William Anders Death: What We Know About Astronaut’s Plane Crash

Former NASA astronaut William Anders was killed in a plane crash on Friday off the coast of Jones Island in Washington state, according to his family. He was 90 years old.

Anders was the sole occupant of a Beechcraft T-34 Mentor which crashed in what the National Transportation Safety Board described as “unknown circumstances” around 80 feet from the island.

In December 1968 Anders was part of the team which circled the moon onboard Apollo 8. He took what later became an iconic photograph of the Earth rising beyond the lunar landscape.

The mission was the first human spaceflight to make it past the Earth’s orbit.

This is a developing story and will be updated.