On the morning of 16 March 1968, the men of Charlie Company, 11th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division, US Army, entered the village of Son My, on the coast of Central Vietnam. The company was led by Captain Ernest Medina. In charge of the company's 1st Platoon was Lieutenant William Calley. The company encountered no enemy forces, no opposing fire of any kind. Its only casualty was self-inflicted. Nevertheless, by early afternoon, over 400 villagers lay dead. Those killed were – almost exclusively – either women, old men or small children. For many of the women, rape had preceded death. Other victims had been tortured and mutilated, then killed. Much of the killing, though not all, had occurred in the collection of hamlets known by the Americans as My Lai 4 and had been conducted by 1st Platoon.

Kendrick Oliver, 'The Apollo 8 Genesis reading and religion in the space age' 'We are now approaching lunar sunrise and, for all the people back on earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.' And with that, the astronauts began to read the first ten verses of Genesis, the biblical account of God's creation of the cosmos. 1 The reading was broadcast live to an international audience of unprecedented size, and it was received for the most part with hosannas of public praise. There was only one notable dissent, from Madalyn Murray O'Hair, an atheist who had been one of the successful plaintiffs in the 1963 Supreme Court case which had resulted in a ban on organized prayer and bible reading in American public schools. As Apollo 8 made its return to the vicinity of earth, O'Hair told a Houston radio station that its astronauts, in reading from the Bible, had been 'slandering other religions, slandering those persons who do not accept religion'. She announced an intention to start a mail campaign in protest against the reading of prayers and scriptures from space. 2 In August 1969, after the flight of Apollo 11 and Buzz Aldrin's celebration of communion on the moon, O'Hair filed a civil suit against NASA complaining that the actions of the Apollo 8 and 11 astronauts amounted to an establishment of religion. She sought a court order enjoining the agency from directing or permitting further religious activities in space. 3 Reports of O'Hair's intention to campaign against the Apollo 8 Genesis reading provoked a massive and sustained counter-mobilization, which received additional impetus with her filing of the suit in August, and which also endured well past the dismissal of the case in December 1969 and the final exhaustion of appellate options in March 1971. Between January 1969 and summer 1975, NASA received over eight million letters and petition signatures supporting the right of US astronauts to free religious expression during their missions in space. 4 This cascade of correspondence appears genuinely to have been a grass-roots phenomenon. There was no single figure who could claim overall leadership of the campaign, which also received only limited support and assistance from established national religious and non-religious organizations. Most of the petitioners seem to have

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