Houston they had found empty fields and built a community. Their lives had echoed the words of John Winthrop, leader of the first Puritan expedition, who as he and his fellow settlers first approached Massachusetts Bay in 1630 had urged them
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| | to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we most be knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection . . . We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.
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| | [If we do this,] the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us. . . . He shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations . . . we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us. 3
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The community the three men in Apollo 8 wished to bring into the empty reaches of space was an American one, filled with a belief that given two strong arms, a willing heart, and the freedom to follow one's dreams, anything was possible. They, like the Puritans, had put their lives on the line to express this ideal.
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Now the men orbited another world, farther away from home than any human had ever been, surrounded by airless space with only a week's worth of oxygen in their tanks. To put the final exclamation point on their powerful message, they had to get home, to their waiting families. And everyone knew that was not as easy a task as the astronauts and the engineers had so far made it seem.
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