By Nita Wilkinson

Faith Editor

There is a Bible on the moon.

It's about the size of a postage stamp, contains every word of the King James Bible, and more than 50 years later, it's still there.

On Feb. 5, 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell stepped onto the lunar surface carrying something no larger than a postage stamp, a complete King James Bible photographed onto a tiny square of microfilm.

The story Bible began four years earlier with astronaut Ed White.

White was America's first spacewalker, and he dreamed of taking the Bible to the moon. His faith was woven into his life. During his 1965 spacewalk, he carried a miniature cross, a Star of David, and a St. Christopher medal that had been blessed by Pope John XXIII.

That dream ended tragically on Jan. 27, 1967, when White, along with Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee, died in the Apollo 1 launch-pad fire.

The dream didn't die with him. Rev. John Stout, a NASA employee and Presbyterian minister, and a friend of White’s, founded the Apollo Prayer League in 1968. The group prayed for the safety of astronauts and NASA employees, supported humanitarian efforts, and quietly pursued one unusual goal: placing a Bible on the moon in honor of White's dream.

There was just one problem. NASA allowed astronauts only eight ounces of personal belongings aboard the lunar module. A Bible was simply too heavy.

Today, we might expect a company like IBM to solve a problem like this. Instead, the answer came from a rather unexpected place.

The National Cash Register Company (NCR), yes the cash register company better known for making cash registers than space history, had developed a new microfilm technology called Photo-Chromic Micro-Image (PCMI). Using it, engineers reduced the entire King James Bible, 1,245 pages and more than 773,000 words, to a tiny square measuring about an inch and a half.

The first attempt came with Apollo 12 in November 1969. Unfortunately, the microfilmed Bible was accidentally left aboard the command module. It orbited the moon but never landed.

Then came Apollo 13. Well... we all know how that ended.

Finally, on Apollo 14, Edgar Mitchell agreed to carry hundreds of microfilmed Bibles aboard the lunar module Antares. On February 5, 1971, one became the first complete Bible to reach the surface of the moon.

The mission carried something else as well. A small folded certificate contained Genesis 1:1 translated into sixteen languages, representing roughly 60 percent of the world's population at the time.

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

Those words, the very first words of Scripture, still rest on the moon today. Protected inside a capsule at the Fra Mauro landing site, they remain exactly as they were left. With no atmosphere, no wind and no rain, nothing has disturbed them in more than 55 years.

As if that weren't remarkable enough, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had already left behind a silicon goodwill disc containing microscopic messages from 73 world leaders. Among them was Pope Paul VI, who quoted Psalm 8:

"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place..."

Long before there were astronauts, rockets, mountains or oceans, God simply spoke. The heavens, the moon, and the stars came into existence because He said they should.

Ed White wanted God's Word to travel into that creation, not because the moon needed a Bible, but because the people who walked there did.

Maybe that's what I love most about this story. At the height of one of humanity's greatest scientific achievements, some of the brightest minds on earth quietly worked for years to carry God's Word into the heavens, not because Scripture needed to sanctify the moon. Because even when humanity reaches for the stars, we still carry the story that first told us where they came from. ■