Lost Apollo 14 Lunar Bibles Discovered in Knoxville Church Head to Auction

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The presence of scripture on the lunar surface was not a NASA mandate. The effort emerged in 1967 following the Apollo 1 tragedy, which took the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. In the wake of the disaster, NASA chaplain and aerospace engineer Reverend John Stout formed the Apollo Prayer League, a quiet coalition of space agency personnel, engineers, and civilian supporters dedicated to landing the Bible on the Moon.

Early attempts failed. A bundle of miniature Bibles packed onto Apollo 12 remained stuck in orbit aboard the command module due to stowage mix-ups. The historic milestone finally occurred in February 1971 during Apollo 14. Lunar Module Pilot Edgar Mitchell carried 512 microfilm Bibles inside his Personal Preference Kit (PPK). Mitchell landed the Antares descent stage on the lunar surface, keeping the microfilms with him throughout two extravehicular moonwalks totaling more than nine hours of surface exploration.

The scriptures Mitchell carried were technical marvels of their day. Created by the National Cash Register (NCR) company, each wafer used photo-chromic micro-image (PCMI) technology to condense all 773,746 words and 1,245 pages of the King James Bible onto a piece of high-resolution film roughly 1.5 inches square. Under a 100x optical microscope, every verse remains fully legible.