’Hair could not claim coercion because nobody forced her to watch, and noted that “a litigant may assert only his own constitutional rights or immunities.” On the Establishment Clause, he applied the test from Abington School District v. Schempp, asking whether the challenged government activity had a secular purpose and whether its primary effect neither advanced nor inhibited religion. He found the astronauts’ reading was a personal choice rather than a government directive, and that accommodating a Bible aboard the spacecraft was a “minor and incidental” expense aimed at the crew’s peace of mind.⁷ “The First Amendment does not require the State to be hostile to religion,” Roberts wrote, “but only neutral.” He called the claim that NASA had timed the mission around Christmas “approaching the absurd.”⁵ The same reasoning disposed of the Apollo 11 communion claim: barring the astronauts from private religious observance would itself have burdened their own free exercise rights.⁶

The Fifth Circuit and the Supreme Court

O’Hair appealed. On September 22, 1970, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the dismissal, holding that the appellants had “no ascertainable legal interest in regard to the issues which they raise.” O’Hair had added a new challenge on appeal, targeting the “So help me God” language of the judicial oath; the court called that contention one that “approaches absurdity.”⁸

She then tried to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. On April 6, 1970, the Court granted NASA’s motion to dismiss the appeal for “want of jurisdiction” in a per curiam order with no noted dissents. The case is reported at 397 U.S. 531.⁹

How the Litigation Changed Apollo 11

The lawsuit lost in court but reshaped the next mission in real time. When Apollo 11 landed on July 20, 1969, Buzz Aldrin had planned to take communion on the lunar surface and broadcast the ceremony to Earth. With O’Hair’s litigation still pending, Deke Slayton, NASA’s director of flight-crew operations, told Aldrin to keep the ceremony private and to make his radio comments “more general.”¹⁰

Aldrin instead radioed a deliberately generic message: “I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.”¹⁰ He then ate the communion bread and drank wine from a small chalice inside the lunar module, out of public view.¹¹

Julian Scheer, NASA’s assistant administrator for public affairs, applied the same caution to the plaque the Apollo 11 crew would leave on the lunar surface. When a Nixon White House aide pushed to insert “under God” into the plaque’s text, Scheer refused, telling the aide, “Peter, there is no universal god.” The plaque went up without the phrase.¹²

Public Response

O’Hair had asked her supporters to write to NASA, and about 30,000 complaint letters arrived at the agency. The counter-response was much larger. A religious campaign called “Project Astronaut” generated more than eight million letters to NASA and to Jim Lovell’s home in Houston between 1969 and 1975. Some correspondents addressed their envelopes directly to the Apollo 8 spacecraft. “We tried to answer them the best we could,” Lovell said later.¹

On May 5, 1969, the U.S. Post Office released a six-cent commemorative stamp featuring Bill Anders’ “Earthrise” photograph alongside the words “In the beginning God…” Postal lawyers had worried about a legal challenge over the religious text, and the Rev. Carl McIntire had organized a letter-writing campaign to the White House pushing to keep the phrase. The stamp went out with the Genesis quotation intact, and no legal challenge followed.¹³

1
Astronomy. Apollo 8’s Moment of Grace
2
NASA. Apollo 8: Christmas at the Moon
3
Texas State Historical Association. O’Hair, Madalyn Murray
4
American Atheists. History
5
DocsTeach. O’Hair Opinion
6
Ukiah Daily Journal. Judicial Follies: Space Law Suits
7
National Archives. Madalyn Murray O’Hair Case
8
Justia. O’Hair v. Paine, 432 F.2d 66
9
Cornell Law Institute. O’Hair v. Paine, 397 U.S. 531
10
Snopes. Communion on the Moon
11
The Guardian. Buzz Aldrin’s Communion on the Moon
12
Freedom From Religion Foundation. Julian Scheer
13
Smithsonian National Postal Museum. Man’s First Trip to the Moon